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Weehawken Reporter NINE WEEKLY NEWSPAPERS SERVING HUDSON COUNTY • STORIES UPDATED CONTINUOUSLY AT WWW.HUDSONREPORTER.COM • A PUBLICATION OF THE HUDSON REPORTER
VOLUME 26, NUMBER 2 • SUNDAY, AUGUST 5, 2012
READY FOR MY CLOSE UP – Janet Tsakis painted a small panel series of photos taken in a photo booth with her college friend Cathy Suhocki. The series will appear at the Parallax AF art show this weekend.
‘Get me at my worst!’
Resident to show paintings of ‘discarded photos’ at NYC gallery show
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By Gennarose Pope Reporter Staff Writer
anet Tsakis is a special kind of recycler. From her artist studio in her Weehawken residence, she takes the photos that most people would erase from their digital cameras or throw in the trash and turns them into art. “These are not the photos most people see and say, ‘Oh, you look so great in that picture!’” she said. “I’m not purposely trying to not show them at their best. I think the pictures are funny and I’m trying to do something different with portraits.”
see PAINTER page 10
DISCARDED INTO ART – Weehawkenite Janet Tsakis takes the photographs most people would throw away and turns them into art. Her “Photo Booth Series” will premiere at the Parallax AF show at 82 Mercer Street in New York on Aug. 4 and 5.
Fighting to remember
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Residents band together to raise money to fight Alzheimer’s
By Gennarose Pope Reporter Staff Writer
eehawkenites Bill Bemke and Isabel Diaz are best friends. They go to concerts together (they just saw Santana and will see the B-52s soon), they talk and visit constantly, and they have reunited a group of
“Toward the end of my father’s life, I’d leave work to feed him at his assisted living home, and then tell him I had to go back to work,” Diaz said. “He’d ask me, ‘Why are you going to work? You’re in kindergarten.’ The day before he passed, he didn’t know who I was.” Her father was one of many members of her family to suffer from the disease.
“There’s no describing [Alzheimer’s] other than it’s horrible.” – Bill Bemke
BEST FRIENDS WITH A PURPOSE – Isabel Diaz (left) and Bill Bemke will join a team of Weehawken residents and participate in September’s Walk to End Alzheimer’s to help raise money for a cure.
Weehawken classmates together through the social media network phenomenon known as Facebook. But that’s not all the friends have in common. Bemke and Diaz have also watched many family members live with – and die from – Alzheimer’s.
Alzheimer’s is the most common form of dementia that slowly takes the memory and mobility of its sufferers, and Bemke himself has lost two uncles in the last
see ALZHEIMERS page 6
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