The American Scene

My collection of The Red Barn plates by Dale Nichols for the department store B. Altman's was gathered over years and years. After the set was complete and all twelve were hanging on my dining room walls, surprisingly, I came across another series of plates from B. Altman's — this time by the artist Adolf Dehn.  Here's a description from a book on Syracuse China:

"In 1952, B. Altman & Company of New York commissioned the American artist Adolph Dehn to create a limited edition set of twelve decorative service plates reproducing, in overglaze decalcomania, a group of his original watercolor paintings called "The American Scene"."

The plates are beautiful.  Each depicting a snapshot of American life — the urban landscape of towering Chicago and the smokestacks of Pittsburgh contrasted by the gentleness of Central Park in New York City and the undeveloped beaches of Florida — the majesty of the Golden Gate Bridge versus the majestic Mount Rainier.

Central Park

Chicago 

Florida

Golden Gate Bridge

            

Mount Rainier

Pittsburgh

Lighthouse, Maine

New England Winter

A sleepy New England village blanketed by snow contrasted by the ocean crashing against the rocky coastline of Maine.

And the sprawling ranch of the west versus the iconic American farm of the midwest both with their tall windmill weathervanes.

Western Ranch

Middle West Farm 

The plates were in a huge former supermarket-turned-antique mart about an hour from our home.  The not-well-lit aisles were lined with flimsy cloth-partitioned booths set-up with table after table of vendors' goods — I could not believe I found another set of plates from B. Altman's!  But as much as I loved them, I quickly walked out of that booth (despite the protests of my husband and kids urging me to get them) because they were too much money.

Then, months later at Christmas, a huge box arrived with my name on it and there inside amidst all the paper packing and bubble-wrap were those twelve plates — a complete set ready to be hung.  It was a tremendous surprise from my sweet husband and soon they too were up on my walls.  Recently I've rehung them and now the image of the southern plantation mansion is juxtaposed with the hard-working, back-breaking cotton pickers in the fields.  

Adolf Dehn beautifully captured the American scene on these plates — but perhaps not all the pictures of American life in the 1940s were so very pretty.

Southern Cotton Fields

Southern Mansion

                                     

Kitchen Art

Though I can't create it, I certainly appreciate it and happily, my life is surrounded by art.  

Looking at a piece of art engages me, fills me, pleasures me.  

While society presses me to question
                                            the acquisition of, 
                                                                     need for, 
                                                                                   interest in,
                                                                                                  obsession with THINGS

I know, I feel what these things give to me and I'm grateful for the joy they bring.  People can disappoint me — the things I have chosen do not.

This is what I see looking out of my kitchen window.

                                                 

           

          And this is what I see to the left...

and this is what I see to the right.

When I walk in to my kitchen, I see beautiful things all around me that draw my eye and pull me in to a place I'm eager to go.  It may be  a place I remember.  It may be someplace I've never been.  It's always entertaining and pleasing to me to see this collection of riches.

  

Many of my things have been found in thrift stores, yard sales, flea markets. But not all.   The decorative garden signs on the side of my frig, I found in a garden shop (on sale of course) and the leaf magnets they're hanging from I bought years and years and years ago at a huge sample sale that my sister took me to in California.  

The bear and the Wyandotte hen (thank you Hylla!) are finely painted, very thin metal pieces with a tiny hole for hanging. I found a cheap frame with an existing double mat and parked these critters on top, allowing them to step outside their "frames."




Above my stove I have two magnificent linoleum-block prints by the extremely talented Daniel Waters.  I bought this gorgeous pair on Martha's Vineyard in 2011 and the poems he wrote are particularly apropos this time of year. [I hope you can forgive my poor photos and read them.]

I love to cook and what makes cooking even better is being surrounded by all these wonderfully beautiful things in my kitchen — and — I haven't shown you the half of them!  SO...what's on your kitchen walls?

This is what I see 
when I turn around.

More about this collection of 
The American Scene plates next time. 

Miss Liberty is holding The Big Apple.
Next to a state-shaped ashtray of Ohio.     

Twenty Feet From Stardom

Featured on the cover is "newcomer" Judith Hill.

And the colored girls go 
Doo do doo, doo do doo, doo do doo

That lyric from Lou Reed's "Take a Walk on the Wild Side" is the perfect introduction to Twenty Feet From Stardom — a documentary film that profiles and (at long last) gives credit to the predominantly African-American women who were (and still are) the amazing and outstanding back-up singers whose voices enriched popular music over the past six decades of rock-and-roll.

Darlene Love, Claudia Lennear, Lisa Fischer, and Táta Vega, are not household names but once you meet them (and others) you'll recognize the sweet sounds of the harmonies they provided for Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder and Sting — to name just a few.

