A Very Personal Tribute.
The last time the thermometers in the UK reached this weeks high , I was working in Carnaby Street, drenched from the unbearable morning tube ride and drinking gallons of warm coke because the sweet shop next door Irvine Sellars MATES unisex boutique, which I managed, couldn't keep up with demand.
It was the same time of the month, as this year's heatwave, that I was preparing for my first trip to America to meet my cousins in LA - Fran Hartsman Molot ... nik and Muriel Hartsman Green - and by the end of that summer I had met my hairdressers cousin visiting London for a family Barmitzvah.
The following year on June 28th 1977 that cousin from Pennsauken, NJ and I were married in London. And next Wednesday Linda Gerber Silverstone and I celebrate our 40th anniversary of that beautiful wedding , which Linda's parents were so absolutely brilliant about hosting at London's Royal Lancaster Hotel. And so a visit to my family in California became a love affair with this remarkable, sometimes challenging, country, and banging on about it while having my barnet trimmed in Barnet lead to a blind date which began when a very slim, very hot looking babe (looks not temperature) with shockingly short hair, cut hours earlier by legendary hairdresser John Freda, for a modelling assignment, emerged from the escalators in Wood Green Tube Station. And after just two dates, I convinced Linda to change her Pan Am flight back to NYC where she lived, and she agreed to spend a weekend with me in North Wales where we consummated our love and realised that fate brought 2 soulmates, who were born, and lived, 3,000 miles apart together.
It hasn't been an easy 40 years. We have gone through more tragic moments than most people could ever imagine and more dramatic illnesses than we could ever have predicted. But the marriage has endured, and we both realise that without our commitments under the chupah and the true love of our respective lives: Lauren Rebekka , we probably would never have survived the shit that was chucked at us.
These have certainly been far happier days than I ever experienced in London and whatever I have achieved in life was due totally and absolutely to the short haired, hot babe, in the blue denim dress and silk neck scarf greeting me inside Wood Green Tube in the Autumn of 1976.
What a journey, Worms! I was a very lucky bloke to find myself such a super, fabulous, smashing dolly bird like you. X
* Photo taken during our honeymoon in Venice (the
hair cut by John Freda grew back)
