Circles and Squares

My roommate at Davenport College, Yale, for three out of four years, was Jefferson Mays. Jeff has become a famous actor and I have not seen him since I went to see him in “I am my own Wife” in 2006 in Washington D.C.

Jeff and I engaged in any number of pranks and performance acts. I remember our salon gatherings of our classmates most vividly. Here are two invitations to those gatherings that I have preserved. I drew the lizard and Jeff did the rest for “The Lizard is Your Friend.”

“Save me from my paranoid room” is entirely my own work. I had drawn horrible ghosts on the walls of my room with glow-in-the-dark paint. The ghosts were so horrible they kept me up at night. So I painted over them. That did not make any difference, however. The ghosts shown through the paint, looking only the more eerie for the cover.

Jeff Mays and Emanuel Pastreich on graduation day, May, 1987.

Jeff Mays in “A Gentlemen’s Guide to Love and Murder”