Contact info:

Email: cavaglass (please type symbol for at) gmail.com

​Tel/text: (001) 212-925-2377

Facebook: Joseph Cavalieri
Instagram: joseph_cavalieri_glass

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Story time

A collection of stories from my life.

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Googlie Eyes and Carmen Miranda 

     Once upon a time, a child was born with a freckle in his eye. Not on his cheek, not on his nose — in his actual eye, floating in the white part like a tiny shipwrecked island. Up until college, strangers would stop mid-conversation to squint at my face and ask about it. They stopped asking during my second year of collegee — because I finally did something about it. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

 

As a child, we regularly visited our cousins in Tarrytown, New York — a short drive from Pleasantville, where I grew up. I was the youngest of seven children, which meant I was also the youngest whenever we visited our cousins. A double dose of youngest. I was pretty shy too, which made what happened next all the more baffling.

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I very clearly remember my Aunt Gloria and older cousins Susan and Lorraine requesting — every single visit, without fail — that I perform googlie eyes. I have no memory of when this tradition started, or why. No one has ever explained it to me. Perhaps there was a founding incident lost to history. Perhaps they were simply eccentric. Both seem equally likely.

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Somehow, googlie eyes seemed to please them enormously.

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The performance itself was brief. I would stand, tilt my head back, stare up at the ceiling, and roll my eyes in a rapid circle. That was it. The whole show. Did the adults want to watch my pupils and my little freckle spin like a carnival ride? Was the freckle even the point? Perhaps one of my cousins will read this and finally solve the mystery. Either way, performing googlie eyes caused no lasting stress, embarrassment, or diagnosable psychological conditions. It was just little Joey, doing his thing.

 

As a teenager and into my twenties, I grew more or less accustomed to people asking “what is that spot in your eye?” — but I was still very conscious of it. Staring into the mirror, it looked enormous to me, like a boulder when it was really a pebble. If I were a teenager today in 2026, someone would probably brand it a quirky aesthetic and it would go viral on TikTok. Back then, it was just the freckle.

 

Time passed. I left home for Manhattan, moving first into the School of Visual Arts dormitories, a tiny room at the Sloan House YMCA on West 34th Street — a room so small the walls had to take turns breathing. It was around this point that I made an appointment at the Ear and Eye Infirmary in the East Village to have my lifelong freckle removed. The doctor explained it might resurface, walked me through the procedure, and we scheduled it for the following week.

 

The next week I found myself sitting upright in a chair in his operating room, left eye clamped open, a nurse continuously applying eye drops so it wouldn’t dry out. If that sounds like something out of A Clockwork Orange — it was. Except the nurse was holding my hand, which Stanley Kubrick never thought to include.

 

The truly serious part was when the doctor asked me to stare directly into his eyes and — under absolutely no circumstances — move my eyeball, while he injected a sedative into it with a needle that could have doubled as a curtain rod. He then proceeded to remove the freckle and stitch the area. Fortunately, he had beautiful eyes. Staring into them was the easiest medical instruction I have ever been given.

 

After the operation I stayed with neighbors for two days and wore a black eye patch for two weeks. Then I went back to Pleasantville to visit Mom and Dad.

 

On the train ride home, inspiration struck — the dangerous, mischievous kind. I cut an eye out of a magazine, drew lurid bloody veins all over it, and tucked it under my patch, ready to deploy on whoever came to pick me up at the station.

 

It was Mom.

 

She asked to see my eye. I removed the patch. She very nearly had a heart attack on the platform of the Pleasantville train station. I regretted it immediately — and then went home and did the exact same thing to the rest of the family, with considerably less dramatic results. Apparently, I regretted it just enough to keep going.

 

The freckle never came back. My confidence grew. My shyness, remarkably, quietly disappeared — as if it had been hiding behind that tiny spot all along.

 

Years later, visiting the Carmen Miranda museum in Rio de Janeiro, I stopped in front of one of her portraits and leaned in close.

 

She had a freckle too.

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The 42nd Street Shuttle 

    Once upon a time, as a part time NYC messenger, I was riding the subway shuttle starting from the Times Square side. You see during art college I worked for the "What's Your Rush Messenger Service" as a part time bike and foot courier. Yes, I know, that company name made no sense at all, but it had plenty of deliveries and helped me and fellow SVA students pay the rent.

 

It was a fun adventure picking up packages from tall skyscrapers, then biking or riding the subway to bring that package to it's destination. I got to know New York City, Brooklyn and Queens by heart. This was before 911, so their was no security in most office buildings.

 

Odd deliveries were assigned to me often, like transporting cats, dogs, and other assorted caged animals for the Dawn Animal Agency to photoshoots, to subwaying a heavy golf bag filled with clubs, uptown from Wall Street to the Upper East Side, to unknowingly transporting cocaine, it was the 80's, and that's another upcoming subject for my story time! Most of the time we gathered light weight envelopes.

 

This one memorable shuttle ride was during rush hour. Fellow passengers politely maneuvered to get a hold of any railing they could reach before the train started its' short ride from Times Square to Grand Central. Fortunately, I got on early and had a seat right by the door for a quick escape. As the subway car filled, two lovely dressed women found a spot to stand inches from me... one wearing a low cut blouse.

 

Those who know the shuttle, know the hard right turn half way through it's journey. I knew it well. When we hit that turn, one of the ladies lost grip of the overhead railing and her full body fell against mine. I should elaborate more here to say her cleavage was right up in my face, smothering me. 

