News from Mark Mitton

Saturday night was the annual White House Correspondents Association dinner in Washington, DC. Bloomberg hosted an after-party at the Costa Rican embassy. It was a veritable who’s who of everything! I bumped into Pamela Anderson and saw Salman Rushdie again (he likes card tricks) and it was quite a wild scene.

They had recreated three famous paintings and brought them to life. I played the part of the soda jerk in Edward Hopper’s ‘Nighthawks’, performing card tricks in a specially-constructed bar area, and whenever anyone came in it was projected on a giant screen in the main party area.

This is Hopper’s ‘Nighthawks’:

Here are some behind-the-scenes photos:

Check out this time-lapse movie of the evening:

Recently, two of my trendier friends were in fashion spreads in the New York Times magazine. Hendrik Gerrits, my old assistant who has traveled all over the world with me and is now the Exhibitions Manager at the New Museum, modeled an expensive leather jumpsuit last month, and Simon Hammerstein, President of The Box, was pictured a week later with performer Kaitana Magno in a very nice suit. How cool is that?

Click on the images to see larger versions of them on the New York Times website.

My friends from The Big Picture, an organization that runs innovative high schools around the world that I’ve blogged about before, were in town recently for a conference at the UN Plaza Hotel. Designer Marc Ecko gave a great talk about the work he does with high school students in his Sweat Equity Enterprises (SEE) program, where he teaches them how to design clothing, shoes and watches, among other things. After that I did a show to pump up the crowd, and then it was time for dinner. Everyone had a great evening and we got the conference off to a very animated start.

This is what that the show looked like: