Guilt, love, and context

My husband and I went to see comedian John Fugelsang's Drama-League Nominated Off-Broadway solo show, Guilt: A Love Story, last night at the Neptune Theatre in Seattle.

Since I've been following Fugelsang's career and social media activities for some time, I knew the show was going to be both hilarious and touching. He intertwines the story of his parents' rather unusual courtship (a nun and a Franciscan brother conduct a chaste exchange of letters between New York and Africa for 10 years), his own courtship and eventual marriage to long-time girlfriend, designer Charmien La Framenta, and a few of the highlights of his career that include an energetic re-enactment of his confrontation with American Nazi/KKK leader David Duke on Bill Maher's Politically Incorrect into a compelling and astonishing performance that defies most of what we have come to expect from the frequently self-indulgent artform known as the "one-man show."

He even good-naturedly nods to that popularly held conception of solo theatre as he begins, then shatters all expectations with an excellent story, beautifully presented. Agile, both physically and intellectually, Fugelsang moves through time and space like a cat who has already figured out Schrödinger's game, crapped in the box, and split for the coast. Hands-down smarter and funnier than just about anyone else in the entertainment industry today, he manages to pull into his tale such unexpected elements as the Biblical story of Onan, President James K. Polk's motivations for going to war with Mexico to take California, and Jeb Bush's passionate embrace of the prison industry in Florida.

For two hours, Fugelsang held us in his palm. He cracked us up, made us cry, and left us renewed. He delivered catharsis, the truest test of live theatre, in my book.

After the show, after two kinetic hours of impassioned storytelling (and some of the best acting I have ever seen, quite frankly, and I have seen a lot of good acting over the years), Fugelsang stood at the door in the theatre lobby like a pastor in the vestibule, shaking hands and taking a moment for photos and small talk with audience members as we spilled out into the damp Seattle night.

We stopped. Damon introduced himself and shook Fugelsang's hand. I asked if I could hug him, and he agreed. He was kind and genuine and I am even more impressed with him after seeing him live. If Guilt a Love Story is coming to a city near you -- even if that means you have to travel a few hours by plane, train or automobile to see it-- do so. You will be glad you did.

Good-bye, Old Friend

I woke this morning to discover that my ancient cat, Stinky, was no longer able to support himself on his back legs. This condition came as no surprise. In fact, I've been expecting it for several months since an x-ray revealed that his hips were overwhelmingly deteriorated by advanced arthritis.
In those months, my husband and I have accommodated Stinky's increasing decrepitude by limiting the scope of his domain. We put his food dish, heated cat bed, and litter box all on the same level of the house where we sleep and where I keep my art studio.
For some time now I've been quietly hoping that my sweet old cat would simply lie down in his heated little bed beneath my studio desk and take a nice long nap into forever. I simply did not want to see him suffer at all and, like most people, I really didn't want to have to make a choice, no matter humane, about ending his life.
Sadly, this morning I had to make that choice.
The hardest part, I think, was waiting two hours for the vet's office to open after I woke up and discovered the poor dear struggling to use his litter box. I helped him as best I could, lifting him into the box, waiting while he urinated, and then lifting him out again when he was done. I was sobbing all the while, I assure you. Then I carried him to bed and curled him up beside me so I could pet him and coo at him and reassure him that I would not allow him to suffer any further indignities. When the clock said it was 8 a.m., I called the vet's office and made an appointment to take him in at 11 a.m.
Three more hours.
Just enough time to make damned sure he was petted and scritched and comforted sufficiently so that I would know that he knew he was loved. After two decades of lap time, nap time and play time, I wanted to make certain he felt all that love before he had to say good-bye.
And now that time has passed. He's out of any pain or discomfort, and I am without a cat for the first time in more than 30 years.
Not today, nor tomorrow, not for a while, but soon enough we will find a shelter cat to bring into our home and into our hearts. Because no matter how awful I feel right now, all those years of soft fur and gentle purring were totally worth it.
Good-bye, old friend. Thank you for giving me all that unconditional love. It really made a difference in my life.

Week as Art Featured on Create Mixed Media

When I saw that Tonia Davenport, Acquistions Editor at North Light Craft Books and Create Mixed Media, was looking for artists to feature in The Week aa Art, I almost did a backflip.

I love letters and numbers, especially numbers, and I'm always incorporating them into my work. I dropped her an email with a "sample" number and hoped she'd invite me to submit a week's worth of mixed media digits. She responded quickly, asking me to provide numbers for this week, February 5-11.

