Crashing Salon 94

 photo: Francois Halard for Vogue

photo: Salon 94

When I was still a student in Boston, I agreed to meet my good friend and former Iowa City housemate, Sarah, for a weekend trip to New York City. Sarah, a painter with a flair for the dramatic, had our weekend planned down to the last queue at the temporary Brooklyn MoMA. Sarah had the romantic idea of traipsing through Central Park en route to our first Saturday morning art stop. Our youth hostel was on the Upper West; Salon 94, the Upper East...ergo, through the park! Undeterred by the monstrous rain/ice/sleet storm, we arrived at our art destination beyond wrecked: my vintage suede coat that my Aunt Linda gifted me from her high school days was destroyed by the massive amounts of rain that had soaked right through it; my shoes were equally damaged; and my mascara had smeared all over my face unbeknownst to me until I caught my reflection hours later.

When we got to Salon 94, we only then realized that our arrival coincided with an invitation-only preview to which we definitely were not invited: I was desperate to bail; Sarah was desperate to get inside. As I was fleeing the scene, Sarah was ringing the private doorbell. We waited an embarrassing amount of time, only for Sarah to ring the doorbell again, the height of persistence. Soon, a door opened, and an immaculate Prada shoe peeped outside of the leaded doors. The disembodied Prada insisted we come back another day: no VIP invitation, no entry. Sarah instead flashed her NYC Art Guild card, mentioned that we read about the gallery in Art in America, and then insisted that we had traveled all the way from SUNY-Albany and Harvard to view her gallery. The Prada shoe caved, and soon we wet students were standing inside the chic, gorgeous, glamourous, and high-end home/gallery owned by Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, the person to whom the Prada pump belonged.

Once inside, the place was swarming with socialites whose faces I had only seen from the pages of my Vogue magazines. While everyone else was dressed to the Upper East Side nines (er, ninety-fours), Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn asked Sarah and me to please remove our wet coats and shoes so as not to ruin her place. Sarah seemed to care little about our denigrated status and lingered barefoot over the video art installations of women and men sleeping in the nude, fast-forwarded, on a recursive loop. Meanwhile, I was mortified and tried not to break anything. Waiters avoided us as they distributed champagne to the elite guests, and elite guests pretended not to notice our bare feet and disheveled appearances as we meandered from room to room and as I attempted to blend into the walls against which the video art was projected.

A few months later, Salon 94 and Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn received a multi-page spread in Vogue magazine, and I felt a strange mix of pride and embarrassment over my foray into her Upper East Side art world. Although I thought about writing one of those silly Letters to the Editor to Anna Wintour to describe Greenberg Rohatyn's willingness to open the door to two wet and poor and idealistic students, I restrained myself since, after all, I'm still not sure if it was hospitality or pity or Sarah's indefatigable tenacity that allowed us access to that privileged art space that sloppy NYC day. And besides, I still miss my Aunt Linda's vintage coat however much it was not Prada...