I’m heartbroken about the passing of my friend Eric Boman, who I was so deeply lucky to have gotten to know these past few years, alongside his partner of 51 years, Peter Schlesinger. After meeting at a party in 2019, Eric and I immediately fell into one of the most magical epistolatory email relationships of my life: every other day an email from Eric would arrive, with his velvet wit, hilarious mischievousness, and his great knack for a detailed story of an old-but-not-forgotten social faux pas or a cinematic society tableau. Eric was a natural storyteller and while he was an exceptional photographer (Roxy Music, Vogue, google him) he also could have easily been a brilliant writer. His emails to me include sacred bits of cooking and gardening advice, pointers on flower arrangement and furniture ordeals, random anecdotes he witnessed in New York or descriptions of bike rides he took with Peter in Bellport. His emails to me slowed this past year, and I desperately wrote to him every few weeks, hoping for more more more of his charm and attention. But now flipping through his emails, there is wisdom everywhere. ,I see last year we got on the subject of rings and love. Here is Eric on rings from Peter: “I have lost every ring he’s given me except one. The first one was antique Persian that I took off to wash my hands in Patti d’Arbanville’s London bathroom. Then my wedding band. He ordered them from Tina Chow and they were symbolically ingenious in that she took two rings, one white gold and one yellow, cut them in half and joined the white to the yellow. I have this thing about not liking to wear anything including jewelry in the shower and left it in a hotel bathroom where the maid took it. Peter saintly ordered me its replacement that I swore to never take off. Then I went in the ocean and the cold water shrunk my fingers and it slipped off! At The Pines of all places! But we’ve kept each other which is the only thing that matters!” Rest in peace my dear friend. Photos by Peter