In the Beginning

So it began with a hangover.

Truth be told many, if not most, of the days following my graduation from college began with hangovers as despondency set in over my failure to find a job. But, however hazy my head was, the day was dazzling, blue and bright. And I, feeling like the future was fast diminishing, found myself standing – camera in hand – on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Forty-Second Street.

That’s when the voice called out from behind me, “You just missed the madness.”

When I turned I saw a dark-skinned, South Asian man with long, kinky black hair in a black suit, camera in his hand.

“Huh?"

“Donald Trump. He just came out of the Tent,” the stranger said, motioning with his head over his shoulder to the huge white tent erected behind him on the lawn in Bryant Park.

“Oh,” I replied. “Thanks.”

Like I give a shit about Donald Trump, I think to myself.

But the stranger’s near-mystical intercession did draw my attention to the fact that it was Fashion Week – that twice yearly event during which New York-based designers showcase their new creations before the high arbiters of fashion who anoint or condemn them, the rich and powerful from around the world who can afford to purchase them, and the common folk who, from behind barricades, stand in the street on their work-weary feet hoping to feel the gaze of a star fall upon their flesh or, at the least, for but a fleeting glimpse of one.

Fashion Week, I realized with a start, is where I would begin.

Picture. New York, New York: May 23, 2007, Affordable Housing Protest March, A Coalition of New Yorkers Hold Hands Around Stuyvesant Town and peter Cooper Village Before Marching West Across 14th Street then to the Swank W Hotel in Union Square, to Protest the Lack of Affordable Housing, Here, One Woman's Sign Succinctly Express What is At Stake.