A Heartfelt Tribute to a Much-Loved Friend: Alex Baker

                                                                                                      Two of my best friends, Alex Baker and Diana Lissauer, both one but not forgotten

If a Nordic God were to appear to me he would look like Alex Baker.  He’d be tall and lean but muscular with well-developed thighs from years of running and he’d smell of green apples.  I often thought if only he weren’t gay and a heartbreaker! I had a mad crush on him that I somehow sublimated into a lasting friendship but others weren’t so lucky. I asked him once why he’d broken up with a perfectly lovely guy he was living with and he said: Basically it’s because he’s a bore, and I’m a whore. That may be true but who else would spend days looking at apartments until he found the perfect one for us and when the lease ran out he moved me because I couldn’t deal with it. He helped me set up and run my catering business.  Now that’s a friend!

What fun we had as we traveled together to Williamsburg for the Summit in 1983, to Mexico on several occasions and partied at the China Club and Studio 54 until they closed the bar at 4:00AM and brought out bowls of shaved ice to cool us down. We’d walk home through Central Park all aglow in pink as the sun rose, high on life and mescaline.  We often marvel that we’re both still alive.  Now he’s gone as many friends have gone too this year and last at age 64.  The median age is going down.  That’s not fair!

I met Alex when I came to cook at Harley Baldwin’s for a fabulous party for food writers that eventually resulted in a magnificently beautiful article in Cuinise Magazine. There Suzanne Hamlin wrote one of my favorite lines about eating my food: she said that it was “almost like discovering colors.”

Harley I met at Craig Claiborne’s celebration of his book “A Feast Made for Laughter” and he decided to take me under his wing. But he grew exasperated with me when he took me to David and Leslie Newman’s 25th wedding anniversary party at Elaine’s. One because I had never heard of Elaine’s and 2.- because I did not know that David and Leslie had written the screen plays for Bonnie and Clyde and the first Superman. I would become good friends with them too. But in the meantime it would be Alex’s job to educate me in the ways of New York.

Alex had been an official tour guide of the city of New York and he was always sprouting out interesting little tidbits about city history, most of which I don’t remember. What I do remember are his clever quips such as when I moved here and left my adored boyfriend Mayo in El Paso and would put a drop of Aramis on my pillow every night and Alex would say “Is this a case of out of sight, out of mind” or “absence makes the heart grow fonder ?”  Darling Alex: in your case it’s definitely  the second.