The Day I Waved Back at Queen Elizabeth the Second
I had just started my first and, thanks to the U.S. military industrial complex and it's insatiable need for prolonged armed conflicts, only year of art school until I managed to get in another year at Oxford in England after my three years of enlistment in the army and a bunch of other wild happenings, which you could read about in, among other things, my article entitled "The Night I Picked Up Andy Worhol in My Cab".
It was late one crisp Autumn afternoon in September of 1965. I had just finished up for the day at the School of Visual Arts and was trying to get back to my bunk in a dorm at the McBurney YMCA on west Twenty Third street. And I got lost, which is hard to do if you are in Manhattan, but not if you're dyslectic. So at length I rounded another corner, saw a crowd and walked up. I asked one lady what was going on.
She said that the Queen of England was going to pass by momentarily, "...and there she is!" The lady added enthusiastically. The entourage wended it's way through the cordoned crowd. A middle limousine contained the sovereign.
I was surprised at how beautiful Elizabeth the Second really was. None of the pictures or newsreels ever did her justice, really. The closest likeness I would think to depict her was a profile image that appeared on the the coinage of the realm, circa early 1970's. An accomplished rider, she has the beauty of the equestrian lady, impossible to photograph.
Plus you have to realize her nobility is tempered with resilience. Few in the States realize what a gutsy person she can be. I understand that the moment she was informed that indeed she was to become queen, she was in training riding in and probably commanding a tank. Once a mentally ill man succeeded in eluding all the elaborate security at, I think it was Buckingham Palace and she encountered him in her bedroom where she calmly and compassionately talked with the person until security finally arrived.
Anyway, there I stood toward the rear of the small crowd, on the sidewalk that was at the same side where she was riding in the car. I was hoping, partly, that she would just zip by and not notice me. I was becoming more and more the motley art student, by then poor, shabby and unkempt. But then she, looking through the crowd, saw me and fixed her gaze on me.
Then she waved directly at me. To be honest, it was the most stunning, elegant and gracious wave I, in my limited plebian frame of reference, had ever seen. I attempted to imitate the gesture which I assume to have been entirely contrary to protocol, because her lovely smile at once transformed into a piercing scowl, equally regal. But then she regained her composure and went on to smile and wave at someone else, hopefully, I assumed, an informed Anglophile.
Years later I wound up, on a technicality, staying at her place. Often, from time to time, when I had nowhere to stay while in London, I slept in St. James park as hundreds of others were doing, on not too few a midsummer's night, adjacent to the palace ground where Her Majesty resides whilst in London, or so I'm told. Anyway, I understood that the Queen had herself intervened so that those sleeping in the park might be allowed to do so and not be told to move along. So there you are. A lady as gracious as her smile.
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