 

As the subway jostled to the left, she was thrown back to her original stance unharmed. Her friend, herself and I looked at each other, not believing what just happened, and all three of us broke out laughing.

 

Minutes later, as arrived in Grand Central, the crowd carried us off smiling in separate ways.

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Taking Chances 

    Once upon in the city of Melbourne in the country of Australia my host showed me a stack of R. Crumb comic books he had collected in the 1970s. I always was a fan of R. Crumb, so I took some high res photos and designed some concepts using these images in a stained glass setting.

 

Mr. Crumb lives in the south of France, and at that time was in his 70s. Somehow I found his email and sent an email showing my digital sketches, with a note asking for permission. I wasn't expecting a response right away, but the next day he wrote giving me permission, saying he would not charge or ask for a work. He wished me luck and said "go out and make a lot of money." 

 

Now my challenge was to replicate his crosshatching pen and ink illustrations on paper to using enamel paints with a fine paintbrush on glass. With much concentration I finished six works based on his work. They were shown and sold out at SOFA (Sculpture Objects Functional Art and Design) exhibition in Chicago, where I was representing UrbanGlass.

 

I recently emailed Mr. Crumb with more designs, which he approved!

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Enid, Lydia, and the Orchid 

    Once upon a time, in the aughts, in the city of Manhattan, I had a sweet tabby cat named Lidia.

 

Lydia was found as a kitten by my boss Greg Monfries when I was working at People magazine. He arrived one morning in a panic at our office after finding Lydia and six of her siblings in a cardboard box on the street near his home in Brooklyn. He needed to find a new home for them immediately, so me and my partner decided to adopt. Lidia happily lived with us for about 5 years, and when that (human) fairy tale relationship ended, I was here new single parent. 

 

A year later asked my downstairs neighbor Enid to stop up to feed Lidia when I was traveling. She did a perfect job so I decided to give Enid a gift of a beautiful flowering orchid plant as a thank you. She was over the top, and loved the gift. 

 

One bit of information I neglected to tell Enid was the plant was plastic. Dear reader, have you seen artificial plants recently? They look more natural than living plants.

 

Over the next few weeks I received texts from Enid saying how amazed she was that the plant was still flowering. She was proud that she was watering it just the right amount for the flowers to survive for such a long time. 

 

Three months later, when I ran into Enid in the hallway, I finally had to confess. She was surprised and I could see a bit confused. 

 

Now, Lydia has passed but Enid is still my neighbor. We often carry UPS and FedEx boxes up from our lobby for each other, and when we do meet in the hallway there is no mentions of Lydia or the orchid.  

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Flounder in the Basement

Once upon a time a very strong hurricane decided to visit the New York area, including my neighborhood of the East Village. Her name was Sandy, and she was mad as hell. At the height of her anger my neighbor Ken and I descended four flights to see our front stoop steps covered with two feet of water flowing in from the east river, and a waterfall filling our basement. A day later all the basements for blocks were flooded, and the light were out for about a week.

 

We did have a warning so I took some items, including my bicycle, out of our basement the day before, but many neighbors didn't take any items, so when the storm ended it was like a soup of soggy boxes floating in our basement.

 

To our surprise, while the waters were pumped out of the basement onto the sidewalk, we found a dead flounder. It must have swam from the east river, been caught in the waves and sucked down, then died in our basement. 

 

I decided to make a stained glass panel about this event, and a few months later sold it to a couple in Brooklyn, who totally related to the story. The art was fun, and had moving parts on the top of the frame, that made elements move inside the work.

 

You may think this is the end of the story, but about a year later in a board meeting a neighbor told the group he was missing his taxidermy flounder. At this point I had to decided to tell my clients the full story. Perhaps they might be upset that the story wasn't true, but they happily accepted explanation, considering it a new chapter to the story of the flounder in the basement.

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Cheerios

Once upon a time a there was an era in New York, probably in the whole of the USA and the world, where bleaching your hair was just starting to get popular. For me this was 1992. I was sharing a brownstone in Brooklyn with a cute lesbian, who had an even cuter boxer. She got her hair bleached at Astor Barbers, and convinced me to do the same. Two incidents happened while I was a blonde. The first was taking an elevator at work, when a fake blonds entered on one floor, and then a second fake blond on the next. We all had a chuckle 

 

The nice thing about having curly dark hair that was bleached, is when it starts to grow out it looked just like cheerios on my head.

 

The second highlight was in my Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope. I was on my way to the subway, donning my fancy cheerios-do, when a car passed by and a lovely black lady yelled at the top of her lungs "I love your hair." ​​​

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My Special Pasta at North Lands Creative

     Once upon a time during my 2008 residency at North Lands Creative in Lybster, Caithness, Scotland I decided to make a warm pasta dish for my three fellow residents. During this six week residency we lived together in a house attached to our studio.  and took turns in the kitchen to prepare dinners to share. My meal was pasta with a variety of vegetables, carrots, zucchini, and mushrooms. After dinner I set to do some work in the studio, and noticed I had a sliver of mushroom on my sweater. I quickly grabbed it and popped it in my mouth. I immediately realized it was not a sliver of mushroom, but a tiny bitter slug. I immediately spit it out and ran back to tell the other residents.

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On the brighter side, while jogging around the streets and surrounding farms of Lybster, I had a conversation with a local farmer. She mentioned she had orphaned lambs that other farmers had given to her, and asked if I and the other residents would like to stop over to help feed them. We showed up the next day, and were equipped with bottles of formula milk, when she let the lambs loose. They ran and quickly devoured the milk. A very magical event during my residency.

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