Everything profound I ever learned about teenage white girls
I learned at the Convent of the Sacred Heart; a stone citadel
on the Upper East Side housing an exclusive all girl Catholic
School surrounded by blue-chip art galleries & world-class
museums; I'd hang out at the Met, Guggenheim, Whitney
& Cooper-Hewitt right across the street, Museum Del Barrio
& the Museum of New York, electronic church bells would
ring out from stone bell towers of the several churches in the
immediate vicinity; so young & so immersed in aesthetics
& on drugs, I would meet up with the various cliques at noon,
lunchtime & at the the end of the day when the pressure to
be holy was off; girls who appeared by day to be obsequious
innocents would begin the transformation from penny loafers
& green plaid and smart emblazoned jackets to ripped fishnet
tights, black lip gloss & false eyelashes; granny ******* replaced
by sequin thongs, ribbons & berets becoming multiple bobby
pins; clean, scrubbed faces turned pale white with blood red
slashed cigarette puffing lips; steeped in catechism these girls
wanted to break free until life ground down their souls & shuttled
them into affluent conformity; some stayed Beat & some got into
****** & crack to crustydom - these were my favorites; girls who
couldn't keep it together, strained & wrinkled whites, rolled down
socks, drug-addled confusion, brilliant, poetic, natural; scruffy &
cast out from the other groups who didn't even stand out from
one another, either in school uniform dress looking all of 14-16
or done up in proto-punk attire; identical whether they were
slumming or taking a test, raving over exiting at the sound
of the period bell. My research revealed that the upper floors
of the huge stone school were occupied by the actual Sisters
of the Sacred Heart, the 'Convent' consisted of old fashioned
wimple wearing nuns who were the teachers; pursuing this
further, I discovered the convent's origin as a home for indigent
& wayward girls, what we would call runaways & prostitutes,
who with nowhere to go & endowed by the woman who started
the Home, a wealthy widow do-gooder as it were, stayed on
& over time given their Christian bent which after fits & starts
became a calling, as some girls continued to ply their trade
either as *** workers or simply eager *****. The founder, now
a nun, only reluctantly began to discourage this after the police
began returning the girls rather than arrest them, advising the
abbess to reign it in as the place was getting a reputation
as a cat house; Here we are, a century or so later, & I wonder
whatever became of those girls I used to smoke ****, drink
& pop pills with at parties &  after school, sometimes often
during school, some right in class; My art was thus torn in two:
whether to depict the clean-cut bourgeois facets of life's smiling
happy parents & docile authoritarianism, or the druggy, crazy,
not quite revolutionary, out-of it kicks to be had in the streets?
What each had in common was the cast of characters, parents
could be drug-addicts, *****, alcoholics or bi-******, just as
****** could be nuns...Catholic schoolgirls could be Punk
Rockers & crusties, fashion models & corporate VPs. It has
been implemented.