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suspected Frank’s Yankee ways, they did admire Ida’s emerald earrings), was forced to help make ends meet by feeding local college students. Georgia, in her lace cap, helped.
    Life largely sucked, the way it does when you’re almost twenty and life’s bounty, if it exists, is being harvested by others, elsewhere.
    Becoming Patsy O’Keeffe
    A year passed, and Ida had saved enough to send Georgia to the Art Students League of New York. The Art Students League was established in 1875 as an alternative to the fuddy-duddy “traditional” art schools; § it had no requirements for admission, major areas of study (aside from art), or required courses. It was a hippie school long before there were hippies, and Georgia loved it.
    When she arrived in New York she was easily the poorest girl at the League, but she didn’t care. She was giddy to have escaped the Dostoevskian drama that was shaping up back in Williamsburg: her depressed, frustrated father; her determined, increasingly bitter mother. Her hair had grown into a chin-length bob, the kind flappers would popularize a decade later. It’s probably safe to say that this was the first and last time in Georgia’s life her hairdo could be considered cutting-edge. For a few dollars a month she shared a room with a fellow student with the sweet, early-twentieth-century name of Florence Cooney. In Virginia Georgia was mocked for her plain way of talking and dressing; in Chicago fellow students and teachers had been indifferent to her familiar, no-­nonsense Midwestern mien; but in New York, she was considered an androgynous beauty with snappy blue eyes, a chic head of curls, a sly and playful wit. People got her. Her fellow students called her Patsy; with her love of dancing, music, and practical jokes, she seemed very Irish. Aside from having to watch every penny, “Patsy” O’Keeffe flourished. She attracted admirers, including a fellow classmate named George Dannenberg, an exotic San Franciscan—she called him the Man from the Far West—who was bewitched by her easy individuality and liked to take her to dances.
    Patsy also began acquiring artistic influences, a taste for what to embrace and what to ignore. She despised her life drawing class, but loved her still life class with William Merritt Chase, a famous American Impressionist of the time who later founded what would become Parsons The New School for Design. The eccentric Chase—he wore a black top hat to class—had become famous and rich primarily as a society portrait painter. He believed in O’Keeffe’s talent, even though she was at a disadvantage for genius because of her sex.
    According to the great scientific thinkers of the time, women could never be artists because an artist needed to devote himself to his art wholeheartedly, which meant days, not to say years, of undivided time and attention. A woman could conceivably arrange such a thing, except that an artist also needed to work from his true nature, and a woman could only access her true nature by having children, and to have children meant a woman would never have the undivided time and attention to devote to her art. Chase didn’t care about all that, and proved it by supporting Georgia as a candidate for the League’s Still Life Scholarship, which she managed to win, despite her gender. The prize was an all-expenses paid summer of painting at the Outdoor School in Lake George, New York.
    In someone else’s life story, this would be the beginning of everything coming together. After surviving a life-threatening illness, Patsy had freed herself from her soul-crushing home situation. She’d found her tribe. She’d found a respected mentor. She had a hot boyfriend who adored her. All she needed was a pair of signature boots and a rock anthem and she’d be set. And it was about time. She was twenty, and in 1907, when the average woman married for the first time at