Once, at Thanksgiving, a neighbor wandered in while my cousin Lisa worked on a turkey, shearing meat off its frame and sliding the steaming slices onto a big flowered plate. 'Hey, that's the man's job,' she yelped, in between slurps of her Big Gulp. No one even paused to acknowledge the comment; everyone just laughed and laughed.

In December 1998 I considered myself an expert on love. I was almost a year into a relationship one that had grown more slowly than I had wished but once it flowered it was much more stimulating than any marriage or relationship I had known.

After its hothouse incubation in the seventies appropriation breathed important new life into art. This life flowered spectacularly over the decades - even if it's now close to aesthetic kudzu.