My very first visit to Miami Beach was part of my very first visit to the United States. I fell in love with Miami then fell out of love, then fell in love with it again. Right now, we are probably undercover lovers, and the Miami I meet these days is a completely different one than the one that burned the skin off my face in 1993. This was the year when I learned the word “TAN”. All capitalized, because what I managed to get in March of that year was a big time tan thing and a huge experience of the United States and a strange sweet version of it, called South Miami Beach. The owner of the record label I worked for decided that it would be nice if I came to the United States and took a good look at the operations and the market, for which I was designing. The distribution company for the label was located in Miami and so I was flown there and put into this beautiful little hotel called The Betsy Ross Hotel on Ocean Drive.
I was 23 and the whole experience was just such a complete blast, so out of this world, so unbelievable, so WOW, I will need to elaborate some other time how deep the experience really hit me. Here I was, a really young independent “Art Director”, flown to Miami, booked into an Ocean Front room at one of the finer little boutique hotels on Ocean Drive. It was a bit of an almost too much experience. I remember sitting for hours on the beach at night and just looking at the s of the glowing art deco district of Miami Beach. This was not reality I was dealing with here. This was some overly sugar coated Krispy Kreme experience. I remember my face hurting from this huge smile I had on my face. And then there was this new pain from too much March sun. It was such an amazing time. So unbelievable. My ego was a huge red balloon floating over the little hotels and the ruins of the places yet to be renovated.
The name “Miami” sounded like the description of a fruit much sweeter than all the other fruit. And boy, what a fruit it was.