I turned 66 in December so I was already feeling old the day Michael asked me if I’d like to write a Spotlight. Then, later that day, I realized I had to think way back to the 1970’s and realized we are part of an old and ancient generation from long, long ago. The Class of ‘77.

Talking about long ago, after high school, I went to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh to study graphic design and advertising. It’s where Andy Warhol went to art school, so, sure as hell, I would go there too.

I’m not sure if any of you knew what I was doing with myself when I wasn’t seen at any LHS after school activities, or any sports events, EVER. Instead of all of that I had been taking art classes outside of school since I was five years old. Maybe some of you knew of Mrs. Hoffman or Mrs. Zahnstecher who taught painting and drawing to kids in Livingston and around the area.

Mrs. Hoffman’s classes were above Harry’s Hardware on South Livingston Avenue. Mrs. Zahnstecher taught out of the old Board of Ed building on the corner of East Cedar and South Livingston and then out of her home over near Hobart Gap Road. By high school, the students in these classes were preparing portfolios of artwork to present for acceptance to art programs at colleges all around the country. That was me. If I were going to go against the Yampolsky tradition of becoming a dentist, I would have to do it fully and to the max.

Although it was a difficult and demanding design program at Carnegie Mellon, I managed to get decent grades and still be out on the town at least three nights a week, if not four. The House of Tilden, The Tender Trap, Heaven, 2001 Disco, Pegasus, Holliday House. Pittsburgh had its own versions of all the New York clubs and discos and, surprisingly, a very busy gay nightlife which I took full advantage of even though I was underage.

Way back, when we had that one brief, shining moment in ‘77? ‘78? ’79? when the drinking age was 18 in New York and New Jersey, Pennsylvania was still 21 and OVER. As a December baby, I was just 17 when I arrived at college but, never mind, a senior in my department took a liking to me, got me a fake ID and I was off to the disco races!

So, It was four years in Pittsburgh at Carnegie Mellon, and then back to Livingston…for a hot minute! I did want to come back after college to be near my family, but to me, “near my family” meant an hour away in New York, New York. So, as fast as I could, I hooked up with a college classmate and rented a small one-bedroom apartment in the East Village. I had the living room and my roommate had the bedroom.

The East Village was just coming into its own in ‘81 and ’82. God, we had FUN!!! Sweet 21 and on the loose in the CITY!

What I remember most about that apartment was our cheap portable stereo, a collection of scratched vinyl records and blasting the GO-GO‘S out the window. We blasted those songs, We Got The Beat and Our Town constantly out onto East 13th Street even when Dynasty was on the TV. Was Dynasty aired on Wednesdays or Thursdays ….at 8? We were addicted to Alexis and Crystal Carrington and waited for the fabulous dresses, the drama, and maybe another cat fight in a fountain outside the mansion. We never missed an episode, EVER.

But, the one hardship of this dream-like existence was, I also had to work (Ugh!). So, I gained employment at a graphic design studio in a loft on 19th Street. We designed publications and promotional brochures for insurance companies and banks. We did posters for Broadway shows and credits and titles for one of the Marlo Thomas “Free to Be” TV specials. It was all exactly what I was trained to do…. BUT……. I hated it………no one was having any fun doing these things, and, you know, boys do want to have fun, and New York in 1982/83 was all about FASHION.

The world’s top designers were young then and right there in New York. Back then Donna Karan and Calvin Klein, and Halston were at the top of their fame and still young enough to be an influence on young arty types. They were l so close you could almost smell them, just a short distance uptown at STUDIO 54, dancing every night with Mick Jagger and Liza! I JUST HAD TO HAVE A PIECE OF IT!

So, now I was determined to transition into the bold world of fashion design with no known contacts and no knowledge or training whatsoever.

But before I got around to all of that really important, life-changing stuff, we went out one night to all the spots: Palladium, Pyramid Club, Uncle Charlies’ South, The Monster, Boy Bar, and Ice Palace 57. We got home at 4 am and took the receiver off the hook of the wall phone so we could sleep off our hangovers late into the afternoon.

We were awakened at 9 AM, not by a ringing phone but by what we thought was a banging in the far distance, and then realized we heard fists hitting hard on the front door of the apartment. No one could get in touch with us by phone so someone in my family in Livingston tracked down a friend who lived up the street from our apartment and sent him down to let me know my father, only 49 and never ill, had died of a massive heart attack the night before.

Off I went in a borrowed car to Livingston for my father’s funeral and then, only a few months later, I was moving back into the family house at three Trafalgar Drive to live with my widowed mother (only 46 years old) while we both figured out the next steps in our lives.

