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Baba Dances on the Berlin Wall In November, 1989, I took a break during my painting class at the New York Art Students' League on West 57th, and went to buy the TIMES. The lead photo and story showed something amazing: the Berlin Wall, symbol of the Cold War that had gripped the world for 4 decades, was being dismantled. In the photograph, a young man and woman stood on top of the wall and danced, as all around them, on both sides of the wall, a crowd cheered. The feeling of Meher Baba's New Humanity was powerfully in the fall air. I knew what painting I would do next. There was even a woman from Germany in my painting class. I asked her how to say "Freedom" in German. "Freiheit!" she said. That became the title of the painting, on a 40"x 48" canvas, quite a bit bigger than the ones I usually worked on. It depicted Baba, in Western dress, embracing the couple dancing on the wall, while all around a crowd did what crowds do: cheered wildly, ate a hot dog, look on blankly, waved a bible, dressed as a clown--and held out a beer, made love, or played the guitar from the windows of the East Berlin apartment buildings I imagined just beyond the wall. The work itself got destroyed some years later because I didn't have a space in which to store it properly. And I didn't think I had a picture of it, either, till yesterday when someone brought me an album of painting photos I'd given him in the early '90s. Looking at the piece, I still feel the thrill I felt in the chilly fall air that day looking at the TIMES. The thaw of the "old humanity" has retreated now from the front-page headlines, but surely it's still going on somehow "underground," and we'll see such headlines, or greater ones, again.
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