By 1988 it had become an annual rite of spring, and one of the clearer indications that you and your design firm had made it big: the parade of recently graduated graphic design students hoping to show you their books and maybe even land a coveted position with McDill Design. You and your friend Michael Dillon began the firm only seven years earlier, but it wasn’t long before at least some in Milwaukee were referring to McDill as the hottest and hippest shop in town. It didn’t hurt that you guys always threw the best parties either.

The ritual had begun four or five years earlier, which meant that McDill’s reputation had been building from the start. And the process quickly evolved into a rather standardized routine: The receptionist would inform you that the nervous young wannabe had arrived and was waiting for you in the conference area. You would enter, introduce yourself, receive a copy of the kid’s resume, and take a seat. You could always sense that they were expecting someone older, and often the interviewee would come right out and say it. You always rather liked thinking of yourself as a dynamic Young Turk, didn’t you? I mean they wouldn’t simply be attempting to win you over with flattery, would they?

Of course not.

From the beginning your introduction has always been the same: “Hi, I’m John McCarthy, the ‘Mc’ of McDill.” And for the first several years the customary response was a handshake—sometimes firm, sometimes not—followed by the young designer nervously trying to remember their name. But lately a new wrinkle has occasionally been added to the procedure. After you identify yourself as a McCarthy, some interviewees almost gasp. Their eyes widen and they breathlessly ask: “Are you any relation to the McCarthy Sisters?” It happened three times today alone, and the answer was always a proud and delighted “I sure am.” The McCarthy Sisters are your baby sisters, Amy and Kathy, and by 1988 they’ve come to pretty much own the Milwaukee Avant Garde.

Amy and Kathy entered your family sometime after the loss of your brother, Danny, who died soon after his birth in 1960. Amy was born on Fathers’ Day, 1961, and Kathy came along in September of 1963. After the trauma of Danny’s passing their arrivals represented a reboot for your family—The McCarthy’s: Version 2.0. Reboot? Version 2.0? Oh yeah, that’s right. It’s only 1988 and those terms are currently meaningless. I’m sorry. It will all become clear several decades from now, I assure you. But for the moment let’s just call it a “do-over.”

You and your brothers were enchanted to have baby sisters and loved them from the start. Sure, you did the usual horrible big brother things from time to time, like teasing them, threatening to shave their heads whenever Mom and Dad left you alone with them, jumping out of closets to frighten them, and so on. But mostly you cherished them. You read to them when they were little, played make-believe with them, took them to movie matinees, and protected them from bullies.

Amy was frail and often sick when she was little, and when she suffered a seizure on a hot summer night in 1964, it was the scariest night of your life. But you will always remember how happy she was when you told her you had scored your first-ever touchdown in a legitimate football game. She was barely a year old and had no idea what you were talking about, but she smiled radiantly and clearly loved that her brother was happy. As she grew older she became strong, resolute and iron-fisted in the care and protection of her little sister, Kathy.

As the baby of the family, Kathy was creative, curious and often willing to take a risk. It was Kathy, at age 2, who was always more than willing to shriek profanities at the neighbors through the front screen door at the urging of her deranged big brothers. And it was Kathy who would later bring home leaves from the bushes at the foot of the block and raise the microscopic specks on the leaves to full-grown Monarch butterflies.

Although Mom was great at raising boys, the only thing she knew about little girls came from having been one herself decades earlier. But things had changed by the time the girls came along and she really didn’t know what to do with them. She didn’t know how girls of the 1960s dressed or how they wore their hair. And she didn’t understand the pressures—unique to girls—of living through such a turbulent time. As a result her daughters, who were never anything less than beautiful, creative and brilliant, were targeted for abuse by the mean girls of elementary school and junior high, and dismissed as nobodies by the jocks and cheerleaders of high school. But after high school, the girls got their own place in downtown Milwaukee, developed their own fashion sense and began rewriting their story. They waitressed, did some modeling and by 1988 had enrolled in MATC’s department of telecasting where they currently beguile students and instructors alike with their beauty, their creativity and their brilliance. And now, every artist, designer, photographer, musician, writer, hair stylist, drag queen, restaurateur, and bartender in town either knows them or is dying to. The whole bunch of them sees Amy as Holly Golightly and Kathy as Edie Sedgwick…or maybe it’s the other way around. In any case it’s as if the Nine Muses of Greek Mythology had at last been winnowed down to two: The Cream City Muses: The McCarthy Sisters.

In the future your sisters will scale back the wildness (a bit) and settle into adulthood just as you will, but they will still create art and will still inspire it in others. And they will still dazzle everyone they meet.

A couple weeks ago you and your wife hosted a surprise party for your parents on the occasion of their 40^th wedding anniversary. It was an enormous success and will one day come to be one of the most treasured memories of your life, but it would never have happened had it not been for the McCarthy Sisters, who planned and orchestrated the whole thing. The truth is that by 1988 they had made themselves utterly indispensable, and I hope you remind them of that from time to time. Soon you will be turning to your sisters for more than just their glamour and sophistication. You will also be needing their feminine strength and maternal nurturing. I’m not going to say too much right now, but I will say this: a hard rain is definitely gonna fall. And when it does you’ll learn that families need muses too.

Kathy and Amy McCarthy, circa 1988.

Note to those of us who reside in the future. Here are links to McDill Design, Kathy McCarthy Sibilski’s Facebook Gallery, and Amy McCarthy Hurwitz’s Walworth flower shop:

https://www.facebook.com/McDillDesign/

https://www.facebook.com/kathleen.sibilski/media_set?set=a.1460784557316553.1073741835.100001550688304&type=3&pnref=lhc

https://www.facebook.com/Forgetmenot2016/