IQSC

Stumbling upon a book of Nancy Crow's improvisational quilts over a decade ago got me interested in quilts and art quilts. It was a thrill for me to experience the visual intensity of her quilts in person at the International Quilt Study Center when I was in Lincoln in June.



The building is very attractive. The twelve million dollar facility was privately funded. Contributions from quilting guilds all over the world are recognized on panels on the first level.



The IQSC has two large areas for seminars, bees, or other events. I wish it had more than the two upstairs gallery spaces. The curators have done a nice job incorporating complementary paintings and prints from the Sheldon Art Gallery, and baskets and pottery from the anthropology collections of the Nebraska State Museum to enhance understanding of quilt design and construction.

You can watch the work in the quilt conservation area through a huge window on the first level. Later in the summer the virtual gallery and computerized quilt design programs will come online at the center's website. There are two booths for making audiovisual recordings of quilt stories to be archived. If I made a quilt for a grandchild, for example, I could make a recording about the quilt. In theory, my great-great grandchildren could access that recording in the distant future. You could also record something telling what you know about your great-great grandmother's quilt. I could tell the story of my Kansas storm quilt.

There was an all black quilt from Japan that blew me away, and one from India with a totally different type of stitching. One group of quilts explored the relationship between quiltmaking and scherenschnitte papercutting.

Listening to the comments of the men and women in the gallery was interesting. Obviously, some of them had planned their vacation travel through Lincoln specifically to visit the IQSC. The men visitors were not just humoring their wives. I could tell they were very informed collectors, and one man was definitely a quilter himself. The center will be good for Lincoln's economy.

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Sleepless Walking Down O, P, and Q

More thoughts on moving mental furniture:

By the time I was seven, I was spending lots of mental energy fighting off sleep by visualizing the route from Lincoln to Pierce, Nebraska. I would imagine walking the 120 miles from my house to Grandma's, by way of Seward, Columbus, Madison, Norfolk, and Hadar ("Hello Hadar, See Ya Later!"). I would visualize the Blue Boot shoe store signs and windmills along the two-lane highways just in case I ever had to run away from home, or perhaps be called upon to assume the role of my parents just like Bert Park's description of the duties of Miss America's runner-up.

What are my little preschoolers visualizing to keep from surrendering to a nice afternoon nap? What mental furniture are they rearranging? What routes are they reviewing? Why do they fight so hard against the after-lunch siesta cherished by everyone from college freshman to senior citizen? It's the sort of thing that makes me lose my marbles...

We all have things we fret about to ward off sleep or to retrieve sleep at two a.m. I review the Seven Dwarfs, the Seven Deadly Sins, the strange names of the Goss sisters (Loy, Billy, Vin, Effa Dale, and Alice June), the three members of the superband Cream (I forget Jack Bruce). "The whole nine yards" refers to machine gun ammo. It was Bobby Gentry who sang "Ode to Billy Joe". Igneous, sedimentary, metamorphic. Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived. The Greek alphabet--pi rho sigma tau upsilon phi chi psi omega won't ya go to sleep!

Yesterday at the post office after writing out the Express Mail and customs forms to mail the camera battery charger to Italy, I couldn't remember the four number PIN for my debit card. Yet I can blurt out the fourteen numbers of my library card with ease.

My dad and I have tried mental strolling down the main street of Pierce from the 1920s through the 1970s. Other times I contemplate the shimmering, revolving Hamm's beer sign with the bear in the canoe I saw walking into the package store in Columbus, Nebraska, that time when the public restrooms in the park along the river were locked. Must have been my first time in a tavern, as I can still see it clearly over forty years later. Maybe 1963... Hamms the beer refreshing...Hamms the beer refreshing...



I've lost the ability to name the counties of Nebraska by their assigned car license plate numbers based on population. Yes, Lancaster was 2, Douglas 1, Sarpy 3, Hall 8, and Platte 10. I've forgotten the rest, even Red Willow County. Colfax? That's something to worry about at two or three a.m.



