Toots Zynsky discusses her first encounter with glass at RISD. Oral history interview with Toots Zynsky, March 22, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 03:45.

Toots Zynsky: I was—did my freshman year at RISD [Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island]. I was—you know, it’s a broad program where you do 2D, 3D—are introduced to lots of different materials to work with; and within those realms of two-dimensional and three-dimensional, a lot of drawing, and then we were supposed to choose a major at the end of the year and I was like, [laughs] ‘Okay. What am I doing here?’ And I actually thought I had made a mistake. [laughs] So. I took a leave of absence from school and then had a sort of second thought about that and thought, ‘Wait a minute.’ You know, we’ve been pretty isolated in those days in the freshman foundation building. I thought, ‘I don’t really know. I mean, what is in the rest of this school?’ Not in depth, I knew upperclassmen and I had sort of run by their departments to see them or something, but we were busy in the freshman foundation building. So I decided, ‘Well, I worked really hard to get in here. I’d better make sure that I’m not making a huge mistake.’ And so I went and got the map, all the buildings and grounds map of every building the school owned, and I went to one thing after another and opened every door and one department after another and I went, ‘Mm, no, not this,’ and ‘No, not this.’ And then finally I was out of departments, according to the maps. I was out of studios, I was out of programs, and I thought, ‘Okay. I’m going to med school.’ [laughs]. You know, and I actually was in the last building and I was on the top floor and I had to go to the end of it to get to the stairwell, and I opened the doors and there was this roar [laughs]. And this thumping music playing and people were sort of suddenly dashing in, out of a door and all it said on my map was ‘ceramics storeroom.’ And so I kind of went and looked in and everyone in the room was in really wild drag; and I’m not kidding, wild drag even by today’s standards [laughs], okay? And this is 1970, and I was from a small New England town [laughs]. I mean, we didn’t know about those things and of course I was riveted. And, you know, there was this guy standing there with jartelle and fishnet stockings and a peach-colored corset and a blue felt hat and bright red lipstick and, you know, false eyelashes, and—very, very curious-looking person. And—but there was this, they were swirling hot glass through the air like drawing huge long tubes of it and just swirling it through the air. No one’s crashing into each other and it was this great, spontaneous choreography; it was like this fabulous dance piece. And that person was Dale Chihuly [laughs] as it turned out, and they had just finished building the studio, and they had invited him. He had come back from a Fulbright, and they’d asked him to come and make a glass department—a glass studio, and it was an offshoot of the ceramic studio. And then the next day I ran into one of the guys on the street and he said ‘Oh, was that you looking in?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, it looks really interesting.’ And he said, ‘Well, come and try it,’ you know. And I did, and it was just sort of fascinating. I—it just kept kind of going like this [laughs] but it was fascinating. It was alive and, and people were moving and that was really critical for me. I had too much energy and I needed to use it. I couldn’t sit still doing things. So this was a good solution [laughs]. This was—this was really intriguing and inviting to me.