Margriet 143

There is a story attached to these late 1970's glasses by Pierre Cardin.

I bought them around 1987 at the Amsterdam flea market and they

were part of a huge construction that my wife and I had made to fill

an empty wall in our bedroom. Four large double mirrors were attached

to the wall and the same surface in plexiglass hung from the ceiling, some

ten inches in front of the mirrors. Umpteen little holes were drilled in the

plexiglass. Each couple of holes held a pair of prescription glasses from

my collection. Especially at night, the effect was fantastic - the lights from

our bed lamps were reflected in the lenses of the glasses and again in the

reverse image of the glasses in the mirror. Manhattan by night! My wife

was an artist and she had a great pair of glasses for each day of the week.

In 1989 we had our divorce and I moved to a nearby appartment. The

construction (or object, if you wish) got the same place in my new bedroom.

In the summer I spent a month in Wallis, Switzerland, climbing rocky mountains

on my own and big glacier mountains with British or Swiss rope mates. But

I also made the acquaintance of Inger, a nice bespectacled girl from Denmark.

She made the journey to Holland in autumn, shortly after her own divorce

and she stayed a week with me. When she saw the object in my bedroom,

her first reaction was "That's the weirdest thing I have ever seen!". During

the week, curiosity took over and one night she tried out some of the eighty

glasses in the object. I asked her if she knew her own prescription and she 

said yes, it's minus 6.00 for my left eye and minus 4.75 for my right eye. 

The Pierre Cardin glasses had exactly the same Rx so I took them from the

object. Inger put the glasses on and she said amazed "They are perfect! But

the frame is awful". She favoured smaller metal frames, hippie type. After she

left, I wrote a song for her called "Viqueen at the wheel" and she was proud

of it - in fact even more proud when the song in her praise became the trailer

on my solo CD "Crystal Veil".
Two of the mirrors have survived and they were used to great effect during
my recent photo shoot with Esther. The plexiglass was thrown out when I
ventured into a stormy relation with a lady who did not need glasses - she
did not see the sense of the object :). However, an old photo of the object
has survived and I will post it here when it can be transferred into a digital
picture without going bankrupt or worse, losing my marbles when trying to
understand the - doubtless bulky and incomprehensive - manual.... 

Margriet, thank you for posing so patiently in the Pierre Cardin glasses while

this long story was written on the weblog!