TWO YEARS IN NEW YORK (Michael Mohr's Fictional NYC Covid Memoir)

Chapter 5 (PAID)

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

Chapter 5

Two major developments occurred in mid-June: I moved to a second Air BnB, in Hamilton Heights, on the west side; and I met Sophia Motte.

Sophia was an artist who hailed from Pittsburgh, PA (quite common in NYC I discovered) and had lived in Manhattan for about twenty years. She’d had an eccentric, theatre-actor mother (who Sophia, as a child, once walked in on after a suicide attempt with pills), and an angry, alcoholic father who’d died long ago, when she was in her lurid, alcoholic twenties. She’d initially been a corporate architect (she’d gone to architecture school at Pratt) but had always had a passion for painting. Over the years she began dipping her toe into the artists’ world in New York, working at and attending art galleries; painting on her free time; and eventually getting h…