Out of the blue I received an email from a young man who said he was the assistant of Milan Mahaaney and thought I'd like to get in contact with him. I nearly fainted! Shortly after moving to Manhattan in a kooky building in what was left of Little Italy, Milan moved in across the hall. He was the son of a diplomat who'd had a falling out with his parents and he now had to figure out a way to earn a living. He cleverly realized that his contacts with the sons and daughters of the very rich and very famous could be a great resource and he hooked up with the new owner of Studio 54, Mark Fleishman, and planned a party for a new PBS version of Alice in Wonderland. A couple of weeks before the event, I walked in on him sitting on his living room floor surrounded by scraps of paper containing the addresses of everyone he knew. He was nearly hysterical. "What am I going to do?", he cried. I scooped up everything, brought it back to my apartment and created THE mailing list and from that point on helped with every party. It could be aptly said that I was mad with power, but it was fun and I got to add all the kooks I knew to that list.

It's hard to describe NYC in the eighties, but it was rather lawless and Milan took me on a glorious ride that included dinners with Andy Warhol, Cornelia Guest, Cosima von Bulow, Cecelia Peck and on and on and on. I still think to this day that I survived the Aids-ridden decade because I was too busy with these parties to have sex on the scale of everyone else, and just keeping up with Milan was a full-time job. I learned so much from that crazy guy and love to tell the clubsters here in Miami the crazy stories of the V.I.PeePee room in the basement of Studio where every stall was a mirrored table with two chairs. After those crazy years I realized I had to start photographing everything I saw because no one would believe it; through those cameras I came to know every freak in Manhattan, and all because of Milan. Good to know you again, my dear friend.