New York Folklore Society Newsletter

"What a lovely image—trading clothes across cultural boundaries. What if on one day of the year, all of the businessmen traded clothing with ghetto kids and put on home boys' signature baggy pants, Nike sneakers, and hooded sweat shirts? What if Netanyahu and Arafat changed clothes and posed for a portrait? It could change the world." —Steve Zeitlin

Steve Zeitlin (Photograph courtesy of City Lore)

Steve Zeitlin is director of City Lore and a commentator for the radio show "Artbeat," heard on National Public Radio. His column is a regular feature of the newsletter.

NOTE: The New York Folklore Society Newsletter and New York Folklore Journal were replaced by Voices: The Journal of New York Folklore which debuted December, 2000.

New York Folklore Society
P.O. Box 764
Schenectady, NY 12301
518/346-7008
Fax 518/346-6617
nyfs@nyfolklore.org

Winter/Spring 1998

WINTER/SPRING 1998 NEWSLETTER MAIN PAGE

A Mile in Claire’s Shoes
Steve Zeitlin

Born in 1926, Claire Tankel is a radiant old firebrand, and her passion flies in the face of her delicate features and slight build. At any public program she attends, when the speaker calls for discussion, her hand is the first one up. Her question extends into a comment, then into a story, and often ends up as a shouting match when the speaker tries to cut her off.

In the 1950s and '60s, she and her late husband, Stanley Tankel, were among the preservation pioneers who stopped Robert Moses’ plan for a four lane roadway through Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village. (On November 1, 1958, she and her husband ceremoniously drove the elaborately decorated "last car""through the park.) She has a penchant for lost and difficult causes, ranging from preserving an old planetarium, restoring Native American names for parks, and saving the aging Central Park children’s zoo.

The last time I heard Claire speak her mind was at a conference on war textiles and fabrics. She was intent on making a point that clothing was deeply symbolic. But when she digressed into a personal story about trading clothes with a traditional weaver from Thailand, the speaker abruptly cut her off. When the program was over, she accosted me and continued on with the tale of one of her watershed voyages, a trip she took to Thailand, Java, and Bali in 1986.

"It was so beautiful," Claire told me when I visited her later at her Greenwich Village apartment. "We traveled to the city of Chang Mai in Thailand and then went on a tour of small villages in the thickly wooded countryside. We traveled by bus to a wooded area where streams flowed and spinning wheels wound cotton fabrics down by the water.

"We reached the workshop home of this wonderful seamstress, Mae Leang Sang Deo Bannasit," she told me. "As we looked at the array of fabrics I could already tell the influence of the West on her work. There were reds and bright colors that we didn’t see on the clothing of the native peoples. She asked me what I liked," Claire told me. "I said I wasn’t crazy about the color of the fabrics she was selling. What I liked were the browns and yellows on the muted, earth-colored sarong that she was wearing. I asked what kinds of things she liked—she pointed to the shirt that I had on! A simple blue blouse from Emotional Connections in New York. Somehow the idea came up that we should trade. So we went back into one of the rooms of her home, and we exchanged clothes. Look at this," Claire told me, "it’s a picture of me in the beautiful sarong," she said, "and her in my blue American blouse. I don’t know what she saw in it."

What a lovely image—trading clothes across cultural boundaries. What if on one day of the year, all of the businessmen traded clothing with ghetto kids and put on the home boys’ signature baggy pants, Nike sneakers, and hooded sweat shirts? What if Netanyahu and Arafat changed clothes and posed for a portrait? It could change the world.

Claire was right. Clothing is deeply symbolic. When she put on the sarong, was she donning some part of Thailand's culture? Were the thousands of years of evolution of cloth and patterns transmitted? And was the Thai weaver slipping on the taste and styles of America with its chain stores and mass culture? Was either the better or the worse for the exchange? Did it contribute to cultural understanding or homogenization?

"What do you make of the trade?" I asked her, trying to tease out the meaning of her story. Suddenly, Claire, the tough firebrand activist, burst into tears. "It’s cultural understanding," she said. "How do we get into another person’s clothing—how do we walk a mile in their moccasins? I cry so easily," she said, shaking her head, tears still streaming down her face, "Native Americans tell me it’s a good thing. It means I’m in the moment."

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