What’s Left After Art

The only visible sign of the effort that went into the manuscript I will send to my publisher tomorrow are the huge stacks of worked over pages that will occupy a cardboard box in a closet in my apartment until the book comes out. Irrationally, I keep them as a talisman against loss. They are otherwise worthless.

Painters have their sketches and studies, which are surely art in and of themselves. Even their palettes look like art to me.


 I saw Vincent Van Gogh’s palette in an exhibit here in New York. It was so beautiful and exciting to see that the Metropolitan Museum made post card of it. I bought one. Here it is! It has all the beautiful hues that you find in his canvasses, and look at the energy with which he painted.

It seems the palettes of many painters have been preserved.

Here’s Delacroix’s and an example of the marvelous precisely detailed pictures he painted using it. You see him in both.

Gustave Moreau worked from this palette:

Here’s what he made with those colors:

This is Georges Seurat’s:

This palette is where he created his vocabulary. Here is how he put it all together, more like the experience of writing, it seems — point by careful point.

I could look at this stuff all day. But now I have to dot a couple of “i’s” and cross a couple of “t’s” before I send in that manuscript tomorrow.

Annamaria Alfieri

A New Way to Waste Time!

I was sitting in my living room, minding my own business, probably reading the newspaper, when suddenly, out of the blue, came a sound that sent me hurtling back in time to the 1940s. I was sitting on the floor with my brother, our heads bent toward the big, brown radio, listening to “Captain Midnight,” and the familiar announcer’s voice talking up Ovaltine! The sound I had heard was the opening chords of that program.

I opened my eyes to my own living room, with no brother or radio in sight, but my daughter, Anne, holding up her iPod and laughing. When she had recovered, she introduced me to “streaming” of “Old Time Radio.” How incredible! How fantastic! I lunged for her iPod, and she showed me how to find the index, search for my favorite old radio shows and play them. “Jack Benny,” “Information Please,” “It Pays to be Ignorant,” “The Shadow,” “The Lone Ranger,” “The Lux Theater,” “The Green Hornet,” on and on they went…

I never realized how completely my childhood was wrapped up in radio. I woke up with it — “The Breakfast Club,” and went to bed with it (under the covers so my parents wouldn’t hear) with “Fibber Magee & Molly,” “Can You Top This?,” “Suspense”… It was all-consuming, sort of like TV and texting is for kids today.

Then there was the year I was home from school with rheumatic fever and could listen to all the daytime programs, “Ma Perkins,” Helen Trent,” Lorenzo Jones and His Wife Belle.” And now, with a touch of the dial – no, with a punch of the iPod – I can hear those shows all over again. Wow!

Goodbye writing schedule. Goodbye family and friends. Goodbye 21st Century. Hello “Tom Mix”!

Robin Hathaway

The "What Ifs" of Our Lives...

Mary Higgins Clark always teaches us to think in terms of "What If..."

I want to share with you a "What If" I had last week.

As a high school student down south, with high ambitions, I followed in the footsteps of a very wonderful guy whom I shall call Jim Smith.

Jim was the brightest, the most gifted, the most true-blue kid in the school and I tried to follow him every step.

I dreamed of being Mrs. Jim Smith, as well.

After he graduated, he went on to become the model minister of his church, then on to a bigger world.

He married a nice, homebody girl, a much nicer, more submissive person than I would ever have been.

Decades passed.

Later, in New York, I heard that Jim, now the famous and erudite Dr. Jim Smith, was then the head man at an internationally famous and prestigious institution for high/higher/highest learning.

Our paths never crossed, but I often read about him in the paper.

I hadn't thought about Jim in years...

Then, last Saturday night, while enjoying my Chinese takeout of tofu and hot and sour soup, I turned on C-Span - and lo, there was a panel on some big talking head program down in Foggy Bottom, with their top guest speaker, a Very Important Man.

Yep, you got it, Dr. Jim Smith!

Of course, I held my chop stick in mid air and watched...

Hmmm. As I listened to the guy pontificate, and tried to buy into how wonderful he was... is... will always be... all the gestures, head turnings and posturing we see on tv every night from THE V I P PEOPLE ...

I couldn't help going back to those earlier days and thinking, oh-my-god-what-if...
.
As I watched this man, showing us how inportant a man he was, etc. etc. etc., all I could think, was ...

What if... I were his other half now, and had to listen to him ... night after night after night after night after night ... year after year after year... and nod my head on how great and important a person he Is, Was and Evermore would be...

Oh, my, what wisdom, those thoughts of Mary Higgins Clark...

Thelma Straw

Aspirations

Erma Bombeck

When I was young and giddy I used to aspire to be a writer like Erma Bombeck or Peg Bracken. I'm sure you remember hearing of Erma Bombeck. If you're too young to have followed her columns, your mother probably did. She wrote riotously funny pieces about mundane housewife stuff, day in, day out, in good times and bad. She died too young.

Peg Bracken

Peg Bracken penned such classics as The I Hate to Cook Book, The I Hate to Housekeep Book (my bible for many years), I Didn't Come Here to Argue, and I Try to Behave Myself: Peg Bracken's Etiquette Book. In the old days there was such a thing as etiquette. Hey, did I ever tell you I knew Judith Martin (Miss Manners to you) socially, when we were both young and giddy and working for the Washington Post? Yes. I have a past. I go back a long way. Once I knew The Great Ones.