I decided to start by making "serendipity squares" for my backgrounds. Here's how I made them. Click on the images to view them at a larger size.

First, I drew a grid for the squares on a piece of Bristol board, then laid down a few diagonal lines of old book text torn into random shapes and distressed around the edges with some Color Box inks.

I tried to vary the sizes and shapes of the text scraps enough that they wouldn't look too uniform but would provide a nice structure for the squares.

Next, I tore up an fabulously pigment-stained paper towel I'd been saving since I used it for clean-up on another project a few weeks ago and laid in another set of diagonals.

Truth is, It nearly broke my hear to tear it up. That's why I took a picture of it before I let her rip.





Then I added scraps of bright yellow construction paper and let the background sheet dry.

Looks like a bit of a mess, no?

I'm always amazed how bad things can look just before they take that turn toward completion. In this case, I just hoped my squares would be colorful but not overpowering for the stars of the show: my numbers.

I cut the sheet into 9 3-inch squares and got out by favorite vintage oilboard stencils to make the numbers.

I love oilboard stencils. I have them in four sizes from 1" to 6". They came from the leftover stock of an old art supply store some friends bought in my hometown several years ago. I love the way they smell and the way they feel in my hand.  They are so much cooler than plastic stencils.


I stenciled each number first using white acrylic paint and allowed that layer to dry.

Then I offset the stencil over the first layer and stenciled the number in black acrylic paint to create a little more dimension.

I dragged the edges of the squares with a contrasting stamp pad to give them a finished look.

You can see the whole week of finished numbers at Create Mixed Media.

Snowpocalypse Now

During the Great Seattle Snowpocalypse of 2012, #snOMG2012 for short, much sport has been made of the following three supposed facts:

1. Seattle drivers can't drive in the snow. (Except that one person from somewhere where it "really" snows.)
2. It doesn't "really" snow in Seattle.
3. We all overreact like a bunch of babies when the first flakes start to fall.

I'd like to take a moment or two to explore these so-called facts and add a few of my own to the conversation.

First, I will not dispute that Seattle drivers cannot drive in snow. They also can't drive in rain or bright sunshine, but that's another thing to bitch about on another day. To their credit, I will allow as how most Seattleites know they can't drive in snow and they stay out of their hybrid four-wheel drive sport utility vehicles when the strange, solid rain falls from the sky. The fact is, it doesn't snow here often enough for Seattle drivers to get used to driving in snow, so they never get good at it. They never learn some of the fundamental techniques someone from the Midwest or Northeast would have mastered before graduating from high school such as "gun the motherfucker up the hill, stopping for nothing, and pray a stalled school bus isn't lying in wait for you to slam into just over the crest." (True story, happened to a college friend of mine. No one was hurt, but it's not atypical of southwestern Pennsylvania winter driving conditions.)

Which leads me to the second of these "facts" in evidence: It doesn't "really" snow in Seattle. Well, yes and no. It doesn't snow often in Seattle and the snow that falls here is seldom deep enough to qualify as a school-canceling occasion in other parts of the country where it "really" snows, but the type of snow we get in Seattle is wet and weird and exactly the sort of slushy mess that would leave most people, even hard-ass four-wheelers from Wheeling, steering into the skid. We are close to sea level here, which keeps the snow away most of the time, but when it does get cold enough at sea level for snow to fall, the humidity is high and the conditions are treacherous. Made doubly dangerous by the manner in which Seattle (and surrounding areas) deal with the snow on the roads, which is to say, laughably.

During my first Seattle snowstorm, dubbed Winter Blast 1996 by the local media (which included a much younger, but still weather-beaten "Danger" Jim Forman), I learned that when lots of snow falls here in a short period of time, the city just shuts down. At that time, the city had just eleven snow ploughs total and WSDOT didn't seem to have many more. Additionally, I learned that they do not (or did not at the time) apply any sort of deicer to the roads before or after scraping them. Some things have improved over the years, there are more ploughs and they now use a chemical deicer that's supposed to work as well as salt without doing much damage to the environment, but problems persist. For example, snow ploughs only work when they are lowered far enough to scrape the snow and ice off the road surface. They don't lower the blades far enough here, so all they manage to accomplish is creating a nice, slick ribbon of ice where the traction-giving snow used to be. Observe any Seattle-area street or highway immediately after the snow plough has been through, and you'll discover a road surface that could easily be mistaken for a skating rink. It's also important to note at this point that only main streets and highways will get even this much attention. Secondary roads and side streets are left untouched by even these puny municipal snow removal techniques, so you're likely to find them impassable because they are littered with abandoned vehicles that were close enough to the curb to count as parking.

