While some of us may not be especially happy of the anything goes world we now inhabit, like Pandora's famous box it would be quite impossible to close it, to go backwards, as the fanatical right is so intent on compelling us to go. Typical Doe writing here, as I try to find a way to speak about matters that are painful to explain, even to dwell on, matters that play NO active role in my life at all, except when they are dredged up again from way back in 1968-72 in order to stereotype me. As an ostensibly sane, bright human being past the middle of life, I've learned to try to maximize the former, and minimize if not eliminate the latter. Grief and bad memories are not stuff that I gladly return to, a fly attracted by the nocturnal lights of an electric fly zapper. Like most of you I try to live life in pragmatic reality, in the present tense.
Artistic creativity seems to require some of that detachment.
It's of very little daily concern to me that I was born and brought up in Pawtucket RI, although I'm not ashamed of being from that sleepy small city just north of Providence. I've lived in New York City since 1962, before many of you were born, and by any sensible definition I'm a New Yorker, not a New Englander. There's a tradition of artists who come here and make this their own home that goes back a great many years. I like it here. New Yorkers hold the civilized notion that folks ought not go spying on neighbors, trying to dig up bits of scandal, private events that are no one else's business.