This film takes us on a journey through the great groups, the great singers, and the great songs of a rich musical past that is marred by the way in which these women were taken advantage of and by-passed despite their greatness.  And try as they might, none were able to breakout of the backup line and make it as a solo artist.  Sadly.

The day after I saw this documentary, as I flipped channels on my car radio, I heard Mick Jagger's "Gimme Shelter" and broke into a smile.  I now know Merry Clayton arrived in curlers at the recording studio for that gig and it is her voice belting out the lyric that made her cringe:

Rape, murder; it's just a shot away, it's JUST A SHOT AWAY!

In the film, we hear both Jagger and Clayton recount how in 1969 she received a call in the middle of the night to come record back-up for this new British group in town called the Rolling Stones. 

And did she ever.  

Merry Clayton's exhilarating voice made that vocal, imprinted that powerful and shrill refrain on your brain and helped make that Stones song a powerhouse of pleasure.  

Too bad "Merry" was credited as "Mary" on the album cover.

If you wanna give credit where credit is due, go see 20 Feet From Stardom at a theatre near you.  You'll be dancin' in your seat.

A Millennial Way of Exploring Love

I want to thank my daughter for always trying to bring me into the 21st century and expose me to the world of social media and all that entails.  While I still have issues even checking Facebook, haven't joined Linked In, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Foursquare (is that still in the picture?) or anything else, I am following an interesting blog she sent me a link to — because it's very unusual and in its way, educational.

Now that she sent me to it, I'm hooked on:

40 Days of Dating

What do you do when you’re tired of the prospect of dating? Two good friends with opposite relationship problems found themselves single at the same time. As an experiment, they dated for 40 days.

Doesn't that sound intriguing? It's very Millennial*  Jessie and Tim are seeing each other every day, reporting on it, seeing a therapist together, blogging, designing it beautifully, embedding video, but only releasing it a day at a time, now that the experiment is over. (They're up to Day Thirty-One as I write this.)  It's just so original!

I scrolled down and started at Day One and have been caught up with following their progress day-by-day. What I like about it is we get to see inside the minds and hearts of these two people who clearly care about each other but are deliberately pushing themselves to fumble through this relationship in a very orderly and public way.  What a personal challenge to undertake.  I think they're being brave.


As I wrote in A Reality of Reality TV, I believe that media can serve an educational purpose — when it's at its best.  And while neither of these examples is THE best, they do open the door to seeing ourselves — foibles and all — in these real-life players who are letting us in on how they're grappling with life. And in that seeing, maybe learning something that helps us become better people, better partners, better friends.

While I don't know how it all comes out, I am rooting for Tim and Jessie to find happiness with one another, but who knows? Maybe that's a carryover of my generation— just another Baby Boomer looking for that fairytale ending.
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* Whether you're in the age zone or not, take the Pew Research Center's quiz to find out How Millennial Are You?  Me? I scored an 8...sigh.

ORANGE is the new BLACK

ORANGE is the new BLACK is yet another series where we find ourselves rooting for the bad guy — or gal in this case.  Though not as extreme as a seemingly mild-mannered serial killer (Dexter), as conniving as a soft-spoken high-school teacher turned drug lord (Breaking Bad), as treacherous as a military hero who is working with the enemy (Homeland) nor as repugnant as a silky smooth politician whose smile masks the most reprehensible behavior (House of Cards), this "heroine," Piper Chapman suddenly finds her wild and crazy past catching up with her in a stop-in-your-tracks way.  

In this based-on-true-events story, Chapman's a white, upper-middle-class, engaged-to-be married, Smith-educated graduate who finds herself heading for federal prison on a drug charge from an action in her past.  Everything we see points to the fact that this is someone who doesn't belong in an orange jumpsuit.  Because she looks like us.  

ORANGE is the new BLACK features yet another anti-hero, but here's what I think is different: 

• We see a character who is bi-sexual and, despite the complications, is fairly comfortable with that orientation. 

• We see prison life from the inside — not the frightening horror stories of a Scared Straight or Oz but the daily, mundane frustrating prison routine filled with injustices big and small and constant reminders of missing freedoms — big and small.  

• We see the backstory of all Chapman's sister prisoners — each of these ladies (and the prison staff) could be a series of their own. Chapman is atypical. (Another small loss is your first name because in prison you go by your last name.) 

Piper's got a blindsided fiancé living life without her on the outside, and further complicating her mess on the inside is that she's locked up with the ex-girlfriend who fingered her for being a drug-runner. There's lots more going on in the show but suffice to say, through the thirteen episodes that are available on Netflix, Piper is doing her best to hang on to her sanity in an environment filled with unknowns that doesn't follow any of the rules she's come to take for granted in her privileged world. 

