Blog 116: 359 The Bowery

On Bowery Street last week, below.

Me in front of my artist mother's old apartment building. She lived there over 68 years ago!

Last week, I tracked down the apartment where my mother lived in New York after she left the Minneapolis Institute of Art. She was young and full of dreams. In Manhattan, my mother hung out with Beatniks and began to find herself as an artist.

The address, 359 Bowery, is home to a few family stories–– one from my aunt Ione, my mother's younger sister, who went there in the late1960s. My mother disappeared in 1962 when she was twenty-three. Ione was trying to figure out what happened to her sister, and travelled all the way from Wisconsin to New York City to find Jan.

It's crazy... the building is still there.

My mother, Jan, as a teenage artist.

Above: My mother, Jan, in her high school years. She pretty much looked like this until she was in her late thirties. When she moved to New York she was eighteen or nineteen, and had long hair, which her strict Catholic parents frowned on. They didn't support her art or her desire to be an artist. Ione and Jan were expected to get married and have kids, and that's about it.

"Religion was crammed down our throats," Ione said.

Jan married at age nineteen to a guy in New York who was a struggling writer...his pen name was Frank Lion. Ione married at age twenty in 1962, but by then (as you know from prior blogs) my mother had already met Riley. Jan and Riley ran off together that year. Jan never divorced her husband–– Riley left yet another family behind. I was born three years later. In total, Jan and Riley stayed together for twenty-three years, the longest romantic relationship (although not all romance, that's for sure) Riley ever had.

Riley left his wife and two children under four years of age and never returned. His wife, Joanne, assumed they were married, but it turned out Riley never divorced his third wife, Alix. Interesting that Riley's head is cut off in that picture, above. I bet that's what Joanne wanted to do, cut his damn head off. Rather than tell people that she'd been dumped, she told everyone, including her own children, that Riley had died in a car accident.

When I finally got my father's boxes of stuff from the storage unit in Porterville, I went through the boxes slowly (so much stuff!) and came across a stash of photos Riley kept of some (but not all) of the families he left behind.

Next blog, I'll be interviewing a writer, lecturer, and music researcher Matt Marble. He's shared information about the cowboy philosopher act that my father had, as well as the "trickster" persona in the early country western/hillbilly years. He's worked Riley into one of his lectures on country music.

Last but not least, while I was in New York, I made a reservation to go to The Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room, which is currently in Tribeca. I'm still absorbing the massive amount of emails and evidence they printed and bound for this exhibit. It'll close soon, but do look that up. I would call it an art installation, but it's so much more than that. I'll share some photos of the experience, below, then sign off until next time. The viewing room was created by David Garrett and his collaborators at he the Institute for Primary Facts.

The Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room

The Trump/Espstein Memorial Reading Room in Tribeca

Timeline of Epstein and Trump, their friendship, their sexual assault allegations, felonies and more.

This is only one photo of the massive amounts of Epstein related emails and all the files— printed and bound! No one may open this books as the victims were not protected by this administration.

Many hundreds of notes written by visitors to the exhibit.

Let's end with the tribute to the victims of these disgusting people (men AND women enabled rape and trafficking of girls and boys). Don't forget famous men like Deepak Chopra, Bill Gates, Dr. Peter Attia, and so many others were friends with Epstein and participated in who knows what. And some enabled his profits. That Victoria Secret guy is so gross, so is Leon Black. The "Epstein Class" as Congressman Ro Khanna named these creeps.

Here's the beautiful tribute, below. So much work went into this concept. Thank you, David Garrett and your partners at the Institute for Primary Facts. Thank you to all who helped fund this project.

Call the Department of Justice at 202-514-2000 to urge the United States Department of Justice to release the Epstein files and to protect the privacy of all survivors and victims (which they've already failed to do in such a huge way...)

A candle for each victim.