22nd
The Pickup
From The Pickup, a 2008 piece by Heather L. Johnson and Eleanor Eichenbaum Eubanks, in which they did this:
Brief personal narratives of those who have lived, worked, or traveled in New York City are being collected, edited to one or two enigmatic sentences, and hand-embroidered to vintage handkerchiefs. Each handkerchief is dropped at the location where the event it describes took place, and left there for anyone passing by to encounter, ponder, and keep.
Bernie, from the Black Cat in DC, put a bunch of us in touch with Heather via email; she’s an old friend of his. I thought it was a really cool idea, and gladly offered a couple narratives.
I wonder now where those handkerchiefs went, and what the people who picked them up made of them. Just standard-brand NYC weirdness?
I never did ask Heather “Why handkerchiefs?” A lot of labor went into embroidering these things. And I have to wonder what it’s like to consider a particular sentence or two, over and over, for the lengthy amount of time it must’ve taken to stitch each one.
There’s a good one, too, about Lydia Lunch.
