Life before the Internet…

it was lonely

Life before the Internet.

I remember how lonely it was being a freelancer… which basically means not going in to any office or having any work social life at all. No Xmas parties… no birthday parties… no parties at all.

Everything the freelancer does has to be self motivated 100%… and that can be a chore. So I was thrilled when the internet came along… and finally I had someone to talk to every day. Weird, isn’t it?

I remember meeting a lot of people from walking the Aqueduct Trail to NYC from Westchester to NYC… sounds weird, doesn’t it? Walking the Aqueduct trail to meet people.

Here’s how it worked… one example.

My spouse walked the trail often, and one day, by talking about me to another trail walker, she learned there was another children’s book illustrator in nearby Hastings on Hudson.

Of course that meant I had to go meet him. It was cool meeting Ed Young in his studio. His whole house was minimalistic in furniture… very asian in design. And to go to his studio, it required a straight up climb up about 12 steps in his garage ladder. But of course later he won a Caldecott… so that’s cool. Ed Young was his name… and it was a pleasure to meet him.

And then Laura R. also walked the trail… and through talking to Laura, it turned out she needed a viola player to do the ‘Ohhm, Pahh, Pahh part’ in her string trio. That’s what viola players do… so that was another trail meeting.

Together we butchered a little Mozart and Beethoven… with Laura always commanding ‘STOP, stop… Play that part over again!’. And in fact the cellist was an interesting character, being Henry Kissinger’s root canal specialist… so it was fun hearing those stories.

Apparently the way it worked back then, before cell phones… was that Henry K would have his phone call the dentist with the instructions… “Dr. Kissinger will be here in 8 minutes. Followed 4 minutes later by another call saying “Dr. Kissinger will be arriving in 4 minutes…”.

In other words, the root canal specialist waits on Henry K… not the other way around. And the cellist always wore a crash helmet when he drove… and he raced at a breakneck speed.

And I had some old college friends who had moved to New York… so it was fun to get together with them, once in a while.

But I having regular work friends as a freelance artist is more difficult. Most conversations are very short and usually just refer to sketches and that’s it.