Sunday, November 21 & Sunday, November 28, 1976
3:00, 3:15, 3:30, 3:45, 4:00, 4:15, 4:30, 4:45
250 Mulberry St., Apartment 14, New York, N.Y. 10012
A door-person (Betsey Sussler) is waiting downstairs just inside the foyer of my apartment building in Little Italy, on the corner of Mulberry Street & Prince Street, across the street from the Italian mafia's social club (the Ravenites). She is collecting a one dollar admission fee from each person as they enter the building for the performance; she instructs them to go upstairs to the sixth floor and to wait in the hall outside the door of apartment fourteen until they are asked to enter.
The door to apartment fourteen opens, and then the audience enters. The performer, Susan Ensley, is wearing a heavy winter coat with slippers. The apartment has not been painted in a long time - the plaster is falling, there is a sense of disarray. There are student drawings of naked females on the walls. There is another woman (Julia Heyward) sitting in a chair facing a white platform on the floor, which revolves with a hand crank. The girl in the chair asks for a volunteer to turn the crank.
Susan takes off her coat and positions herself on the platform, nude. A timer is set for eight minutes, a song begins to play (Susan Ensley & Julia Heyward singing), the volunteering member of the audience begins to crank, the platform turns around three hundred and sixty degrees. Susan, naked - all body hair shaved -is posed in a classical position looking at her face with a mirror held in her hand, her gaze meeting that of the audience around her.
REPERCUSSIONS IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD … Susan was told by her building superintendent that “they” (the Mafia) thought I was a prostitute...
Two Mafia thugs came over twice looking for her; they “had some business to do with her” as reported by her neighbors—She was not at home either occasion .…
The Mafia on at least two nights discussed her at their club meetings, my superintendent finally convincing them that “she was all right”…
However, two months later - unconvinced - they still thought “something was going on”…. and so Susan finally moved.