It is easy to criticize Seattle, its drivers and citizens, for over-reacting to winter weather. We do go a little crazy at the sight of a few flakes and we obsess over Cliff Mass’s weather blog and the highly dramatized weather coverage presented pretty much 24/7 on every local news channel. We post photos and comments on Facebook and Twitter. We watch YouTube videos of unfortunate cars and busses sliding and slamming around our city streets. We overshare our anxiety and wonder over the frozen crystals from the sky.

But we do so relatively secure in the knowledge that in a day or two, after all the panic and pandemonium, the temperatures will rise and the rain will come to melt the snow and flood our storm drains and basements.

This morning, large ice pellets are falling from the sky, clicking and clattering off the frozen crust of ice that lays on the six or so inches of snow in my back yard. Friends in Ballard or Greenwood may have seen less than an inch of accumulation. That’s snow in Seattle. And we really do love it.

Book Review: Graveminder by Melissa Marr

Graveminder by Melissa Marr

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I found Melissa Marr's Graveminder a compelling read.

Well paced and plotted, Graveminder tells the story of a contemporary small town that is both protected and threatened by a metaphysical pact made by town residents hundreds of years before. Like some of the best fiction of this type (think Stephen King, Ray Bradbury and Shirley Jackson), Graveminder captures the reader's sympathy with the comfortably common details of small town life and grabs the reader’s attention with chilling perversions of the same.

Populated with characters both believable and sympathetic, Graveminder explores familiar territory with fresh eyes, examining the interplay of fate and free will, the nature of love and duty, and the essence of family ties, both in blood and in choice.

While Graveminder works perfectly well as a stand-alone novel, Marr has created in it a rich well of material from which she could draw numerous sequels. And I would be happy to read them.





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2011 Year in Review

So, a lot of folks are eager to kick 2011 to the curb, and some of them have good reason to feel that way, but this was a pretty good year for me.

It started off with a trip to Kauai with my wonderful husband, pictured here. We stayed in Princeville, had a marvelous time just being lazy and happy and warm. Good thing, too, because almost as soon as we arrived there he got a call from a recruiter asking if he could start a new job the following week. Yeah, that made it so much easier to relax and enjoy the pool. the ocean, the food and each other. It also made coming home just a little bit easier as well.

Just before we left on vacation (Christmas day of 2010), I learned that a photo of one of my art journals was going to be published in a major art magazine, Cloth Paper Scissors. After we got back, I got busy making art for my first-ever one-woman show at Cafe Luna on Vashon Island. I also hosted a travelling exhibit, Leaving Dakota, a collection of photographs by Kyle Cassidy, and started an exhibit of my own, Art on My Door, which now stands at 175 pieces of art, each displayed on my office door for a working day during the past year. You can see all of those pieces on Flickr.
The Cafe Luna show kept me busy throughout the spring and was successful enough to encourage me to try showing my work more. At the end of May, one of my pieces was shown in the Seattle Erotic Art Festival. In June, I participated in 30 Days of Creativity, a wild ride of art-making that had me trying new things and really having a great time in my studio. Around this time, I noticed that there was no art hanging at our local coffee shop, Cafe Ladro and asked if they were looking for artists to exhibit. As it turns out, they were, and they asked me to hang a show in September.
The Seattle summer was mostly "meh," so I had plenty of time to work on pieces for the September show. We did manage to have some fun and go camping with friends. I also walked in the Komen 5K with some of the best people I know, among them my dear friend Allena who was undergoing chemo at the time and is now, I am happy to say, cancer-free.
The last few months have been busy and blurry and mostly filled with all the ordinary stuff that makes life good. Highlights included a week in November when we saw Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer in concert together at the Moore Theatre on a Wednesday night and then went back to see the amazing and wonderful Jason Webley in the most magical and strange concert I have ever seen on 11/11/11.
We are warm and safe and generally happy. We have love and chocolate and art and music. That's usually more than enough.
I hope 2012 is every bit as good for me as 2011 has been. If you're one of the folks whom 2011 treated poorly, I hope the New Year will give you some special treats to make up for it.
Happy New Year.

Book Review: Personal Geographies

Personal Geographies: Explorations in Mixed-Media Mapmaking by Jill K. Berry

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Berry's approach to maps and mapmaking as both art and spiritual exploration devices is full of enthusiasm and the genuine excitement of discovery. The book is well-written, richly illustrated, and includes ideas and projects that are inspirational for artists and explorers at any level. I read this book on my Kindle Fire and found that format perfectly suited to this sort of book.

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