I lived there for about three years before my mother told me, in a nice way, I had three months to find an apartment and get out! I found a roommate in the want ads of the old Village Voice’s Roommate Wanted section. I moved in with the roommate in West New York, New Jersey for a while. But before I left Livingston for the final time, in 1984, I had found a job at a family run company in New York that designed, Imported and wholesaled handbags and fashion accessories from Asia.

I had an aunt, in Paramus, who had a neighbor, who had a son, who was a sales executive in that handbag company. He needed an office assistant to organize his TELEXES. That Telex organizer would be me. Remember Telexes? The precursor to email. There was one Telex machine for the whole office. The messages for everyone came into the New York office all night long out of a machine that looked like a fax machine. The messages were on one very long roll of paper that fell to the floor in great curls and waves like a roll of paper towel gone wild.

All the messages came in from the main overseas office in Taipei. The messages were on that long roll in no order other than the order in which they were sent. Everyone’s messages were mixed together and had to be cut off the roll individually and put in a folder for each executive. The messages then had to be taped to a blank piece of paper so each executive could read their messages and respond. My Job was to do that taping and organizing for my boss. In the afternoon, his handwritten responses were taken back to the “Telex Girl” for her to type into the Telex machine sending the responses back to Asia and the whole process repeated overnight, and again, the next morning.

In two days, I decided that office work was not for me. But still no one knew I was a designer. I was bored, and restless and then things changed. The owner of the company decided I had to go with my boss when he made a trip to Asia because, “What is THAT ALAN going to do in the NY office for a month while his boss is away”?

I started that boring job in August and by November I had my first passport and a visa and I was going to Taiwan for a month! My boss was going to Asia, as he did four times a year, to supervise the creation of the handbag line in the company’s Taipei sample room. Still, no one knew I was a designer so, for my first assignment when we arrived in Taipei, I was sent, just to get rid of me, on a five-day trip through the Taiwan countryside with a Taiwanese quality control inspector who spoke no English. At that time, before China was open to export to the US, every pig farmer in Taiwan who could afford to put up a big shed and buy sewing machines became a handbag or garment manufacturer for export. I spent five days with no English, sleeping in inspector’s sheds around Taiwan, on wooden bunks, on straw tatami mats, no mattresses or pillows, going to pig farm, after pig farm, inspecting handbag production before shipments were sent to the United States.

This was a FAR CRY from my dreams of dancing with MICK and LIZA at Studio 54……..but I loved it!

When that inspection trip was over, I went back to the sample room in Taipei and decided to let them know I was a graphic designer but that I could draw a mean handbag if needed and started to learn what I needed to know to become a handbag designer. As the years went along, I became design director, and creative director overseeing the entire design staff. I was directing the complete design process for accessories collections and private label programs for national retailers, four times a year, for the next 42 years.

Over the course of that career, I traveled, every year, to some combination of London, Paris, Florence, Milan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China, four times a year for a month or more each trip. I was jet lagged all the time, but I had tons of airline status and awards miles. I supervised and designed 175 seasonal accessories collections and estimate that I trained and mentored sixty or seventy designers along the way.

In 1987, at 27, I was doing well enough that my mother told me I had to stop spending all my money going out all the time. I had to buy an apartment and get a mortgage and grow up. I bought my first home in New York. It was a one bedroom, high in the sky, on the 18th floor of a building near Union Square Park.

For years I was living the life of a bachelor, traveling the world, having a ball. Then unexpectedly, in 1996, I met Andrew at Splash Bar in Chelsea We got a dog and started to settle down. A year later we bought a bigger apartment (for the dog) on the West Side where we have been all these years. We married in 2015 when marriage equality became federal law, but our partying days weren’t at an end.

We went skating at the Roxy in the warehouse district Monday nights, Tuesdays at The View. We ate out all the time at Food Bar on 8th Avenue and spent our summer weekends for 15 years carousing on Fire Island in the Pines and Cherry Grove. We frequented all the local spots: The Pavillion, The Sip and Twirl, Cherries, The Ice Palace, and the Blue Wale.

In 2020 when the gay scene in Asbury Park began to explode, we switched our summer routine to the Jersey Shore. We bought a house in the town next door to Asbury and began a business as landlords with a handful of single-family homes for year-round tenants. We spend weekends down there year-round and move there for the entire summer season. Those of you who are Facebook friends know we have a large vegetable garden and cultivate fifty or more tomato plants each summer and grow many other vegetables.

Last summer I decided I was tired of constant work deadlines and all the other work-related pressures so in November we retired. We plan to travel, relax, and definitely have no guilt about just taking it easy.