Margalit Fox: evaluation

Transcript context

…What’s the most surprising thing you’ve learned about an ordinary life writing one of these obituaries? Not a famous person but — . Well, here’s one. I brought one with me. There was a very good photographer who worked for the Village Voice for many years, a man named Fred McDarrah. He died in 2007. Now, his work as a photographer for the Voice alone would have been more than enough to get him a news obit in our pages, which it did. He took, for instance, a very famous photo of Bob Dylan, a young Bob Dylan all in black, in Sheridan Square Park in New York, facing the camera and saluting. That photo has been everywhere. That was taken by our guy, Fred McDarrah. And because of when he worked in the fifties and sixties, he was famous for documenting photographically the beat generation. To my surprise and delight, when I started pulling old clippings and researching the obit, we found that not only did he document the beat generation, but he enterprisingly started a business called Rent-a-Beatnik for these society matrons who wanted to be au courant, wanted to have a beatnik play the bongos or read poetry at their fancy parties in Scarsdale, but didn’t quite know how to go about it. With rental markets and everything, I would say.…

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