Donald Chauncey has been a cultural mover and shaker in South Florida since you were in short pants. He was born in Clearwater, Florida and has spent most of his time in Miami as a film librarian and retired as director of a moving image archive. He relishes being labeled “Dade County’s official pornographer” by a local pastor protesting his series of banned films shown at a Miami-Dade Public Library.

BFI is in a warren-like, artist-run building on NE 11th street in Downtown Miami. Here are a few things you can see from the sidewalk: the color-saturated façade, its rich blooms of color marked here and there by delicate graffiti commentary; an exotic dancers club; various high-rises, some of them attended to by the city’s ubiquitous construction cranes; mostly empty parking lots, the asphalt fighting a losing battle with vegetation; a lot of down-and-out people, some of them apparently homeless, some of them apparently in the throes of addiction; big, gorgeous sky.

Magical times have perhaps waned, and hopes for a real dragon would be absurd, but the children need some sort of payoff. The circus is in town. Specifically, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey presents “Dragons.”

Xuxa is considered the most popular beautiful superstar woman in Brazil to have her own line of children’s shoes. Some believe she made a satanic pact to appear on TV in giraffe suits and pink spaceships. Today, her special musical guest from Liberty City is the Bass Mechanic. She is Shoo-sha. He is A.D.E. She once declined an offer to be the mother of Michael Jackson’s baby.  He once threw a cheeseburger at a bus. She had a breakfast song called “Who Wants A Bread Roll?” He could do the “Tootsie Roll” but probably wouldn’t admit it. She was nearly kidnapped in Rio. He was nearly killed in Rio. We could go on. The tape is still rolling.

Cat Power emerged from the Grand Central Miami green room around 10 p.m. on the evening of October 11 sporting a bleached-blonde mohawk, balancing a lit candle in one hand and a plastic cup half-full of an unidentifiable, clear liquid in the other, and looking particularly distressed. (Little did I know, she had been hospitalized for unspecified reasons at Miami Beach’s Mt. Sinai Medical Center just a couple of weeks earlier).

“I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it
back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my
speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the
room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out
any irregularities my speech might have.”

Full disclosure number one: I’ve been a Frank Gehry groupie from the day I called Vogue to request a full page for a house that a young architect had built himself in Santa Monica. “Spelled G-e-a-r-e-y?” my editor asked, and the request was denied. (I wrote it up some months later for British Vogue.)

On March 10, 1990, my mother was in the stands at the Polo Club of Boca Raton for the semifinals of the Virginia Slims of Florida Women’s Tennis Tournament. Sitting directly behind her was the New Age composer Yanni and his girlfriend at the time, Dynasty actress Linda Evans.