Picture of Art Spiegelman in MetaMaus

I noticed that there is a picture of Art, ca. 1968, sitting on a statue in Central Park. I took this picture, and have one similar to it of one of the statues holding a cup full of Coca-Cola; I also am in one of these pictures, not on a statue, but with my brown hair very long, wearing a white blouse with little white ruffles along the front. So, if, in the next edition of MM, they'd like to give appropriate credit, I am the photographer of this picture… unless he has a whole series of them taken by various friends at the same time. Art and I met in December of 1966 at the home of his close friend Jon Sheldon. I was going with his friend Seth Segall at the time. Art and I played a game of Knock-Hockey with a marshmallow, the agreement being that whomever lost would eat the marshmallow. Of course, I lost. I immediately, with a smile of warm "I-don't-mind" ed ness, popped the grubby confection into my mouth. Art seemed both revulsed and delighted, which would come to be an emblem for many of our future relations with one another. "Honey!"He said in immense delight. "You're the most gullible person I've ever met!" It was like a movie made a few years later, with Gene Wilder, I think by Mel Brooks, in which someone, seeing Wilder's innocent expression, says "And then God created… prey!" He said that if he had lost, he never would have eaten the marshmallow. "You wouldn't?" I said in amazement. Among us,in our family, an agreement was an AGREEMENT. If you were stupid enough to agree to eat a marshmallow that had been kicked all over the floor and stepped on, well, then, you had to eat the damn thing! He (as I recall) chucked me under the chin and gave me a quick kiss on the lips. (I wondered whether Seth would mind, but he didn't seem to. No one minded what Art did-- even then-- and anyway, he had another girl with him, a blonde shiksa type, I think. It was as though he was trying to teach me to protect myself on one level, and on another, lurking in the waters of a possible relationship sometime in the future and getting ready for love with the most gullible person in the world… And yet, I was happy that I'd played, and lost, and eaten the marshmallow. (The thing that bothered me about it the most wasn't how dirty it was, it was that it was not vegetarian. Marshmallows are made with gelatin-- even so far, for me, did honor go.) I was happy that I'd just met one of the young men who stood out from a crowd of people who all stood out in a crowd, the group of students at the State University of Binghamton (Harpur College) in 1968-- I think they were supposed to be the graduating class of 1971 or something,but some of them would leave much sooner and some of them would stay on far longer. I somehow knew I had just met a real genius, no matter how odd and unkindly peculiar his desire for diversion. I had met someone who was the opposite number to myself in the universe, a person who was in this world because I was in it, just as I was in it because he was.