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“Find a subject you care about.” — Kurt Vonnegut
A few years back I had the opportunity to write a freelance piece for Screen Printing magazine about Joe Petro, a, screen printer who produced art for a disparate range of high profile characters including, but not limited to Jonathan Winters, Ralph Steadman, Hunter S. Thompson and former president Jimmy Carter.
In the original conception of the article I was intending to write about the screen printed artwork of Jonathan Winters, whose paintings I discovered while searching for his recorded humor. I interviewed Winters for near forty-five minutes (a rare and highly entertaining privilege) and spent a great deal of energy shaping what amounted to a very weak piece about screen printing, because Mr. Winters didn’t actually do screen printing. Joe Petro did the screen printing for him.
The rejection letter from the editor whom I pitched was very kind, leaving the door open for another pitch. I replied that Joe Petro himself would make a great story, since he was doing work for all these other high profile people, and with a little luck I might get access to some of them. Sure enough, the finished piece appeared in January 2004 under the title, Serigraphy, Celebrities & Joe Petro. It was a lot of fun.
One of the celebrities in my article happened to be Kurt Vonnegut, whose creative output was not limited to the written word. He, too, was an artist.
When I called him at his home one Sunday afternoon in the fall of 2003 I asked if I were interrupting anything. (The interview had been pre-arranged.) He said he was sitting in his living room watching a New York Giants football game. The ten minutes we talked flew past in a snap.
On April 11, 2007 Kurt Vonnegut passed. He was 84.
As the Boomer generation came of age, Kurt Vonnegut became one of its most important voices. When I was in college at Ohio U. it seemed that everyone was reading Vonnegut. Beginning with Cat’s Cradle, I read everything he wrote that I could put my hands on. His surly, incisive wit, creative cast of characters, and enthusiasm for smashing sacred…
