Hey Mickey!
Proclaimed by New York magazine as one of the city’s ‘most photographed faces’, Micky Boardman, aka Mr Mickey, has been at the epicentre of the Big Apple’s social scene for almost three decades. Now the Editor-at-Large of Paper magazine, alongside best friend and fellow fashion icon Lynn Yaeger, is finding a whole new audience with the pithy and chatty Mickey & Lynn Show.
Interview Adam Mattera Photography Christian Trippe
I was intrigued to hear you live above Cafetal, where we did the shoot with yourself and Lynn. You’ve lived there since you first arrived in New York, am I right?
Almost. I've lived here 29 years, and I've been in New York maybe 33 years. Cafetal opened around 10 years-ago – but it’s been a social club for the local Italian community since I moved here. Lynn and I started coming here a lot after we’d finish the show, it was one of the few places in Manhattan where you could dine al fresco during lockdown. This district’s known as Nolita, which stands for North of Little Italy. It's a very neighbourhood-y kind of neighbourhood. When I first moved into this building, it was mostly a lot of old Italian women and me, then within a few years the hip young types started arriving. Now all the old Italian ladies are dead, so I'm the old Italian lady.
You mentioned the Mickey & Lynn Show – I wanted to ask you about that. What was the spark that ignited the whole idea?
Well, Lynn had been approached by a luxury fashion brand to do an Instagram live - it was a one-off thing for Fashion Week or something – and she asked if I knew how to do it. And of course the best way to learn something new is just do it – so we did one as a kind of practice run and various people logged on randomly and seemed to love it. And because it was the pandemic and we had tons of free time on our hands, Lynn suggested we do like a show like this every week. I was completely shocked, because Lynn’s been quite wary of social media in the past. But we had such a great time doing it, and we have a great rapport just talking about what we’ve been doing or watching, new objects we’ve collected. So we’ve been doing it every Friday at 6pm.
Given that great connection you have, I’m guessing you’ve known each other a pretty long time?
Oh we've been friends for like 30 years. We actually met through Michael Musto. When I started working at Paper I knew of Michael of course because he the most famous gossip columnist in New York. Michael invited me and Lynn and a few other friends over to watch the Academy Awards in 1994 or something like that. And that was such a success that we all became great friends and started doing this bad movie club where we’d all get together and watch terrible movies.
When you say bad movies, do you mean like camp and over the top bad or so-bad-its-good bad?
Well, Michael’s the one who curates them. They're things like ‘great stars brought low’ or movies where you sort of scratch your head and think ‘how did this ever get made?’ Like Valley Of The Dolls is too good for the bad movie club. I'm trying to think of one of the classic ones. There's a 70s movie called The Baby, starring Ruth Roman – it’s a story of a man who’s a fully grown adult, but mentally has the capacity of toddler. There’s his mother and two kind of trashy, sexy sisters who dress him like an infant and call him Baby. We used to do awards, and The Baby won ‘Best Movie Ever – Drama.’
“I was always like a bit of a freak, so coming to New York, everybody was a freak on some level – at least at that time, maybe less so now.”
How was it for you when you first arrived in Manhattan from Illinois in the late 80s? It must have been a bit of an ‘I’m not in Kansas anymore’ moment?
Totally. I was always like a bit of a freak, so coming to New York, everybody was a freak on some level – at least at that time, maybe less so now. Michael Alig and that whole club kid scene was still around. And all the fashion and theatre of course, I loved it.
How did you make the transition from studying fashion at Parsons to working at Paper magazine?
Well, I failed the class in my senior year and at the same time got hired at as an intern at Paper. At the time Parsons was very much the opposite of what Central Saint Martins is now. They were training you to be an assistant for a designer on Seventh Avenue. So it was very Banana Republic – really not my thing. I did this Jackie Onassis Hip Hop collection called Jackie Ho, which you couldn't do today because of cultural appropriation. It was inspired by that hip hop band Kris Kross who wore their clothes backwards. I thought it was brilliant. But they hated it. Whereas at Paper they loved my crazy outfits, my attitude and energy. I was sort of the star-turn there and a disaster student at Parsons, so of course I stayed where I was wanted.
How was it working at a magazine like that at the time? Influential titles had such access and power in the pre-internet age.
When I started at Paper, print media was at its height. So with fashion, for example, around 300 people would be at, say, the Isaac Mizrahi show, and when we featured the collections in our fashion issue that would be around four months before they were even in stores. Now any person in the world can watch the Balenciaga couture show on live stream and have a better seat than I do. There was an exclusivity to stuff back then. Same with movies, books, everything… you had an inside peek at things, which you needed because of the long lead times. Things are totally different now. And that's fine – times change – but I'm glad that I experienced what it was then and what it is now and, you know, survived.
“At Paper they loved my crazy outfits, my attitude and energy. I was sort of the star-turn there and a disaster student at Parsons, so of course I stayed where I was wanted.”
For a long time you wrote your celebrated Ask Mr. Mickey advice column for the magazine. What kind of questions would you get?
Oh, that was fun. It would be stuff like “I work at a hip downtown art gallery and have to look super professional for my clients, but I'm also into S&M and like to go to sex parties after work. What can I wear that can take me from distinguished gallerist to sex kitten with a whip?” Quirky things. I’m usually a huge procrastinator when I write, but the publishers encouraged me to be really spontaneous and off the cuff with my answers and it really worked.
I’m intrigued by your column Fat And All That – that was a much more candid, sincere side of you. What inspired that?
That came at a time when I’d been sober for 25 years, and I realised that when I peeled back all the issues I had, that weight was at the core. Most people in America are overweight, very few are sample size, so everybody can really relate to it. When you’ve been in fashion for as many years as I have, every step of the way you’re told fat is bad. Whether it's the size of the seat at the shows or the size of the clothes in the store, it's all a constant ‘fuck you’ to fat people, which is terrible… I actually was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in January, so I've been keeping a journal about that. I haven't been publishing it anywhere, maybe I will at some point. It's interesting to have writing as an outlet for the things I'm going through in my life.
“When you’ve been in fashion for as many years as I have, every step of the way you’re told fat is bad… it's all a constant ‘fuck you’ to fat people, which is terrible.”
You’ll be on your 100th episode of the show before you know it. Do you have any plans to celebrate?
Well, we just had a summer party at this store downtown called Muse. We had some Mickey & Lynn Show mugs made and sold them there. I was thinking of doing T-shirts for my Mr Mickey fashion line, but Lynn hates T-shirts, which is not that shocking, because she dresses like she's from the 1920s. But I’m sure we’ll do another party for our 100th or maybe two year anniversary. Probably at Cafetal, we virtually live there after all.
The Mickey & Lynn show
Tune in every Friday at 6 pm (EST) via Mickey’s Instagram
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