Thing of Beauty by Stephen Fried Page B

David-news flashes. You had to understand the world he had packaged for mass consumption to speak the language. You had to know about Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, the first rock band ever to sing about homosexuals and heroin, and you had to know about pop artist Andy Warhol, who made the Velvets the toast of a downtown Manhattan club you had to know about called Max’s Kansas City. You had to know about the rivalry between Bowie and Marc Bolan of T. Rex, and how Bowie had rescued Mott the Hoople from obscurity by giving them his song “All the Young Dudes.” And you had to know about the Rolling Stones—not because of their venerated position in the history of rock but because Bowie had recorded their “Let’s Spend the Night Together.” And the Stones’s recent number one single “Angie” was supposedly a love song from Mick Jagger to Bowie’s wife—or to Bowie himself.
    To get to the rest of the stores they liked, Gia and Karen would walk up across Broad Street through the more expensive part of town. This was where Nan Duskin and Bonwit Teller sold the clothes their mothers hoped they would one day wear. Between the stores were the fancy restaurants and hotels, and the salons of the top hairstyle superstars—like Julius Scissor, Vincent Pileggi, Mister Paul and Barry Leonard, the Crimper—where the “looks” from the pages of the fashion magazines were dispensed to those who knew to ask.
    The very center of Center City was where the wives of old and new money alike went to indulge themselves, asking for as much daring in their do’s as they could socially afford. It was not New York—nothing in Philadelphia ever was, a fact that Philadelphians rarely allowed themselves to forget. But a sufficiently high level of regional fabulousness was available to those who wanted to separate themselves from the fuddy-duddies: those who the trendy cutters sneeringly referred to as “the wash-and-set ladies.” The top shops in Philadelphia didn’t set any trends—that was done in New York, Paris and London—but they were the fashion franchisees licensed to dispense them.
    Just beyond the toniest shopping and salons was Sansom Street, the city’s original bohemian enclave. The street’s rebirth had begun in the mid-sixties, supposedly as a Philadelphia version of London’s Carnaby Street, and it maintained a foppish air even after some of the mod, fashiony shops were replaced with hippie and glitter-rock stores. But Sansom Street was more than just stores. It was a
scene
, the site of the city’s first stationary freak show of painted hippies, outlaw bikers and drag queens. Those extremes made the street a place where Philadelphia’s traditionally powerless—the young, the black, the female, the homosexual-could feel powerful, or at least relatively safe in numbers.
    In recent years, Sansom Street had also begun to attract tourists: little kids from the suburbs and the Northeast who came in on Saturdays to gawk at the interracial couples publicly kissing, the men holding hands with other men, the latest tattoos. Entrepreneurs seized the moment by carving a mini-mall, Sansom Village, out of spaces on the standard, store-lined shopping block. It was suddenly possible to comparisonshop for items that were once impossible to find anywhere. There was Stosh’s Hide, the leather store; Mr. Tickle’s, the poster shop; boutiques like Picadilly’s, Dreams, Distant Drummer and the Pants Pub; as well as the Alice’s Restaurant ice cream parlor, which had to change its name to Alice’s Restaurant of Pennsylvania because someone else had already franchised the title of the Arlo Guthrie song.
    The commercialization had taken its toll. The hippies and art students who settled the area were certain that if thirteen-year-olds knew about Sansom Street, it had clearly passed the point of hip exclusivity. The developers of Sansom Village were actually trying to clone another site in the Northeast. But the street had