During our phone interview, I kept expecting Nina to guess who I was the way Grete did, but she never recognized me. Then again, I wasn’t the first person Nina had talked to about herself and Lillian. Nina has cameos in a bunch of documentaries, and her name is in the index of any self-respecting textbook about art history or women’s studies or First Amendment issues. Which probably explains why she sounded so self-congratulatory on the phone.

NINA PAGANO: At Pratt I spent my undergraduate years realizing I was talentless, but I partied with the studio-art crowd, and that was all it took for the Vitalists to be born. It was basically eight of us writing manifestos, sharing studio space, and boinking each other in various combinations. Being the historian of the group, I was there to get it all down. If anyone asked, I’d have said we were destroying the barrier between art and viewer; we were placing the goals of the collective above those of the individual. Then, in 1957, we graduated. Lorraine and Eric got hitched, lit out for Vermont, and started raising bees. John embraced the big ugly and started law school, and Susan married him so that she could embrace something big and ugly, too. That left Katherine, Gary, Milt, and me. We all debased ourselves at the same parties and bars; I watched them drag their portfolios to the same Tenth Street galleries. We all knew that Katherine’s stuff was the strongest but that Gary talked the better game. Guess who got a show? And then turned his back on everyone except Milt, who went and got a show of his derivative color-bar paintings with Stan Kohl after Katherine’s superior color-bar paintings had been nixed? The difference being that Milt had to talk jazz with Stan while matching him drink for drink at the bar, while Katherine had to leave the bar with Stan and go back to his apartment, which Milt did and Katherine did not. Well, that was my limit. Seeing Katherine get shafted made me want to shit on the whole establishment, so that’s exactly what I did one night when a bunch of us were passing Milt’s second-rate paintings in the Kohl Gallery’s window after an otherwise undistinguished night of getting blotto around the corner. It had been the same big talk, big whiskey, and big laughs until I squatted in the middle of the sidewalk and yelled, Number two for number two. As the cold air kissed my bare ass, it got very quiet. After that, it was either leave town or start my own place.