Don’t know if it’s due to the pandemic but an old, old friend with whom I’d regretfully lost touch asked a mutual friend - the brilliant jewelry designer Rebecca Koven - if she knew me & then asked for my number & called me! An English beauty with an incredible sense of humor & style and with a Greek husband - both terrific - she was and is a great jewelry connoisseur and collector. Ditto paintings! We used to see each each regularly in Venice, London, Athens and New York. We met at a party uptown 40 years ago, her long black hair was loose and flowing AND…she was wearing a staggering brooch by MME. BELPERRON by whom - as some of you know - I believe I am the only living American jewelry designer who had the honor to be befriended. More about THAT in another blog. Two nights later i was at one of the outstanding painter Nabil Nahas’ exquisite dinners in his Tribeca loft - decorated partly with a large suite of guilded chairs made by Jacob Desmalter for Napoleon - for the Chateau of Fointainbleau. i was talking with a couple i’d never met and whose name I hadn’t caught when i let my eyes wander from the lady’s face to her jewelry…and there was the Belperron brooch. I couldn’t help myself and exclaimed: “Oh, it’s YOU, Pauline!” Now i will tell you what PROSOPAGNOSIA is. Say WHAT? Years later i learned why I was not recognizing women I knew, sometimes, at an Aspen Brain Seminar which I attend yearly - having had brain surgery in 2008, myself, makes this incisive event all the more intriguing to me. A gorgeous brain surgeon from Mt. Sinai Hospital - very pregnant spoke, limmediately followed by her white, rapper, gorgeous husband made up a rap based on her talk AND i got to ask why - when women changed their hairstyles - i often no longer knew who they were. The answer - you guessed it - is Prosopagnosia and it is an actual physical phenomenon: some of us need the hair framing a face to recognize the person we know! and Pauline’s hair had been very tightly pulled back against her head…the second night. go figure! (i’ll allow myself a tangent before i forget this related story. Three decades ago I noticed that an upcoming Christie’s London sale had a jewel BY Mme. Belperron, which…they hadn’t realized was by her. Sure that the price would go through the ceiling - as it should have - i nevertheless arranged to bid by phone. Lo and behold the hammer went down at $2,500 (ludicrously) and it was…mine! go figure. later that afternoon I was surprised to receive a call from Christie’s saying apologetically that one of their favorite Belperron collectors had been stuck in London traffic and would like me to sell the brooch to him. i asked how much he was offering. The flustered answer was: “well, $2,500 of course” I politely allowed that if their friend would like “to add a zero to that figure, I would be glad to sell it.” he did not!)