Telling the stories of Piper (and her band of widely diverse inmates) through flashbacks of life before prison, makes these characters human and allows us to feel empathy for them — even prods us to identify with her.  But Season One ended on a disturbing note as the weight of being locked behind bars permeates Piper's psyche and explodes with a vengeance.

Guess I'll have to stayed tune.

What Democracy Looks Like

I live in a red state but I wish it were blue.  In 2008 — by the miracle of a massive organizing effort, hard-working grassroots volunteers, and a candidate like none other — Barack Obama carried our state by less than 14,000 votes.  But four years later, the miracle was long gone and our temporarily blue state transitioned back to red.  In 2012 President Obama lost by almost 100,000 votes.  Now in 2013, with a Republican super-majority, the tide has turned so red that it's scary.

I'm not an activist/organizer-type but I did campaign for Obama and recently I attended some community rallies at the state capital to let our legislators know that some of their electorate were not pleased with cuts to services affecting women, children, teachers, the unemployed, and the economically disadvantaged.  To make things even worse, this super majority's making changes to the rules to suit their purposes and ensure their agenda.

Led by the clergy, the weekly "Moral Monday" rallies mobilized people enforce — even though it hasn't swayed our Republican governor or legislators one iota. 

Last Monday, as 8000 people gathered from across our state, across generations, across issues, across religious, racial, socio-economic, and sexual affiliations— posters in hand and on their backs — with purpose and voice, in call-and-response — the crowd chanted:

"Tell me what democracy looks like?

THIS is what democracy looks like..."

Red, white or blue — it was a show of strength and a crowd I was proud to be part of — 'cause this is what democracy looks like. 

Emotional Baggage

Everyone has emotional baggage.  Behaviors that are slowly developed over time as a means of surviving whatever was the context of our family lives. The baggage is full of behaviors we carry with us based on our childhood experiences. Those experiences make us who we are and who we are not as adults and as parents.

Making myself "valuable" to anyone and everyone, always helping to fill someone else's needs, these were my way of attaching myself to others in the hopes of making connections that would fill the emotional deficits left by a chaotic family life.

When I became a young person, (looking for answers to this inner malaise) most of the time my selections in the emotional department were not the best.  I was reminded of this recently when I watched a coming-of-age film, The Perks of Being a Wallflower and heard this little gem: "We accept the love we think we deserve."  I was reminded that trying to fill those emotional voids led me 
to make plenty of poor choices back in the day.

A wonderful therapist I had many moons ago explained that as children we develop ways of surviving that become a second skin.  Then, long after we're no longer in that situation we're still behaving the same old way.  We continue to drag around all this unnecessary baggage because it's stuck in our hands, melded to us like a second skin.

I've spent decades trying to get rid of my baggage. I've done everything I know to work through changing the behaviors that I developed as protective armor when I was a child, an adolescent, and a young adult.  You'd think that all these decades later — married, kids, home, friends — I'd think the emotional deficits would long be gone.

Why is it so tough to get past my past? 

Maybe the past is always with us.

Television was and is my companion. I latched on to TV as a means of getting the family I wished I had.  As I got older, I found solace watching Family, thirtysomething, My So-Called Life, party of five — I loved these shows (still do) because I felt part of those families.  They were there, week in and week out, with great regularity and great dependability — and in the most comforting way, they became my family.  From those shows I learned how successful families interact, in spite of their challenges, despite their ups and downs and disappointments.

So forgive me if I share another little piece of wisdom I garnered from more fictional media, from The Perks of Being a Wallflower: "We can't choose where we come from — but we can choose where we're going."

Maya Angelou asks us to ask ourselves:

"Am I making you proud? Am I doing all that I can be doing?"

I know I'm not. Time to get crackin'

What the Mirror Sees

www.alexandriaymca.com (not my Y but close to what mine looks like)

I've written about Nia — my favorite type of exercise these days — and since Nia is all about "experiencing joy and connecting with one's self," I wanted to share what I noticed about me this past week.  

I always head for the corner of the room farthest from the entry, and while that places me directly in front of the mirrored wall, I plant myself so far into the corner that I am below a wall-mounted trapezoid speaker.  Though I am smack dab in front of the mirror, I never look myself in the eye. I look at my feet, I look over my head, if stuck looking straight ahead, I divert my eyes to stare at my midriff.  I actually do everything I can to avoid looking at my face.

Our teacher Patti repeatedly tells us that Nia is about finding the movement that works for you and Nia is not about everyone looking the same or doing things the same way.  This is part of the ritual of starting every class.  Still — whenever I can't do or don't do what Patti is doing, I find I spend a lot of the time grimacing.  Even though she's made it clear that there is no messing up and no one is judging me, that Nia is all about "doing it your way," still — I feel my face grimacing.  I don't see it, but I feel my facial muscles contorting to express my own judgment and disapproval.

