Open House

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    The enigma that was Andrei Warhola was pronounced dead at 6:31 a.m on Sunday February 22 1987. After years of estrangement from both Warhol and each other, Lou Reed and John Cale spoke for the first time at the memorial service to Warhol on April Fools' Day 1987 at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York. By 1990, they had released the song-cycle Songs for Drella, which had been performed in part over the previous year or so.
    The album came to have significance to us as a family around 1995, when I found a tape cassette of it in a charity shop in Church Stretton, Shropshire. It became a staple of holiday car-journeys for years to come. James was five.
    One of the songs on the album is 'Open House' - referring to Warhol's mother's traditional Czechoslovakian habit of feeding anyone who came by the house. Over the years, we've operated a kind of open house here, with all the visits we've had by actors and sundry other characters involved in various film and photography projects; dishing out food and drink and generally having a good time.
    Fast forward to COVID-19 and we've not seen anyone here for weeks apart from the postie, let alone James & Leo. Yesterday was their first visit since lockdown, but we still had to eat al fresco, and with no physical contact. Small steps - here's hoping we can go back to being an open house in the not-too-distant future.

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