Some nights I attempt an imaginary 1974 university pub crawl. These sleepless icy sidewalk treks begin at 13th and Q Streets inside the Hong Kong Pizza King, the spiritual home of ham fried rice. They head west to Casey's at about 11th and P with the chili dogs, then across the street to the tavern that had dime draws. What was its name? Across P again past Der Loaf Und Stein, the Greek hangout, which was later transformed into a quiche/french onion soup/spinach salad/fern bar. Then down the alley from 13th to 14th, from O to P to Barrymore's.

Barrymore's was my favorite space. The bar was in the backstage area of the old Stuart Theater. What could be finer than sipping a bourbon sour while staring up into the catwalks? Maybe having a sandwich of cream cheese, walnut, pimentos, and olives on rye?

Back into the icy alley toward 14th and the Zoo Bar. Paying the cover charge for live blues from Chicago. Or maybe a stop at The Watering Hole where the decor was peanut shells and lost car keys nailed on the wooden beams?

Do rabbits contemplate their fortune cookies after lights out? I've been dreaming that Norton, the class rabbit, got loose in the Walgreens where my sons used to work. The bunny would be better off picking up take-out from Hong Kong Pizza King and planning his next escape up Highway 81 through Humphrey and David City.

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Feels like painting in oils

This stitching project feels the most like painting yet. I'm playing with layers of opacity and translucency, with line and shapes. My goal is a backlit view of a gourd vine on a fence with a majestic orb spider and web among the browning leaves.

The colors are the earth pigments Richard Trickey listed for our Oil Painting 201 palette in the drafty Richards Hall classroom: raw umber, burnt umber, raw sienna, burnt sienna, yellow ochre, and ultramarine blue. Colors of rich compost, primordial stew, and fossil fuel meet mixtures of turp and linseed oil...

The design uses positive and negative collage concepts from Gail Butt's Drawing, Composition, and Watercolor classes. How many times do I contemplate his definition of drawing as "linear, monochromatic, or incomplete"? Whether I cook, write, or stitch, I think of his color lecture about "delicate, rich, or bold".

The process of stitching is my on-going internal discussion with James Eisentrager about saving and discarding parts of a painting. Eisentrager particularly warned about avoiding "the precious save" of the favorite section when it impairs the development of the whole form. In my mind he sits at that gray university desk in his smoky office patiently opening my mind to large decisive areas of creamy cake frosting or clear broth, instead of a picture full of anxious narrow strokes (or stitches).



© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Happening by a fortunate accident or chance

That is the definition of fortuitous. It was hard locating a visitor parking space on the UN-L East Campus when I went to the quilt show in the Home Ec building. I parked Dad's car in front of the Plant Sciences building, and went inside to obtain a visitor parking permit from the first office I encountered. The guys lounging in the Forestry office didn't have any permits, so they sent me across the hall. The woman in that office didn't have the key to the file cabinet where the permits were kept. She sent me up the stairs to Entomology. I'm so glad she did.

Hanging on the wall behind the desk in the Entomology department office was a gorgeous poster of bees and cherry blossoms and postage stamps. It had a website, http://www.pollinator.org/, that I managed to remember until I got back home to Texas. Got my permit, and went on to the show of quilts of the 1930's entitled, "Recycling and Resourcefulness".

Back at Dad's house, I chatted with him and with his housekeeper about the quilt show. We dug out the quilt I remember so well from childhood, "Grandmother's Flower Garden". From my earliest years its hexagons inspired our play. Sometimes the hexagons represented blooms. Other times we pretended the contiguous green pieces were the sidewalk around the flower beds at Lincoln's Sunken Garden. Our paper dolls dressed in original crayola fashions walked these sidewalks on lazy afternoons. We spent hours avoiding sleep at naptime by discussing favorite colors, patterns, and combinations of fabrics. I loved the perfect fit of the geometry.

My parents were both engineers, and I was aware of Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes nearly as soon as my dad built my Tiny Tears doll a Tinker Toy swingset. I wanted the colorful quilt to balloon up into floral domes, perfect homes for our troll dolls and Liddle Kiddles!



Dad told stories of how quilts were made by his aunts and grandmother, and other women of Pierce, Nebraska during the Depression years. Some of those ladies became my first pen pals. Our mail exchanges gave me a new fascination--postage stamps. I'm sure Aunt Em would like the new pollination postage stamps!



