This has been a pretty busy week. I'm trying to get as many orders filled before my Christmas deadline, which fortunately this year is later than usual. I've got several large chair seats to paint so I should make a decent amount and be able to pay my bills and maybe buy the brats a few trinkets. Or maybe I'll just buy myself something pretty, who knows? My kids like to tease me by saying they're going to get me an all day foot massage at a spa. They know I'd rather spend the day at Gitmo being waterboarded. I told Jay years ago, after he got me the wide screen hidef tvs that he never had to get me another gift; . What more could I possibly want? Last night, Josie and I watched Rudolph. You don't know scary til you've seen the abominable Snowman on a 48" screen. I didn't sleep a wink.
Thursday night I went to my final Christmas concert. I've been going to those things for 22 years. I'm over the cuteness of it all. Actually, Josie's school puts on a pretty decent show. The music teacher knows better than just to have class after class get up on the altar and sing the same old carols year after year. That's boring for the kids and the parents and I can't imagine what kind of torture it must be for the teachers who've been there forever. No, Ms. F. likes to mix it up. Some of the classes sing, some do traditional dances from all over the world; the Spanish sword dance was a hit this year. The kids used rulers instead of swords but it was still mighty exciting. She lets the 7th and 8th grade boys do drumline numbers, which is brilliant. What twelve year old boy doesn't want school credit for pounding the hell out of something? The eighth grade girls did a moondance with white tambourines, a dark church and a black light. It was neat, except for some toddler who never stopped screaming. Wait. Was that me?
Yesterday I spent the morning helping with a mailing at school. My hands are now covered with paper cuts and they hurt like the dickens.
In the afternoon, I went upstairs to work. As I said, I'm working on some large dining room chair designs. That means I needed a lot of floor space to cut the canvas and draw the outlines and so the floor needed to be clean. I started putting paint cans, stir sticks and plastic mixing buckets away. That lead to throwing out piles of magazines I'm done with, finding discarded drawings under half painted footstools...next thing I know it's an hour and a half later and I've filled a couple of trash bags and swept out about half my office. The room is still very far from clean, but at least I had a large chunk of floor in the middle where I knew it was safe to roll out a yard of canvas.
If this economy really tanks and I find myself with no work for a while, giving my office a thorough cleaning is right at the top of my list of things to do. Well, right behind watercoloring every day, taking a class on wood working and learning to make my own frames. Also, I'd like to write a novel. Kind of like the Twilight series, only instead of vampires; physicists. Cool, huh? Think about it; what's a vampire compared to a guy who understands quantum theory? Hah! Gotcha!
No one understands quantum theory!
After school, Josie and I started to put up the tree. Since I wrecked my shoulder again (doing pilates. Don't try a T-stand if you have a history of bad shoulders.) I told Josie she would have to light the tree. I'm particular about the lights. It's very simple, but back breaking work to light a tree properly. You need lights on every branch, at every level, all the way back to the trunk with no straight lines, sagging wires or dark gaps. I showed Josie how to do it and she's doing a beautiful job. We only had six working strings so half the tree is done. We'll have to run out to Target this morning and get more lights. Back in the old days, when they were $5-$10 a string, we used to spend hours replacing burnt out bulbs. Now that you can get a 100 bulb string for 2 bucks, I waste no time on temperamental lines. If they don't light up on the first try, they're trash. Hey, I'm just doing my bit to keep the economy sputtering along.
At six, my sister Katie and her crew picked us up and we all headed out to the Midtown Global Market, where a friend of ours is taking part in a Holiday bazarre. One look at the crowd and I realized it was actually a Winter Solstice Bizarre.
The event took place in the old Sears Building, on Lake and Chicago. Not the greatest neighborhood in south Mpls. My sister has lived in the city most of her life, but she married a suburbanite and has taken on his bad case of the city-willies. It took us twenty minutes to find a parking spot out on the street and Katie kept warning everyone to look out for knife-wielding muggers. It's no wonder her kids suffer from nightmares. Finnie kept shouting "Are we
in Chicago?" He was bitterly disappointed that no mugger appeared, giving him an opportunity to unleash some of his black belt expertise all over the bad guy's ass. It was a gorgeous evening; not too cold with fat, lazy snowflakes drifting down as though cued by special effects. Nothing more sinister than a parking meter as far as the eye could see.
Inside the market, the first booth I saw had a huge sign that read "Eco Friendly Feminist Fashions" and I knew I was in the wrong place.
I like to go to things like craft fairs and art fairs once every decade or so, just to see if I still hate them.
Yep.
Still hate 'em.
Acres of badly made hats, bags, belts, posters and jewelry at booth after booth manned by boys and gals who's most glorious work of art is themselves. What they see when they look in the mirror; "edgy, creative, nonconformist". What I see when I look at them; "Please, please,
please, I'll
just die if you don't mistake me for an artist!!" This makes me laugh. I happen to know a few artists, actors, painters, writers and dancers who actually make a living at it. One thing they all have in common is that none of them wastes a single iota of creative energy on their appearance. If anything, they all strive to look normal. They frequently fail in small ways. My mom can make
anything and she looks like every other grandma at Target. Until you notice that her shoes don't match. That's not because she's trying to be edgy. It's because she lost interest between shoes.
For an economy that's every bit as dire as the Great Depression, there sure were tons of people out plunking down thirty bucks for handmade crap. Our group got separated three feet inside the door. Josie, Meg and I spent the next forty minutes wandering amid the crowd, looking for Katie and listening for Molly. We did find Fran's booth fairly quickly. You can see her cards online at
www.Zeichenpress.com. They're hilarious. Compared to all the other vendors, Fran and her sister in law look like a pair of soccer moms who just wandered out of Cub foods and got lost. Up close, one sees a tiny, tasteful nose ring on Fran's tiny, tasteful nostril and one thinks "Ah! Subversive. Maybe she shops at Whole Foods after all."
After wandering through the crowds for a year or two, we ran into Fran's husband, Kenny, who was with some of their kids. He looked shell shocked. "Oh my God," he said "I hate this so much. Too many people. Too much crap. Too much
everything."
If you're picturing Kenny as some big, beefy Dad, wearing a Vikings jersey, horrified at finding himself in a crowd of bohemian, sexually ambiguous non conformists, you couldn't be more mistaken. Within the last two years, Kenny appeared on stage in a production of Knock! as a fourteen year old girl and he was great.
Katie bounced through the crowd up to us and chirped "Omigod! They're selling ecologically friendly Che Guevara shopping bags!"
Isn't a shopping bag with a communist icon on it oxymoronic?
"I saw it!" I said. " I was tempted to buy one, take it home and painting a lead-based cadmium red circle with a line through it over his face." I answered. I just wish I'd been wearing my "Viva Steyne!" t-shirt.
We bought some organic, free range pizza and sat and watched the crowd for awhile. There was a small stage not far from us, manned by a quintet of pale, pudgy twenty somethings, singing blue grass. Ironically, of course.
"Have you notice that everyone here looks exactly the same?" Katie said after about ten minutes. " I've never seen so many people wearing tiny glasses."
It's true. We were in the same sex couple/desperately creative/white/communist ghetto.
"If we only had some whiskey we could do shots for every lesbian couple that passes by." I said.
"Too easy." Kenny shook his head. "A shot for every lesbian couple
with kids."
Alas, we had no whiskey. Not even organic, free range whiskey.
