Emilio Sosa is one of my early favs on this season of Project Runway, which has become good again, thankfully. (Strong casting, not being in LA, the likelihood of battle tested designers and not corn-fed ingenues showing at BP, Michael and Nina around, it’s so much better.) He’s 43 and has done Broadway work, including costuming for Topdog/Underdog. New York Magazine ran a profile of him called “Broadway Sosa.” Here’s an excerpt:
The old neighborhood was full of personal pain, too, Emilio says, looking at himself as an apprehensive 12-year-old in a picture of the Revista Temas Little League team, hung on a wall of the Sosa house. “Baseball is like religion with Dominicans, you know,” Emilio says, “especially with my dad. He was the coach, and I, like, suck. Everyone knew I’d rather be in my room, drawing. That we were both called Emilio Sosa only compounded that shit.”
It was his mother, a tiny, bright-eyed woman who has just retired after 30 years on the clock at a plastics factory, who saved him, Emilio says. “There’d be guys in the lobby with cans of gasoline telling her, ‘Don’t worry, honey, this is for the building around the corner, not this one,’ and she’s signing me up for the Cub Scouts so everything can seem normal. I was the youngest damn Cub Scout in the history of the South Bronx. Forget baseball, she said: 'You want to be an artist, be an artist.’ ”