© 2007 USPS. All Rights Reserved.

I love the interlocking blocks of the beautiful postage stamps, just as I love the interlocking hexagons, and the cycle of Reduce-Reuse-Recycle illustrated by the quilts of the 1930s:

Come summer, Post Offices will be abuzz with the release of the Pollination stamps. The 20-stamp booklet consists of four stamps arranged in two alternate and interlocking blocks-of-four. The intricate design of these four beautiful stamps emphasizes the ecological relationship between pollinators and plants and suggests the biodiversity necessary to ensure the viability of that relationship.

Artist Steve Buchanan created an intricate graphic scheme for the stamps that emphasizes the ecological relationship between pollinators and plants and also hints at the biodiversity necessary to ensure the future viability of that relationship. To that end, the four different stamps are arranged in two alternate blocks that fit together like interlocking puzzles. In one block the pollinators form a central starburst. In the other block, the flowers are arranged in the center.

Returning to Texas I learned that the preschoolers would study honeybees and hexagons this week. The classroom teacher ordered the free poster from the Pollinator website, and the free garden wheel. They arrived almost immediately. The poster would be a beautiful addition to any classroom. How fun that I could show the students photos of Dad's "Grandmother's Flower Garden" quilt during our hexagon week, and talk to them about the generations working together to make a quilt. I read them Lesa Cline-Ransome's Quilt Counting. The words do not flow trippingly off the tongue, but the illustrations by James Ransome are glorious paintings.





© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder

Docent So Close To Me

Docent so close to me, don't stand so close to me! I want to have the mental and physical space to form my own reactions to the art in your small gallery. I'm quite harmless. No intent to stick my chewed Doublemint gum on a work of art.

Immediately upon arrival at the Hillestad Textiles Gallery at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to view the "Recycling & Resourcefulness: Quilts of the 1930s" exhibit a volunteer docent-in-training attached herself to me like one of those non-skid bathtub daisies on an early 1970s bathtub. Ecstatic that the gallery had a live visitor, she made me her bosom buddy to practice her spiel and stayed within hug-ability range. I've had a marriage with greater adhesion, and certainly less conversation.

This was not the most aggravating experience of suction docent syndrome, but very annoying anyway. I've been involuntarily conjoined to docents at the MADI and the MAC in Dallas, thePhilbrook in Tulsa, and the Wheelwright in Santa Fe. Thanks to the Valley House Gallery for being less velcro!

Don't stand, don't stand so
Don't stand so close to me
Don't stand, don't stand so
Don't stand so close to me
Don't stand, don't stand so
Don't stand so close to me


© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder

I haven't had a good night's sleep since Hector was a pup.

Twas a hellacious night of mental three-headed dog-walking, dental drilling dreams, and idiothermostatic irregularities. Somewhere between the hotter-than-Hades throwing off of blankets, the post-flash chills, and trying to remember if Dr. Deavers was the dentist or the doctor in old-timey Pierce, Nebraska, I got hung up on Dad's phrase, "since Hector was a pup."

My Auntie Em used the expression "since Hector was a pup" often, so I sense it came from the early 1900s. In Miss Madsen's seventh grade English class we studied Edith Hamilton's Mythology and Homer's Iliad. Hector, as everyone knows, was the true Trojan hero slain by Achilles and dragged all over tarnation in front of his parents, Priam and Hecuba. Dr. Louise Pound expounded in her 1927 work, The Etymology of an English Expletive, on the origin of "tarnation".

Feeling dragged through the cycle for yet another night, I'm wondering what's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba that he should weep for her. Maybe Hecuba is tossing and turning, and keeping Priam awake all night. Maybe Hecuba is considering asking her doctor if hormone therapy is right for her. How did hellfire and damnation get twisted into tarnation? How do carnations get dyed all those tutti-frutti colors for bouquets for sorority initiations?

When was Hector a pup? Was Hector a bully? Why is Heck a nickname for Henry? Who were the other two lawmen known as the "Three Guardsmen"* of the Oklahoma Territory besides Heck Thomas? Was Heck the one who killed Bill Doolin? What Led Zeppelin song had the howling dogs of doom?

