Melon Ice

The painting project in the minute downstairs bathroom is done:  two weeks and two days.  Bruce-the-painter just about moved in with us.  Of course, there was more to do than a bathroom: a hall, the entryway, and a bunch of doors that had to be hand-painted in oil-based enamel.

It turns out that for a large sum of money, you can have your 1980's  faux-sponged wallpaper  removed, and the mess of a wall it leaves behind completely rehabbed and painted with a very smooth and elegant color called "Melon Ice."  (Jerry calls it "Dilute Salmon.")  My sister and I spent part of Thanksgiving Day poring over Benjamin Moore color chips to come up with this color.  The first color, which I chose on my own, "Golden Apricot,"  felt wrong from the first swath on the wall.

Here are a couple of photos:  The After shot (no art, can't bear to hammer holes in it yet) and the Before.  It's hard to capture the cool sophistication of  the new color: think pink grapefruit sorbet.

After:  Melon Ice

In progress: Tribeca Loft ?

Look Up!

Yesterday we went to Pt. Pinole Regional Park to look for Monarch butterflies.  Each fall, Monarchs migrate from inland areas west of the Rockies to coastal areas with milder climates.  This is called "overwintering."  It's a mystery how they choose the same coastal areas year after year, but they do, and if you're lucky you can see masses of them at Natural Bridges State Park near Santa Cruz or in Pacific Grove near Monterey,  hanging from branches of eucalyptus trees. 

Sign directing us to trail to see Monarch butterflies

We set off.  After an ill-advised trek on a bumpy dirt road led us to  the San Pablo Yacht Club, not a Monarch in sight,  we got back in the car and found our way to Pt. Pinole.  We followed a well-marked trail to the trees where this year's migrants congregated. 

After about a mile, we found fifteen people, heads thrown way back, trying to see a couple of small Monarch clusters in high in a  tree.  A sign with an arrow indicated where to look up, but I could see nothing but two small patches of what looked like dark leaves.

Sign indicating where to look up

 An East Bay Parks naturalist had set up a camera on a tripod, and we got a good look at the clusters that way.  My own digital camera was useless--way inadequate zoom. A steady stream of gazers joined us.

This morning Jerry explained to me that entomologists have never figured out how the butterflies know where to migrate each fall. It's the grandparents of the current migrating generation who came last year, and those butterflies died long ago. The current crop had no guide to Pt. Pinole, they just knew where to show up.

The close-up of Monarch butterflies high in a tree

Happy Birthday, M!

Today is my sister's birthday.  She was a Thanksgiving baby, which accounted for my mother being missing when I got up on Thanksgiving morning, 1953.  I remember standing in the drafty garage of our brand-new tract house, and my dad telling me I had a baby sister.  I didn't know what to expect.  When we picked her up at the hospital, she cried in the car, and I said, "Send her back!"  Which would have been a big mistake.

Thanksgiving, 2011,  with a cake I brought from Berkeley

Some of her  pals lamented that they couldn't see her face in the grainy newspaper photo I posted earlier this week, so here's a picture of her taken a year later.  She was in the first grade when my mother made this dress, which featured blue cherry fabric and an organdyhalf-apron worn over the dress.  I had a matching one. 

c. 1960

Hey, thanks!

If you read my blog regularly: thank you.  I love having an audience, and I hope I don't sound too much like Andy Rooney, ranting on about bottle openers and how you're supposed to eat an ice cream cone. I used to think,  "Just how much do we need to know about one person's off-the-wall opinions?"  Ditto blog.

We're off to San Jose for dinner with my sister. It's supposed to be an indoor picnic. Yesterday she called because she couldn't find a package of  real linen tablecloths she stores under her bed. I'm assuming that means it's going to be fancier than I thought, but I'm wearing a flannel shirt and jeans.

Happy T-giving.

Nursery University

That's the title of a documentary we watched last night, and I recommend it unless you're a person who doesn't like to shout at the screen.

