Showsight October 2020

SUSAN KAMENMARSICANO APU BASENJIS BREEDER INTERVIEW BY ALLAN REZNIK

Where did you grow up? My parents had a small, two-story brick home in Laurelton, Long Island, New York. My brother and I were able to walk on our own to PS 156, a public grammar school. I had a choice and chose to attend Far Rock- away High School, which meant I got on the Long Island Railroad every day to go to school. I was the school artist in both schools, Valedictorian in grammar school, and an Honor Student in high school. I didn’t grow up, or find my niche, until I was accepted into Cooper Union Art School at the age of 17. I left home shortly afterwards, got my own apartment (East 10th Street, $17.22 a month), and got my first dog right away, Do you come from a doggy family? If not, how did the interest in breeding and showing purebred dogs begin? The Story of Apu: My mother was young and trying to keep my asth- matic sibling alive (before there was good asthma medicine) when we were little. “Don’t get overheated!” was her constant cry—and remember, she had to worry about polio back then, and we had just come out of the war. I read the Diary of Anne Frank almost right after it was published (and to this day I recognize anti-Semitism immediately). I brought every stray dog home. My flailing mother, without fail, had them all carted off. She was doing her best. I left home at the age of 17 to go to art school in NYC. I left Long Island, got out of the subway at Astor Place in Manhattan, stepped over a sleeping derelict and so my life began, for real, at Cooper Union Art School. Cooper is a scholarship school. I was so proud to be admitted, and am still proud to be a CUAS alumna.

92 | SHOWSIGHT MAGAZINE, OCTOBER 2020

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