When asked to find a favorite cousin of a deceased relative for a friend, I found much more than a name. I found the door to a world full of artists, authors, poets, models, and playwrites; a world of bright colors, bohemian living, and unconventional characters. This world, however exhilarating, existed in the past. The cousins of the deceased were also deceased, they were Marc Chagall and his second wife, who'd arrived from New York and who also lived in France at that time. As I found their names, I was done with the favor, but not with the investigation about these larger-than-life artists.st
The moment I walked in to the gallery show of Marc Chagall's art, I was consumed with awe, like a child at the circus. I laughed and gasped, oohed and awed at the goat-headed man getting married, at the acrobats flying from their trapeeze, and the bull in the armchair's colors on fire! I was unable to turn away, my attention caught by parisienes who no longer existed and who had been the cousin of a photographer I knew and coincidentally had learned from - getting paid quarters to run the stop bath in the studio as a child.
I dug deeper into the artists world. I snuck flowers designed by his parisiene grand-daughter, visited Cafe Rotunde's latest cafe in Monmartre, and visited Chagall's studio in Nice, France, where he painted and lived with his second wife - the New York cousin - before he died. What I ended up writing is a play about the