The filmmakers follow five families as they try to get their three-year olds into Manhattan nursery schools.  There's been a baby boom in Manhattan over the past ten years, and competition is fierce to get kids into the nursery schools that feed into the right private elementary schools,  right on up to Harvard.  Parents grovel, connive, and donate to get their child into one of the top schools,  most of which cost $20,000 a year.

I liked the family of color whose child got into the Mandell Nursery School with a scholarship and the Greenwich Village family who opted out of the rat race and put their daughter into a co-op nursery.  I did not like the highly competitive investment banker whose adorable daughter got into seven schools.  I was neutral on the single mom who had twins at 57 (yes!). And the overentitled mother who says she's always gotten everything she wanted, but couldn't get her kid into City and Country Nursery School and so moved to Boston?  Whatever.

A personal note:  Without a doubt, I would not have been accepted at any of these schools.  One show of separation anxiety, my bete noire,  at the interview, and you're out.  A tantrum?  Forget it.  A dad who brags about affiliation with a college he didn't really have much to do with?  No go. The director calls to check.

I went to the San Jose State nursery school affiliated with the Home Economics department.  I remember the row of little toilets and the constant washing of hands.   My sister  didn't go at all, but managed to get a graduate degree.  Those were the old days.

Not For Public Consumption

I've been watching the PBS American Masters special on Woody Allen, and God, I find him refreshing.  Death!  Anxiety! Hypochondria! Death!  Remember that scene in "Hannah and Her Sisters," when he is so relieved to find out he doesn't have a brain tumor that he leaps along the sidewalk and then stops dead (no pun) realizing that one day it will be bad news?  Oh, Woody!

Shelves 2 and 3 

  I've got an out-of-the-way bookshelf in my studio with books pertaining to my own personal obsessions, which overlap with some of Allen's. Shelf 1:  Death and Anxiety  ("Dying at Home," "The Heal Your Anxiety Workbook,").  Shelf 2: Travel guides, always more than one for any locality because you never know what could go wrong. I've seen a documentary about Woody Allen in Venice and he is very anxious about water and boats and canals.  A definite tie-in.  Shelf 3:  Biographies and memoirs of first ladies, starting with Eleanor Roosevelt.  I'm at a loss here re Woody, although I would love it if he did a time-travel number on Pat Nixon.

The other day a contractor I've known for a long time was in my studio checking out leaky windows.  I saw him studying the shelves.

"Ah, Liz, I see you're interested in first ladies, " he said.  He is a very progressive Berkeley liberal.  "Laura Bush?"

I doubt Woody would have been chagrined, but I was.  He reveals the damndest things about himself, and people find them entertaining, maybe because they think he's more neurotic than they are.  I wonder.  In the meantime, Shelves 1-3 stay upstairs and pretty much out of sight.

The 1958 Caddie

Yes, this is us. My mother, me, and my sister  accepting the keys for a 1958 Cadillac we won at a gas station.   The San Jose State prof-- that would be my father--is nowhere in evidence.  He might have had to teach that day (or he might have thought that art professors should not be seen with Cadillacs.).

There was no question of us keeping the car, but my mother dressed up in her fake fur stole, and my sister and I put on matching fuzzy knit hats with our school dresses and patent leather shoes, and off we went for the publicity photo.

The actual car we won was red, with fins, and the proceeds from its sale became the seed money for a trip to England the following summer. My mother hadn't seen her family since 1947, when she emigrated to marry my father, whom she'd met in London during World War II.

Family lore.

You Decide

I went out to breakfast today with friends, and I heard a story that stuck with me.  See what you think:

One of the women, whom I'll call "A,"  now the girlfriend of a man who's been a friend of mine for years, was informed by her husband a few years ago that he was leaving her for a much younger woman.  This came completely out of the blue.   She was about 55 and  had retired recently thinking that their joint financial future was stable; her husband was a very well-paid attorney. 

She was shattered.  A divorce case followed.  She was eligible for ten years of spousal support.  Her lawyer insisted that there be a life insurance policy, so that if her ex-husband died, her spousal support allowance would be covered by the policy.  It was up to her to pay the premiums.  She did.

Her husband just died unexpectedly at 60.  She now has enough money to live comfortably for the rest of her life.

