ANDY WARHOL’S FACE — AS RECOGNIZABLE an image as a Campbell’s soup label — made me stop. Someone had propped a postcard in the window of a newspaper dispenser on Main Street. The postcard pictured four black and white photographs of Warhol from one of those coin operated photo booths. Flash. Andy adjusting his collar. Flash. Cocking his head left. Flash. Cocking his head right. Flash. Looking straight at the camera.
Hey, I like Andy Warhol. Don’t we all? When I was 15, I saw a Warhol retrospective exhibition in Munich. I remember thinking his Brillo boxes were so cool, and 15-year-old me must be a little bit cool for having been in the same room with them.
I flipped the postcard over. “Royal Elastics presents...”
I had walked by Royal Elastics lots of times, but never gone inside. At first glance, I didn’t know what they were trying to sell. I peered in the window. It was stark, contemporary, there were stacks of shoeboxes. But it didn’t look like a store that was really selling shoes. (I still don’t think shoes are what they’re selling.) The postcard promised that Warhol on Main — a launch party for Royal Elastics’ spring-summer shoe collection — would have music and a photo booth.
So a week ago Thursday, I dragged my husband Pete down to Main Street.
Music pumped through the store. People stood around a table in the middle of the room, turning the pages of Interview magazines and Andy Warhol coffee table books, chatting — “What are you doing here?! Tell me your name again.” — and stirring Red Bull and vodkas with red stirrer straws. Silver, square, Mylar balloons floated above, and silver hooks suspended bunches of bananas from the ceiling. There were Campbell’s soup cans, bare breasts on TV, and a guy in the corner trying to beat the high score of 334,830 on the old school video game “Galaga.”
Couples, threesomes, and foursomes crowded into the photo booth, drawing the blue curtain closed. Flash. Pete faking a smile. Flash. Sticking out his tongue. Flash. Kissing me. Flash. Bugging his eyes out.
I love those photo booths. Don’t we all? Posing for a camera. Practicing for our 15 minutes in front of the paparazzi.
But when Warhol made that statement — “In the future everyone will be world famous for 15 minutes” — he meant that when everyone was famous, no one would be. There’s something both sad and hopeful about that comment, especially when I think of Warhol as a little boy during the Great Depression, the son of immigrants, bedridden with a childhood illness, an outcast among his peers. And I think of Andy watching his mother make metal flowers out of old soup cans to sell door to door, because the money Mr. Warhola (the family’s given name) brought in as a coal miner wasn’t enough for a family of five.
My favorite part of Thursday evening was when a German woman in a puffy metallic gold jacket, silver hoop earrings, and a black baseball cap embroidered with a cow skull came up next to Pete and asked, “Are you native?”
Now, Pete gets this a lot. He has waist length black hair. He was an extra in “Flags of Our Fathers.” Every Native American he’s ever met has told him he’s Apache. And maybe he is. So when strangers ask what tribe he’s from, he tells them he’s Apache.
The German woman pointed to the cow skull on her baseball cap and said, “I love natives.”
Don’t we all? Natives are so in. The woman was drunk. “Some old Native Americans have incarnated into American government,” she said.
After a few minutes, Pete pretended to catch sight of an acquaintance down the street and called out, “Bob!” As he hurried off after his imaginary friend, he told me, “Hey, babe, gotta’ go talk to Bob.”
A few seconds later, I interrupted the woman to tell her that I, too, really needed to catch up with Bob.
So I left the party — I mean, the shoe store. I almost forgot! There were shoes. Skate shoes to go with your Warhol Pop DPM skateboard. Skater-girl flats made from gray T-shirt material, metallic camouflage, white punched vinyl that looks like car upholstery. Burlap flip-flops.
I flipped a flop: $70. Well, fancy that. Royal Elastics took a $4 flip-flop and turned it into a pop-flop. Little Andy would be proud.
MARIEL HOWSEPIAN digs black coffee, fairy tales and a man in coveralls. She lives in Santa Monica and
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on April 11, 2008. Read the original PDF.