Rehearsals for a Departure

An oddment, Tony becomes a wanderer in a world of Avante Garde art, music, and dance: The book replete with cameos of Norman Mailer, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Claes Oldenburg, Red Grooms, many others, brought to him by an older woman who breaks his heart never to be forgotten. Another oddment, Tony is in possession of a splendid painting by the great abstract artist Mark Rothko, purchased for him for $1200 dollars by a woman never to be seen again. Eventually worth many, many millions he carries it with him all his life until given away to the child and grandchild of the lovely young women, dying young, who'd made the gift. But not before the charlatans in charge of Rothko's estate, trying to buy it for pennies, destroyed what innocence, if ever, the art world possessed. A Bronx born boyhood leading to a Greenwich Village apartment at 18, a loft acquired cheaply in a downtown Manhattan neighborhood eventually dubbed Soho and sold by him for fifty times the purchase price, leading to the luxury of a penthouse apartment on Central Park West within blocks of Lincoln Center. Heartbreak, early failures, later success in a wealthy old age runs through a life of startles and stops there is more, but the pudding is in the reading.