...I know you like this one better,"she said as I reached for the other Frida Kahlo retablo, which was grey and plain and had socialist images painted on it. "You'll sell the yellow one more easily, though..."
I don't think that grey and red one ever did sell.
On its shelf: the broken keychain she'd bought me at the Museo/Casa Azul, the glass bird we'd gotten for her at a flea market in the 70s, a big gem, a monster finger puppet, Paloma's first dog tag, a package of those little candies wrapped in tissue paper and tied off with string from the last time we'd gone to Cien Años (the time she'd set the menu on fire by holding it over the votive candle too long and the waiter whose nametag was the EL PÁJARO card from lotería had to first come extinguish the flame and later come back to settle the heated Vicente/Alejandro dispute that ensued about the background music. Vicente.)
The Frida Kahlo exhibit opened yesterday at SFMoMA. But today I could go an hour before the museum officially opened. One of those small gifts of serendipity that I choose to attribute to her...All those paintings with their aura of the original. Perhaps because today was today, my cynicism suspended and the work and the artist seemed again new.
Come to think of it, though, that title might need to be added to the list of advice I wrote back in November.
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