But I never could be as consistently funny as Erma Bombeck or Peg Bracken (although I can be pretty funny on a good day), or as certain of what was right and good as Miss Manners, or as light-hearted and innocent as they all used to seem. Few can. The world has changed for woman writers. Nobody wants to hear about etiquette anymore, or about women who do nothing more than rattle around the house and try to keep it together. The women who don't want to hear about politics and world problems – topics I don't have the chops to write about – want to hear about body building, exercise, and grooming, which if you think about it are even more narrow and self-absorbed than etiquette and housekeeping. Or they want to hear about who is sleeping with whom and who is having or has had whose baby. And who is divorcing. Who are these Kardashians that you speak of? Are we to emulate them? Why would I want Kim Kardashian's skin?

As you can see, I've been spending too many hours standing in line at the supermarket, perusing the tabloids. Sorry about Whitney Houston. Sorry for all the dead ones. But, I tell you what, I like good fluffy froth. Not dumb gossip about stupid people, not, gawdhelpus, advice, how to lose weight, how to have Kim Kadashian's skin, but writing that skates lightly over the brutalities of real life with grace and humor. This is what I still try to do. Sometimes it works.

Kate Gallison

Over-the-hill Revolutionaries (Encore)

I am on two deadlines. Forgive me for repeating myself. Here is my post from November 30 of last year. I promise something new soon!

I am no fan of "Madmen." Glamorizing the sexist attitudes of the fifties and sixties seems to me the last thing the world needs at this moment. I admit that I have seen only one episode, the first, and about twenty-three minutes of the second, but that was enough to turn me off from the series for good.

My favorite "good times" of the second half of the twentieth century involve the antidote to the culture of Madmen – the international effort that is still spreading known in those days as The Women's Movement.

Betty Friedan and Friends

If you are fifty-five or over and worked for a living during the 1960's, 70's, and 80's, in the US, Canada, or Western Europe, you participated in this revolution that profoundly and forever changed the entire world.

If you are younger than fifty-five and came of age or were born into a world where working women’s rights were protected, stick around find out a bit about how we got to where we are today.

Bella Abzug

There were, in those early days a few widespread influences: books like "The Feminine Mystique" by Betty Friedan and "The Female Eunuch," by Germaine Greer; "MS. Magazine"; the marvelous New York Congresswoman, Bella Abzug. The National Organization for Women emerged eventually. We did have a well-publicized march for equality – down Fifth Avenue. My father, the World War Two combat Marine, pushed my daughter in her stroller in that demonstration, while I carried a sign that said, "THREE GENERATIONS FOR EQUAL RIGHTS FOR WOMEN." But none of these publications, societies, or events can be credited with the Movement’s widespread success.

Rosie the Riveter

Of course, the demand for equal rights did not come out of nowhere. A wonderful example was set by the Civil Rights Movement. The employment of women in war-time manufacturing during the "Rosie the Riveter" era had changed women’s self-image. The demographics of the country – a growing economy and a lower birth rate pointing to a need for more entrants into the workforce also had an impact. All of that history and more. Yes. But.

Whatever the historical factors, I doubt the revolution would have gotten off the ground it were it not for thousands and thousands of ordinary women on the line who fought the battles on the job, who showed up every day and got the work done, and thought up imaginative ways to thwart the status quo when it stood in the way of progress.

I know a lot of stories from the pink collar wars. Here's one of my favorites. It is a perfect example of what made the Movement move:

In the state of Nevada in the 1970's, there was a thriving printing business. Big firms stamped out mail order catalogs, magazines, Sunday supplements for newspapers, all kinds of color work on shiny paper. The jobs were divided into heavy printing and light printing. Those who did heavy printing were all men and made near twice the hourly rate of those doing light printing, who were all women. The women wanted into the higher paying positions, but a state law stood in their way. Nevada’s books said that if the job required employees to lift more than twenty pounds, the work had to be done by men. Women protested, testifying that females in everyday life regularly lifted more than twenty pounds. Any mother of a toddler or housewife who did laundry and grocery shopping for a family of four could have told you that. Nevada women took their case right up to the State Supreme Court. But the justices held their ground and upheld Nevada's right to "protect" women in the printing industry from getting a sixty percent increase in their wages.

Not ready to be frustrated once and for all, the ladies looked for another way.

Printing was the second biggest industry in the state. The first biggest was gambling. And that's where our “light” printers found their answer. The big-time casinos employed hundreds of women who waited tables at the headliner dinner theaters. They preferred ladies with long legs and pretty faces. The statuesque, scantily clad members of the "weaker sex" hefted huge trays piled with dishes, glasses, cutlery.

Casino Waitress

The printing women did a little study. One Saturday evening, when the restaurants were packed, they got the waitresses to weigh their trays. About a third of them were over twenty pounds.

Nevada had two choices. Either force the casino owners to put men in the place of the waitresses in stiletto heels, or change the law and let women do jobs that required them to lift more than twenty pounds. The casino owners, with their enormous political clout, weighed in, as it were, on the side of the women printers. The law changed and so did the take home pay of hundreds of women workers.

It happened that way over and over, a little triumph here and rule changed there. Progress.

Things are not perfect yet. But they have gotten better. And will continue to do so. Because of the revolutionaries in pantyhose who made it work those decades ago.

Annamaria Alfieri