I started out early in the evening at the shop of Liz O’Brien, who has an atelier in fields of collecting in the decorative arts at 306 East 61st Street between First and Second Avenues. She was hosting an opening of a collection photographs by Mark Shaw of a woman named Joan Morse, who had a shop on the Upper East Side in the 1970s called A La Carte. Morse was known as “Tiger” Morse in those days, a kind of Warhol-related character.
I only knew of Morse back then because Blair Sabol (who writes NYSD’s “No Holds Barred”) wrote a weekly column in the Village Voice called “Outside Fashion” in which she wrote a piece called “How To Get Waited on At Bloomgindale’s.” In those days Bloomingdale’s was the center of retail shopping in New York. It was, a mecca, where thousands, men and women, visited frequently, even daily just to see what was up and what was new. It was so busy that it was famously often difficult to find someone to wait on you.
In her piece, Blair wrote that Tiger Morse’s way of getting a sales person’s attention at Bloomie’s was to: dress up in a cowgirl suit – hat, skirt with fringe, holster and gun, cowgirl boots, and jump up on a counter and yell, “Where the fuck’s the manager??!!” Evidently it worked.
That’s all I knew about Tiger Morse until last night when I stopped by to see the Mark Shaw photographs which was a series he did for LIFE Magazine of Morse in 1962 on one of her buying trips to Thailand. Interestingly, there was no Dale Evans business about her in these photos. She was smartly dressed in the style of the day, and chic, and game to take it all in. I took a couple of photos of the photos to give you an idea.
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