Thoughts on… Neil, Willy and Me

Pamela LaPointe, a classmate of mine in high school who came from Tennessee in our senior year and stayed just that one year, wrote in my yearbook, “Good luck with the beatniks.”

She was referring to the fact that I was off to art college. That exposes how old I am, but the fact is my time at art school fell between beatniks who sat around reciting poetry and hippies who let their hair grow, protested Vietnam and smoked pot, I was neither. I didn’t understand poetry, and the smell of marijuana made me nauseous.

            I did, however, meet many interesting people at college.

            The other night I was watching the Celtics game and perusing Facebook during timeouts. I find the proliferation of useless videos of cats, fake AI-created “breaking” news stories and cheap New York apartment tours fascinating. They are the twenty-first-century version of the old National Enquirer newspaper that I read on my Sunday night bus trips back to art school in the ’60s.

            In one of those videos appeared a tall, slender old fellow in bib overalls and black canvas Converse All Star high-cut sneakers. Somehow the guy looked familiar. As he entered his apartment building, he mentioned that he purchased the four-story, 11,000 square-foot building in 1972 in a dangerous, industrial area in the SoHo district of New York (he said he paid $36,000; I checked, it is valued at $28 million now!).

            Mmmm? SoHo? That’s an up-scale artistic district now. He said he turned the first floor into an art gallery, and when he said his name…whoa! I sure did know this guy, he was my old friend and classmate at art school, Neil Jenney.

            Neil dropped out of school early to drive a cab to raise money to move to New York. Neil, his roommate Willie and I bent many elbows sitting around drinking beer in their small apartment on Wigglesworth Street in Boston’s Mission Hill neighborhood and talking about our future as artists, generally considered to be a dead-end way of making a living.

            Willy, later known as William Wegman, became rich and famous all over the world for his photos of his Weimaraner dogs dressed in clothing and posing like humans. Another roommate became the original art director of the National Lampoon magazine. (I see a trend developing here that hasn’t included me.)

            You could say Neil has become a second-tier famous artist. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship, has had his paintings in museums around the world and even started an art movement called “Bad Art.” If art is in the eye of the beholder, consider this… his work sells for over $800,000! (Yup, definitely hasn’t included me.)

            I doubt Neil would know me if we were to meet today. After all, he has spent his life hob-knobbing with the likes of Andy Warhol and celebrities like actress Brooke Shields.

            Hey, I’ve done all right and I never had to wear bib overalls and black high-top Converse sneakers. Old friend Pamela LaPointe would be proud.

            Mattapoisett resident Dick Morgado is an artist and happily retired writer. His newspaper columns appeared for many years in daily newspapers around Boston.

By Dick Morgado