How did two teenagers from the Bronx connect with the underground-film crowd in Manhattan?
We had friends, like bohemians or whatever they were called. A friend of mine, Donna Kerness, she was very pretty. We went to high school together, and then I started putting her in pictures. She made friends with this man, Bob Cowan, who was about ten years older, an artist. He came down from Canada with two other Canadian artists, Mike Snow and Joyce Wieland, to get into the culture scene. He was infatuated with Donna, and she introduced me to them, and they introduced my brother and me to that whole art world in New York that was going on. Ken Jacobs helped you guys out, right? We went to Ken Jacobs’s loft because Bob Cowan, I think, was acting in his 8-mm movies. At that time it was like a little theater there, and every Friday or Saturday night he would play underground movies. So my brother and I came with our pictures, people liked them, and we were asked to come back. Ken Jacobs told Jonas Mekas about us, and that’s how the whole ball started rolling. Even though you were teena
