Tina looked over my shoulder at the slide which I had placed on the light
table. Don't I have a projector she asked. No, I don't.
It was a slide of a painting I had done sometime in the fifties.
Mamie Eisenhower. Her tightly permed curls almost indistinguishable from
the roses in the wall paper. The wartime photograph of her husband
beside his driver in the front seat of a Jeep was a blurry black and
white in contrast to the colors of the wallpaper, and I remembered that
when I was working on the painting -- all pink and color intense except
for the photograph and Mamie's curls -- I felt that rare thrill of
original vision.
When I painted her husband and his driver in the photograph, I was not
aware of his now rumored affair with his driver, and as I looked at the
slide I was struck by the irony of her inclusion.
"Mamie", I said to Tina, and I wondered if Tina would know who Mamie was.
I wrote the Title, "First Lady", and what I thought was the date I had
painted it, 1958, on an envelope and put the slide in the envelope.