No Quarter (Jones/Page/Plant)
Close the door, put out the light.
You know they won't be home tonight.
The snow falls hard and don't you know?
The winds of Thor are blowing cold.
They're wearing steel that's bright and true
They carry news that must get through.
They choose the path where no-one goes.
They hold no quarter.
Walking side by side with death,
The devil mocks their every step
The snow drives back the foot that's slow,
The dogs of doom are howling more
They carry news that must get through,
To build a dream for me and you
They choose the path where no-one goes.
They hold no quarter. They ask no quarter.
The pain, the pain without quarter.
They ask no quarter.
The dogs of doom are howling more!

Then, of course, we must consider why heck is a euphemism for hell. Hell is a euphemism for having to walk the three-headed dog before you've had three mugs of black coffee. Cerberus is the three-headed hound guarding Hades. A cold day in hell is when Cerberus licks the pump and freezes his tongue on the handle.

*Chris Madsen and Bill Tilghman
© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder

Campus Walk

Since Tuesday evening I've been walking across my memory campus. Maybe you've had similar thoughts. As my heart goes out to the students, parents, faculty, and administrators at Virginia Tech, my brain tries to wrap itself around the horror. Underlying real life in the present, a continuous loop video is playing. It's the remembered walking and walking and biking around my university campus as if filmed through the shaky lens of my naive, inhibited, careless, opinionated, generous, self-centered, invincible, scared-sheep student 1974 self.

Names of the buildings scroll past in the supertitles. Learning my way from Harper-Schramm-Smith to the the third floor of Burnett, the huge lecture halls in Henzlik and Hamilton, or the odd 501 Building way over on Tenth Street for calculus. Riding my yellow bike in the snow between the power plant and Mabel Lee, around my dear Morrill Hall and Bessey to get a dime coffee in a paper cup from the machine in Oldfather. Late to Econ in CBA when sorority sisters can't quit Luke and Laura on General Hospital. Chaining my Schwinn to the rack outside Avery for the interdisciplinary Intro to Eastern European Studies with Jerry Petr. Cigarette smoke everywhere. Shortcuts through courtyards and quadrangles. Gravel parking lots. Grimy couches in the Union.

Honors freshman English with Miss Daniels and flickering fluorescent lights in the basement of Andrews. Savoring Tom Jones, Ibsen, and Lear. Rhetoric in a June mini-session with the amazing, rumpled Dudley Bailey, but without air-conditioning. Gene Hardy's childrens' literature class making Little Red Riding Hood all about-gasp-sexuality. Poetry-writing with Greg Kuzma.

That's the one that hits me. A dozen poetry students in a room no bigger than the offering envelope for Sunday School at First Plymouth. Pseudo-nonchalant lolling around the one table, always waiting to see if Kuzma would show up. So vulnerable, reading our little poems aloud out into the cosmos to be diced, minced, bludgeoned like baby seals. Not making eye-contact with the creepy guy in his camo. Yes. The older student back from Nam writing bloody raping poems and going off on long, violent monologues. Kuzma being hip to all that, so we felt like such high school babies.

Sitting outside Andrews on a stone bench that sunny, frozen afternoon all inspiration and deadline desperation, pouring out poems in blue fountain pen with cedar waxwings in the bushes. Tears.


© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder

Sherwood Forest and Emerald City

After enjoying some afternoon nature walks, we are considering the incredible variety of greens around us during art class. The children are mixing paints to make a wider variety of greens, and trying to use descriptive terms for the colors we mix. Greens vary in value, the relative darkness or lightness of the color. Greens vary in hue, their place along the spectrum between yellow and blue. Green also varies in saturation, being bright or dull. Greens can be described with these terms, for example dark yellow green or bright blue green. The color variations can also be described with more fancy specific names like lime, chartreuse, jade, swamp, pine, hunter, avocado, army…or even mint chocolate chip ice cream green!

Color adds such richness to our experience of the world. Color names add important distinctions to our descriptions of the world. Did you eat a cucumber, a pickle, or a Hot Wheels classic 1968 Camaro? I dunno. It was something green.