What's your first reaction?  Mine was:  "Ha!"  My second was:  "Good for A!"

It's the "Ha!" that troubles me.

In the meantime, she and my friend, whose wife left him years ago, are very happy together.

The Managerial Mind Needs Some Help

Years ago I heard a woman psychology professor at the University of Washington say that "women have the managerial mind."  No doubt about that today.  I have no choice.

I've got a painter downstairs, a pair of housecleaners working around that disruption, and a sick husband.  The sick husband was born in southern California and has been forever imprinted with a notion of chilly that I do not understand.  No windows open, ever, is his preference.   The painter has just laid down a coat of smelly primer.  I fling open the windows due to the fumes.   The husband whimpers ("This is awful," he said, seeing the kitchen windows open. "It's a gale in here.").

Sonia at work, cheerful and adaptable

The housecleaners are like my sister-wives for the day: sympathetic,       adaptable, humorous. They, of course, have managerial minds.  Here's to you, Sonia and Anabelle, who arrive twice a month and  lighten the load.  I am lucky to have you.

Laying Down Color



Tribeca Loft?

Bruce Bostwick, Mr. Uber Meticulous Painter, is here imparting some desperately needed freshness to the downstairs front hall and bathroom.  Houses get tired-looking (hell, I get tired-looking).  You know those Open Houses  with graying sheers on the windows and ancient chipped paint?  We were on the road to that.  Truly.

After two days of work, Bruce has stripped the faux paint-sponged wallpaper from the bathroom walls and filled the three big holes.  He's talked me out of a mad moment of  thinking I'd go Tribeca Loft and live with the stripped surface.

"Won't go with the house," he said, calmly.  Bruce is not going to let me drive off the deep end.  On the other hand, I wouldn't have an audacious red dining room if he hadn't forced the issue in 2001.  Stop dallying, he told me after I agonized for a year. I  finally chose a red, closed my eyes, he painted five coats, and I love it.

With a properly prepared surface, the bathroom will be painted with Pratt &  Lambert "Cream Whip," an unaudacious, airy peach.   Bruce refers to that stage not as painting but as "laying down color."

Could there be a more meticulously organized brush box?

Lining Up for Thanksgiving

Yesterday's record number of households for a Monday at the Berkeley Food Pantry:  82.  Number of  brand-new clients: 5.  Number of regular Monday crew: 6.   Cal students helping out especially for Thanksgiving: 2.   People who told me they were hungry but had already come in too many times this month: 2  [they got "make-up" bags].    People who said they either paid the rent or bought groceries: 2.   This is the story for many Pantry clients.

In the meantime, my sister and I are trying to scale back Thanksgiving dinner, or at least the hassle that goes with it.  Turkey sandwiches?  Do we want all that labor-intensive brown, mushy food?  We don't, but people who don't have a choice definitely do.

Quilts (?)

On Sunday I went to a show at the Berkeley Art Center called, "Paper Quilt Project: Collaborations in Contemporary Craft."  The place was almost empty, and I had a good, long look.

Now, I am what is called a traditional quilter.  I work with fabric, in a pattern based on a grid, and the finished quilt has a back, a front, and batting all sewn together.  The whole works can be thrown on a bed. Or a wall.

The quilts on display were contemporary interpretations of quilts.  They were made of paper, fabric, collage, lace, gouache, graphite, photographs, pastel, mica, colored pencil, masking tape, and/or gold leaf.  Back, front, and batting not required.  A departure from traditional quilting, yes, but I was game.

Game, but edgy.

I liked a lot of the pieces, even one that consisted of a video projected onto the back of a old, beat-up quilt:  Quilt as Screen.  The video showed a boy and then a man, wandering around with another quilt wrapped around them.  As a conceptual piece, it worked.  As a quilt, per se, no.  According to me.

