I KNOW IT WAS YOU FREDO

In Chicago. It’s Saturday. Tryouts for Team Jew.S.A. tomorrow morning.

I saw Alfred “Fredo” Cohen for breakfast this morning. Alfred, besides the inconsequential fact that he does not make art, is, in my humble and completely accurate estimation, an artist of the highest order– The King of All Logo Chairs and Self Portraits if you will. When I saw him last year, he had without explanation been wearing only florescent green for months. So allow me, ladies and juju-bugs, to now, using only the power of digital photography and the interconnectedness of all things, profile for you the one, the only, Alfred Cohen.

alfred cohen, yesterday, on a boat, at the annual chicago air show

Alfred comes from a long line of magical russian cantors, Jewish singers, synagogue divas so to speak– 5 generations long until Alfred broke the streak electing to instead become a ballplayer, and a human genius. He was raised in Highland Park, an affluent Jewish neighborhood just north of Chicago. By the time he was in high-school, his baseball talents were shining like the multiple suns of a parallel earth from another dimension. He was dominating.

alfred flying high

And another…

fredo pitching, looks good, blocked front side, late rotation with the lower half

By his senior year, he was in a dog fight for the city batting title with this guy, Randy Poffo. If you look just to the right of the picture of Poffo, you can see under “individual batting”, they are #1 and #2.

randy poffo

Fredo ended the season with the higher average. Poffo went on to play for the Reds…

poffo with the reds

But Poffo didn’t last in pro baseball and had no choice but to change his name, answer the primal call of destiny, and become this guy…

randy poffo aka the macho man randy savage

Insane Hard To Believe But True Jewish Baseball Magic Fact of The Day… The Macho Man Randy Savage was Jewish. Look it up.

Alfred got a baseball scholarship to the University of Arizona. But, like Poffo, and so many of us, the Big Leagues weren’t in the cards for Al, so after college he returned home to Chicago, got married, and invented logo chairs. That’s right, the genius Alfred Cohen had unknowingly become the first person to ever put a team logo on a fold-out-chair and ended up supplying the NBA and NCAA with customized sideline chairs for years, a scientific accomplishment no doubt on-par with the theories of Relativity or Evolution.

one of alfred’s logo chairs

I will leave you with a sampling of what may be Alfred’s greatest, most mature work, his self portraits, pictures he takes of himself in front of the worlds most beautiful buildings and women and sunsets and sports stars. I could not show you all of them, for you do not have the time or mental prowess it would take to understand a body of work so profound and powerful and strange. But here are a few, a reminder if you will, so no matter how hard your days or lonely your nights, you will be comforted knowing the genius Alfred Cohen, King of All Logo Chairs and Self Portraits, is out there, pure of heart and unsound of mind, protecting us all.