Where Are They Now?: Norman Rockwell Models Edition

Grab your uncle’s yellowing stack of Saturday Evening Posts and a couple of Sharpies and make your way to Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where on Thursday, in an event that has New Yorker “Talk of the Town” piece written all over it, a bunch of expressive-faced people who once modeled for artist and illustator Norman Rockwell will convene at the Berkshire Crowne Plaza Hotel for a tea to benefit the Norman Rockwell Museum. Here’s your chance to meet one Betsy Manning, who appeared on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post in 1957 as “Girl Missing Tooth” and in Rockwell-illustrated ads for Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance. Also on hand? Wray Gunn (did Rockwell name him as well as draw him?), who posed in the 1967 painting “New Kids in the Neighborhood,” a civil rights statement that plays out in a driveway of pastel-hued suburban Anytown, USA. Norman Rockwell Museum curators will also be on hand to present an illustrated talk on the artist as well as a special screening of the Museum-produced documentary Drawing Inspiration.