In the little booklet about the show ($3), I read this:  "Aside from being an inviting, warm and humble medium, the quilt has an intrinsic capacity to connect people...this uniquely democratic folk art."    It's humble I have a problem;  I completely buy into "democratic."  People who didn't go to art school can make art with fabric and a sewing machine and batting.  Do we need quilting to be elevated via new materials and methods into something more than "warm and humble"?  Can't  we call this new species of collaborative art "collage," or "works on paper," or "mixed media,"? Leave quilting alone, I want to say.   Let it be.  And while you're at it, take a good long look at the Gees Bend and the Amish quilts.  Their makers may have been humble, but they needed no more than thread and fabric to make art.

Tammy Rae Carland & Allison Smith
Unititled (Sears Roebuck catalog), 2011 (detail)
digital inkjet print on hand-sewn paper

This piece had squares and lattice but was an utterly flat representation of a traditional quilt.  My questions were "why?" and "what's new"?

Back at the Little Farm...

There was an era in the '80's when many of my pals were having babies and I was always finding myself at the Little Farm in Tilden Park. God, it was boring!  The kids, usually toddlers, were endlessly entertained, and I, a non-mom, was bored to the point of vowing I'd never, ever go back.   Don't care re cows, chickens, and pigs.  Not interested.

Well, today I went back.  Claudia's adorable nephew, Rylan, made a long-awaited visit to Berkeley, and the Little Farm was a welcome destination for a 19-month old who wanted to get out of the house (which he indicated by  knocking on the inside of her front door).  Off we went, him with his pacifier hanging out of the corner of his mouth like a forgotten cigarette.  He was delighted beyond measure.   Photos below.  Indulge me.

Rylan and Claudia admiring a cow

The first of two lunches



 

Where the Hell Am I?

I spent part of a rainy afternoon labeling photos from our trip to Italy and England last spring.  Six hundred photos with no labels and an aging mind grappling to figure out what I'm looking at.  Not good.  Anyone know where I am, above?  It's somewhere in the Villa  Borghese Gardens in Rome, a museum of some kind.  Did not go inside or I might remember.

The other day, my friend Laura called to ask when she and her daughters went to Paris.  She couldn't remember, possibly 2005 or 2006.  I rummaged through my datebooks for those years and found that I'd scrawled "Laura and girls leave for Paris," on August 3, 2006.  She needed to know because Leah's getting a visa for education abroad.

I don't really need to know where I am in that picture, except that it pisses me off that I can't remember.

Off the Male Radar

Yesterday I asked Jerry to haul up some cans of paint from the basement.   I got home: not done.  This morning I asked him to get a package of chicken out of the freezer for tonight's dinner.  We were upstairs.  I had little faith that he'd remember by the time he got downstairs. (He did it, but only after much shouted consultation/instruction up and down the stairs). Dinner is not on his radar before 7:30 pm.

I just finished a book called "'I Don't Know How She Does It," by Allison Pearson, a young British woman who is witty and heartbreakingly accurate in her assessment of what women notice and feel burdened by and DO, and what men do not.

"Women," she writes, "carry the puzzle of family life in their heads, they just do."  She's referring to couples with children, but this applies to couples, period. In my experience, men do not notice what needs to be done.  If you point it out to them, they don't think it needs to be done.  And even if they do, they don't know how to do it.  Or, to be fair, they make a stab at it and the woman has to do it over again.

Some men are on top of the details of running house, remembering birthdays, putting on a Christmas dinner. We once had a very anal male guest who inspected every glass in our cupboard and systematically dropped each mildly cracked one (and not at the rim) into the garbage.  I didn't know whether to be ashamed or pissed. Pearson covers this dilemma very thoroughly.

I used to think that not noticing what needed to be done was a diabolical plot Jerry had hatched to get me to do them.  It took me years to figure out that he simply does not notice.  It is not on his radar that 30-year old white paint has turned gray and needs re-coating.  Or that due to recent repairs,  the downstairs bathroom has three large holes in the wall that need to be filled.  Not on his radar, and that's just the way it is.

It's Not Optional!

This morning, reading about the Penn State coach who  (allegedly but there is much evidence) sexually abused numerous young boys, a practice that apparently went on for years even  after campus officials were notified, I asked Jerry if  really it wouldn't be best if this person were marched out and shot.  A more wicked crime I can hardly imagine.  Once again I tried to understand how anyone could hear of such incidents and not immediately call the police.  I have had this thought many, many times while reading about child sexual abuse by Catholic priests and how bishops repeatedly looked the other way.

