No Kings numbers

An estimated 530 people came out for our small town’s No Kings event yesterday.

Three young Republicans with a current-occupant flag stood in a parking lot across the street from us, blasting Los del Rio’s “Macarena” from a large speaker sitting in their car’s passenger-seat window. That lasted for about five minutes.

One older woman wore a t-shirt with an image of Iris Apfel. I had to tell her: “Unless you met Iris Apfel, you now have three degrees of separation from her.” I told her about my friend Aldo Carrasco, who worked at Iris and Carl Apfel’s textile-importing firm Old World Weavers in the 1980s, before Iris became a widely known figure of fashion. The woman wearing the t-shirt told me that she thought her shirt depicted Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I found a photograph of IA on my phone and showed it to her. Yes, it was Iris Apfel on her shirt.

It didn’t occur to me until later to think about the words on the shirt: “I’ve heard enough from old white men.” But there’s no evidence that Iris Apfel ever said that.