Nia is not just about movement it's about making sounds...about "sounding." Patti has a newsletter she sends out and this issue* was all about the sounds. She writes:

"Nia class is a safe container for playing with sounds - yes, no, trills, whoops, kias, hisses, belly laughs. Pretend to be a warrior, a lover, a little girl, a little boy, a dragon, a kitten - and see what sounds emerge."

Making sounds?  I have the hardest time doing this!  You would think a person would welcome a choice to sound-off — to make sounds and release what's inside — but it is SO hard to get anything to come out of me!  In class I hear Patti (and the others) yipping and grunting and gutturally proclaiming "HUNH!" with each side-thrown fist punch and I want to join her, I want to show solidarity with the class, I want to let go of what's built-up inside, but it's trapped — by me and my inability to just let'er rip.

Sometimes we end class by laughing — just laughing — my friend Nancy is very good at this and seems to really connect with her laughter, but for me, laughing is tough.  I sit there and try and eventually force a laugh or two outta me.  But it's not joyful as it's meant to be and sadly, I don't feel connected to any joy within me.

But maybe there's hope.  I went to Nia three times this week, at three different Y's, each time, hiding in my same spot, hidden in my little corner.  Finally, on Friday — I managed a sneak peak.
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*If you want to read more, here's a link to Patti's August Nia News.  

Driven by Nothing

Floaty.

That's how I feel inside.  Floaty.  It's not a word I've ever used before and I can't say I know what it means (literally or to anyone else) but that's how I'd describe what's going on inside me.

When asked by my therapist, "Tell me, how do you feel?" that's the word that comes to mind.

When pressed I'd say that I feel the shell of me, the structure of my exterior — but inside? Inside it's as if the core of me has dissolved into an inner atmosphere.  My feeling self feels disintegrated — and I feel nothing. Not good, not bad — and not anything I can hang my hat on.

I can't say I've ever felt this way before.  

Without any feeling, I don't know where I am. And if I don't know where I am, I certainly don't know where I should be going.

Part of me wishes I had the drive I had before, but more of me is relieved to be at rest.  

This time of my life may be the first time in my life I can honestly say I feel calm.  The word "calm" does not come to mind when I think back on my life — certainly not my childhood or adolescence; not when I started jobs throughout my career; when I dated, had relationships, or got married; not whenever I've moved or tried something new; and certainly not when I gave birth and became a parent.  Calm was not part of the last decade, when I dealt with the illnesses and passing of my father, cousin, sister, mother, and six months ago, my sister-in-law.

Floaty.  Empty.  Hollow.  

But at night when my head hits the pillow, the lights are out, the computer and TV off, my brain suddenly leaps into overdrive, churning about all the conversations I haven't had, wish I'd had, shouldn't have had.  Over and over and over the words, the sentences, the feelings, the emotions play out inside the dark room, the silent night, my jumbled mind.  No longer distracted by the day, or the things I have to do — the shopping, meals, editing, emails, phone calls — my mind is just frantic.  Worrying, worrying, worrying about all I didn't do that day.  It's hard turning that racing, racing, racing brain off.  

Two of my dear friends — from very different parts of my life, living in very different places (neither near me), and very different from each other in every way — BOTH gave me similarly supportive (and surprising) feedback: right now a lot is going on for me emotionally; most of my adult life I have been driving on all cylinders  and often in serial crisis mode — I have a right to be in this place of nothingness; I need to be patient with myself and not expect to race forth into the next phase of my life.  For now, it's okay to just BE.
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Thank you Aaron and Barbara, and thanks to all of you who are supporting me directly through your friendship and indirectly through your readership.  I am grateful for all.

New Orleans - Part 3

I know that when people think of New Orleans, they think of food, jazz, and Mardi Gras but for me it's all about the art. I've indulged my enthusiasm for the Ogden Museum of Southern Art the last two posts, I'm going to move on to The Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden at NOMA, the New Orleans Museum of Art.

Despite the intense heat and humidity I could only marvel at the 60+ fabulous works...here are some for you to enjoy.

You could sit alongside these folks.

This was a three-sided, tri-colored dog.

I YURNED for these...

There is NOTHING like a Claes Oldenburg to make me happy.

Leandro Ehrlich
Window and Ladder - Too Late for Help  2008

Well, after pondering all this great art and trying to discern the intention of all these great sculptors, one works up an appetite.  And since food does matter, I'll just say I was partial to The Milk Bar on S. Carrollton Ave and Slice Pizzeria on St Charles Ave.

If you'd like to find out about these sculptures and more, visit this link, or better yet, plan to make New Orleans a stop when YOU next travel.