I think Penn State should now pay for unlimited therapy for these victims, the administrators involved should be fired and perhaps imprisoned, and even the venerable Joe Paterno should go.  Somewhere.  And think about what happened because he didn't follow-up on what an eyewitness confided in him.

These children will never be the same.  They have been violated and robbed.  When is it going to be beyond question that such predators are reported to police?  I just don't understand.

Memorial for Rob

Yesterday morning I got up at 7:30, flew to Los Angeles for Rob's memorial gathering, and returned to Oakland Airport at  7:40 pm. A very long day.

Chris Yee, another friend of Rob's, went with me, and thank God he did, because this involved  renting a car and making our way to a house in Laurel Canyon.  During the drive from Burbank Airport,  I told Chris that I bet there'd be valet parking, and sure enough, when we arrived at the house,  there was a squad of women done up in black pants, bowties,  white shirts inscribed with "Valet of the Dolls."  They disappeared our silver Kia.   We got lost trying to find the front door. 

Several male guests getting out of cars wore dark suits and ties, and Chris momentarily freaked out because he was wearing jeans and a North Face jacket.  I said, Rob was in the entertainment industry!  The business types will wear suits and the creative ones will wear jeans.  I was right.  It was about half and half, if you count black t-shirts and jackets in the suit category. Overheard snippets of conversation re scripts and nominations.

The house was built up the side of a steep hill, four levels, the second of which was devoted to the party.  A sumptuous buffet, a bar, photos of Rob and his sister in 1950's Roy-and-Dale cowboy outfits,  pictures of Rob and his partner Emanuel  in European sidewalk cafes, and  a framed cover of the New York Times magazine that featured Rob when he was a dancer with Merce Cunningham.  Elegant bouquets of yellow roses and white hydrangeas.  An poster-sized photograph of Rob, the one that appeared with his  obituary in Variety.  Outside, the back garden was terraced, the main level a worn astroturf lawn with tables and more bouquets and another bar, another poster of Rob.  The sun shone, the eucalpytus swayed in a light breeze.

The most touching moments:  Meeting four of the "Six Saints," as Emanuel called them, close women friends of Rob's who brought food to him, called 911, spent nights in hospital rooms, and kept him company when Emanuel was traveling.  Each wore a tiny silver wishbone pinned to her sweater.   And talking to Rob's stepmother, Mary, whom he adored and who had traveled from San Jose, with her sister, who lives with her in the house where Rob grew up. 

Meeting Mary was both moving and instructive.  In her eighties, having lost both her stepchildren to cancer this year, she is grieving but lively,  deeply empathic but accepting of death in a way that I can imagine was a great comfort to Rob.   As Chris said, she is a role model.

And then, very soon, it was over, and we stood on the front steps of the house waiting while the lady valets  rushed around retrieving and delivering cars.  People chatted about all sorts of things, plans for getting together for lunch next week.  And I thought, is this it?  It's over?  The way I always do after a memorial service or funeral.  We reclaimed our Kia and drove back  to Burbank.

Another Marriage Down the Tube(s)...

So, Kim Kardashian's marriage of 72 days is over.  She filed for divorce yesterday. Somehow it was more interesting seeing if she'd get to this point than knowing that she'd actually done it.  Her mother had a facelift to get ready for this wedding!  Her stepfather, Bruce Jenner, has apparently had "several facelifts" over the years.   He's a year older than I am.  These K-people exist in another universe.

The wedding cost $10 million to put on.  The couple made $18 million on TV rights.   The rest of us--well, some of us--spent time scouting the internet for photos and "news" and/or watching a four-hour TV special on the wedding.  All this time, money, and energy that could have been channeled into something else.  Crazy!  I'm done with Kim.  This morning I spent two hours reading about rubberized roofs and composite decks, and honestly, my brain thanked me.  It was getting tired of junk food.