Once upon a time, Christmas of ’56 in New York, I enrolled in a sketching class at the New York Art Institute on 57th Street.

John Bishop, an ex-Marine and pal from Cleveland who had given up acting and became a writer, and I, who studied and painted, each made a big five bucks a night posing as seminude models in an advanced class on the second floor. Five bucks went a long way in 1956.

We weren’t fully nude, we just sat quietly in wooden chairs for two hours with only a towel across our laps that hid our “manhoods.” When you’re struggling actor, even today, you do stuff like that.

Over the sound of outside traffic and pencils scraping on canvas, “you’ve got a tux?” he said flatly.

“Just the one I work in.”

“Work” meant my job at the Bloomingdale department store perfume counter where I sold toys and shoes, shirts and ties, and expensive colognes and flirted with the waitress on the sixth floor.

I was happiest folding shirts in men’s clothing and dating girls who worked in “better dresses” and the next thing I knew I was given a tux and stood by the door next to the perfume counter lightly spraying women passersby.

I’m told they don’t do that anymore. Somebody got sued. Now a woman hands you a piece of paper that smells.

I adjusted my towel and asked John, “what’s the play?”

“It’s not a play, it’s a job, as an escort.”

Later, John filled me in.

An ambitious Yale grad, he said, with New York family connections was hiring suitable actors with tuxedos to escort “young ladies” from wealthy families, who I’m told, were embarrassed to go to these affairs escorted by their brothers.

I accepted the gig, and did two, no, three. There was a nice girl name Joya in Brooklyn whom I escorted to a wedding and another, the daughter of a famous bandleader. But I only really remember one, Mary, the daughter of a stockbroker and a sweet mother who painted.

Mary and I actually had six clumsy dances at the old Plaza Hotel, feasted on canapés and in our fancy duds snuck away to a hamburger joint on 48th where I entertained her with my impressions of actors she had heard of.

I’ve written about Mary before, disguising times and New York places where we snuck away to movies. She was a devoted Catholic, a quiet girl who wore big glasses she hid behind.

I can’t tell you her real name, she got a big job at the old Waldorf and one day she startled me by becoming a cloistered nun — a true story, very sad but true story.

Later in my fabulous but rocky life, I married another devoted Catholic girl who wore big glasses and acted on Broadway and knew all my impressions.

John became a famous Broadway playwright and sadly died of cancer in Berlin, Germany, back in the ’60s.

And here I am on a snowy Sunday in Maine, with all of you who think I make all of these stories up.

No I don’t. Trust me.

J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.