Ann Mintz's Page

Before he changed his name to Rollo Banks, moved to Honolulu, bought China Sea Tattoo from Sailor Jerry and became famous, Michael Malone lived in New York where he fell in love with tattoos. Here’s the story he told me at the time about how it happened: When working on what he described as an “artsy-fartsy photo-essay” of weeds growing through the cracks of the sidewalks, he noticed a man sitting on the stoop of a tenement at 2nd Street and Avenue B, a Japanese style tattoo wrapped around his l… Continue

Books should be read, don’t you think, they do no one any good, sitting in boxes. That’s what I thought, when I decided to give away my museum library—the six boxes of books from my last career, the career I walked away from three years ago when I realized what I really wanted to do was to come home and not keep gypsying around the country from one museum job to the next. The books are going to a university where they will be read, or maybe they won’t be, but at least they could be useful. Which… Continue

When I was very young, my parents had a friend named Tina Strobos; I took her for granted, the way children do. Last week, I as I turned the pages of the New York Times, I found her name in a headline—not in an obituary, as you might expect for an 89 year old woman, but in a story about her heroism as a teenager during World War II. She and her mother managed to hide, save, and smuggle out of occupied Holland over a hundred Jews, in a house only a ten minute walk away from the Secret Annex where… Continue

For my husband and his cousins, it was a rite of passage; when they met the person they wanted to marry, they went to Cape Ann, north of Boston, to their grandparents’ house in Essex. The family had sold the house but it played such a huge role in their childhoods, it was important that their future partner see it, at least at a distance. Just a few years ago, I went to Essex with my husband and his cousin Peg. We had been sitting in our car for a few minutes, on the road outside the house, when… Continue

He moves lightly, leaning towards his partner, alive with the music as they waltz together in perfect time. His brother dances nearby. They smile as their eyes meet. The song ends, and expression vanishes from his face. He stands, unmoving, in the center of the floor where moments before, he danced so gracefully. His brother approaches, puts a hand on his shoulder and quietly, leads him back to his seat.

“If you loved me enough, I wouldn't have to drink," my mother used to say. The first time her binge drinking sent her to the hospital, I thought the sense of self that made her leave Minneapolis and move to New York, outrage her Midwestern parents by marrying the smartest , handsomest man she'd ever met, a twice-married Jew twelve years her senior, get a PhD in the 50s when women just didn't, would take over and she would slow down but but she drank herself into the hospital sixteen more times o… Continue