Ash art

Claire Anderson and I walked around Union Square tonight with heavy, bazillion-dollar camera equipment slung on our backs. We needed a story for our TV skills class. In two hours, we found more than we could ever do in a night: a group of GLBT homeless teenagers that gathers nightly in the square; a clearly insane man playing a guitar he “got for free”; a late-night recruiter from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints; and a Puerto Rican, 9/11-inspired artist named Edwin Class.

We picked Class. He was a gem of an interview subject. It didn’t matter to him that Claire and I were bozos with the camera and tripod --- once we got the camera rolling, he talked with the ease of someone married to Barbara Walters.

The best part of the interview began when he took out a pair of scissors and a book of matches. In less than a minute, he’d snipped off the heads of most of the matches. After a few more cuts in slants and jags, only two matches were standing tall. We were looking at the New York City skyline, he said, as it was before the towers fell.

Class scraped the skyline against another matchbook and the towers ignited in a tiny puff of flame. Two black marks were left behind the charred matchheads. Those are called the footprints, Class said. He explained how people became ash that day; how the buildings fell seven floors below ground level.

For someone who said his favorite artistic medium is people, he worked well with a matchbook. And I got to keep it --- it’s tucked away for now, in my purse.