The Office of Emergency Preparedness and Panic Proliferation gives us guidelines for disasters. For instance, always have an extra month of your medications on hand in case the drugstores are closed. The only thing is, they forgot to tell the insurance companies. I defy you to get an OK for an extra month of all of your meds.Keeping your gas tank full is another precaution that nobody can afford anymore. I have noticed that every time I go to get gas, the person who was there before me bought $20 worth. That is just what I was going to get. We are all filling the lower half of our gas tanks these days.Food and water is also addressed. I saw a woman on the Weather Channel who survived after Hurricane Katrina by drinking the water from canned vegetables. Very ingenious, I must say. I have one, too; dry dog food. It has everything my dog needs so it must be good for me, too. You just can’t think about what goes into making it. Another good reason to keep goodly quantities of puppy chow around is so that when the food gets low you and the dog won’t start sizing each other up.When I was a kid, parents used to have a favorite saying for foods that us kids refused to eat. “Poor children in China would be happy to have that,” they intoned. The universal kid response, “Well send it to them then,” always brought an unpleasant result. I wonder if the governments of modern-day poor countries have figured out the dog food thing.The TV show “MythBusters” has shown us that the final item you need in your kit is a case of duct tape. The stars survived on an island for several days using almost exclusively duct tape. Everything needed was made from fishing gear to a hammock. When you start to drive each other crazy you can also tape your mouths shut.You will notice that there is no mention of reading material or family board games. Presumably you will be too busy rigging rabbit traps with your duct tape to have time or energy for amusements. Our early settlers had a similar situation, spending all of their time catching fish, burying them around the corn stalks and then burying each other as the plagues, malnutrition and murderous rages thinned their ranks. Checkers, down at the general store, came much later.We are told that the breakdown of civilization is not an “if” scenario, but rather a “when.” I’ll be OK. I have a coupon for the 40-pound bag. Bill Abrams resides, along with wife and dog, and a large supply of duct tape, in Pine Plains.
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Greg Fricke and James Boehmer, co-owners of Peggy Mercury in Kent, recently launched their first fashion line, “Imaginary Concerts.”
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Fricke and Boehmer are not there to stock their shelves with the same products customers find at standard makeup retailers. They’re there to help customers find what works for them. That usually means asking customers about themselves and learning about their beauty habits, skin, style and the way they like to present themselves. Fricke and Boehmer believe it’s their job to help customers bring out the qualities that suit them and determine what works best for their look.
So much of the Peggy Mercury world is about emboldening people to become more creative, and possibly bolder, versions of themselves. Some of this comes through the store’s creative collaborations with artists, designers and stylists.
It’s part of an ethos that encourages them and their friends to use the shop as a kind of laboratory, trying out new creative experiments without knowing how they might turn out. Whether in fashion, painting, fiber arts or photography, the projects almost always turn out marvelously.
A line of sterling silver charms they sell started as a small project by their friend Nolan Percival. In the beginning, the pieces were for close friends and loved ones. But Boehmer and Fricke encouraged Percival to get a little more serious about the project and create a whole line for the store. Today, it’s one of their top-selling collections.
Classic styles, bold colors, and creative concerts make up the “Imaginary Concerts” line at Peggy Mercury.Provided
“Imaginary Concerts” has the duo taking their own advice.
The project started as a way for Boehmer to connect with his mother, who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Taking old concert shirts from his own collection, Boehmer and his mother began cutting out the graphics with the idea that they would make a quilt together. Unfortunately, she died before they could complete the project in 2025. The pieces, which were ready for production, were put on the back burner as Boehmer and Fricke dealt with their loss and the whirlwind of projects that never seemed to cease at Peggy Mercury.
But the harsh winter of 2026 presented an opportunity to take some time and focus on themselves. Part of that meant revisiting and redefining the concert T-shirt project. This time, instead of looking to the warmth and comfort of a quilt, they turned to another passion — fashion.
Taking a page from their own book, they wanted to create something that felt comfortable to them. They took two disparate loves — one rooted in simple preppy style, with clean lines and classic silhouettes, and the other in the nitty gritty worlds of punk rock and pop — and blended them together to create something entirely new. Pulling from the staples of vintage Brooks Brothers and Charvet collections, they applied the graphic elements with bold stitching reminiscent of punk jackets of the ‘70s and ‘80s, but with a much more sophisticated air.
But the remixing isn’t just the pairing of prep and punk. The pieces are not canon. They take liberties with the realities of concert tours, combining one band’s dates with another band’s logos, mixing them all up until the reality is lost and imagination is the only truth.
Shirts from Peggy Mercury’s first fashion line, “Imaginary Concerts,” hang on display.Provided
Adding to the mix is an element of perpetual creativity. Art can be messy, both figuratively and literally, and many of Fricke and Boehmer’s artist friends carry evidence of their work on them at all times. As a nod to these tireless creatives, the duo added haphazard splashes of bright color, giving the line an even more distinctive feel.
For them, “Imaginary Concerts” passes the “Peggy Test.” The mythical Peggy Mercury is a fictional figurehead for the company, a character who thrives on creativity and change. The name, much like the clothing line, is a mixture of interests: Mercury is a planet, a deity and an elusive, transformative element, while Peggy is the wonderfully stylish and boundary-pushing Peggy Guggenheim.
Everything Fricke and Boehmer put in their store has to pass this test: Would Peggy Mercury approve? For their first collection, the answer is a resounding yes.
Peggy Mercury is at 9 Maple St., Unit 2, Kent.
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