Some members of the Arts Council of Southeast Missouri journeyed to Altenburg to see my photo exhibit and liked what they saw. I stopped by the gallery at 32 North Main Tuesday to see what we might work out in 2013ish. I was very flattered by their comments.
But, that’s not the reason for this post. (By the way, click on the photos to make them larger.)
Does this look familiar?
“Did that come from where I think it did?” I asked Gallery Board Chair Lori Ann Kinder.
“Hecht’s. I had it recovered in a more neutral color so it would fit in better here.”
She said they call it “Poof.” Nobody knew the official spelling of poof, so we’ll go with “Poof.”
When I wrote about Hecht’s in 2010, many of the readers mentioned Poof. We all remembered it as Red on the Male Color Chart Scale, which contains only Primary Colors. I thought it was made of some slick material, but everyone else voted velvet. They’re probably right.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
I kept waiting for Richard Dreyfuss to come sliding in looking for the strange mountain-like object in front of me like he did in Close Encounters.
Like Dreyfuss in the movie, I kept staring at it. Puzzling away at it.
Something wasn’t quite right. When I was a little kid parked on the thing while Mother did whatever Mothers do in a fancy dress shop, I could have sworn the thing was 8 feet tall. I’m pretty sure I never tried to scale Cape’s dress shop Matterhorn – I might not have been able to see Mother, but there’s no doubt that she could see ME – but I’m sure it would have taken Sherpas and supplemental oxygen to make it to the top had I gotten up enough nerve.
Today’s Poof is tiny in comparison. I could stand next to it and look over the top of it, making it somewhere in the 5-foot range or less. Lori Ann swore she hadn’t had the top 3 or 4 feet lopped off.
Better see exhibit soon
If you want to see my photo exhibit in Altenburg, better go soon. It’s coming down around November 9 to make room for the annual Christmas tree exhibit. There are plenty of calendars and show catalogs left over from the Immigration Conference last week. There are also a limited number of prints from the show available. If you go up this weekend, you might catch me there.
After all the stories I did about the building at 101 North Main Street being condemned and looking like the front wall could come down at any minute, I never thought it would ever be fixed up and occupied again.
There was some work going on in front of the old Hecht’s building, but I don’t think it’s going to bring back “the grand lady of fashion” it had been for 86 years, making it the second oldest business on Main Street when it closed in 2004.