Growing up around Cornhusker football fanatics, it bothered me that the team colors for the University of Nebraska, and its fiendish rivals Oklahoma U, Alabama U, and Arkansas U were all red and white. We could not ALL be the best team in the known universe! We could not all yell “Go Big Red!” It was comforting to learn that NU was the Scarlet and Cream, which was clearly superior to Oklahoma’s Crimson and Cream, Arkansas’ Cardinal Red, or that dastardly Crimson Tide of Alabama.

Will it ever be important to know how to mix twelve different greens? Yes, this knowledge has a very practical application. As a MOBO, (a Mother Of Boys Only), I received many requests for army camouflage birthday cakes. The food coloring box has red, yellow, green, and blue. You’ve got a brand new package of plastic toy soldiers and flags for the cake top, but you have to frost the cake. The guests will arrive in less than an hour. Green is for GO!


© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder

Merlin Goes Mod

Merlin, the wizard of Arthurian tales, has been portrayed as a time-traveler. My students discovered that Merlin had spent some time visiting the last half of the twentieth century, a time most mod, hip, and groovy, when they interior decorated their wizard towers last week. They also gave his tower a moderately mad scientist look with a telescope on the roof and a chemistry lab by the fireplace. The spells and potions books they made were quite similar to Texas roadkill recipes. I just wish we'd had enough time to make little Oster blenders so Merlin could make nutritious/delicious [eye of] newt smoothies.



History may look back on the past forty years of architecture and interior design with a critical newt eye. I've lived through flocked wallpaper, foil wallpaper, and flocked foil wallpaper. Do-it-yourselfers put crinkle veined mirror tiles on bathroom, living room, and allegedly elegant dining room walls. Both VWs and bathtubs got groovy daisies. The bathtub ones were non-slip, at least. Law students studied in eyeball chairs at the University of Nebraska. Student apartments were hung with black light posters. New construction homes and ancient mildewed basements both got very scary shag carpets in red, burnt orange, and avocado green.



Perhaps strangest of all were the early-1980s personalized custom travel vans with shag carpet on most surfaces. These family vacation get-away van exteriors were done up with airbrush paintings that were part NRA hunting billboards, part carnival midway caricatures, and part drunken truck driver tattoos. A Nascar vehicle looks sophisticated and understated by comparison. That may have been too much for Merlin, as the fad seemed to disappear from the face of the United States as if someone said, "Abracadabra, please and thank you very much!"

Peter Harlaub wrote in the 10/04/05 San Francisco Chronicle about this mysterious disappearance. His story is, "Once, custom vans ruled the road" is worth a read.



My students didn't have to travel through time to style their wizard towers. We received a goodly batch of gift wrap samples that took the place of foil, flock, and crinkle veins. It was a magical riot of cut and paste, plus glitter tempera paint! If only we'd had some shag rug samples--and a disco ball or two.

My trail of bread crumbs

Last evening I got to hear the Dallas Symphony Orchestra perform "Pictures At an Exhibition" conducted by the Russian guest Andrey Boreyko. The music was clear and light, rich, dark and frightening, bold and triumphant. I liked Andrey Boreyko's interpretation very much. Felt like I had been wandering in the woods of a Grimm fairy tale without my bread crumbs. I sat above the stage level, which was good for seeing the harps and bells and other unusual featured instruments. It makes me happy when the tuba player gets such rousing applause!

My college watercolor professor, Gail H. Butt, Jr., would have been eighty-two this weekend. In my drawing, painting, and composition classes with Professor Butt, I heard his lecture about "rich, delicate, and bold" many times, usually reinforced with recordings of classical and jazz music, and the smell of his cigar.

Scott Cantrell's review in the Dallas Morning News comes straight from my UNL watercolor class:

Rounding out the concert was a vividly characterized Mussorgsky-Ravel Pictures at an Exhibition, with great care over gradations of volume and color. At big moments, Mr. Boreyko was even sensitive enough to factor in the generous reverberation of the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center.

The Lincoln Symphony Orchestra performed "Pictures At an Exhibition" for an assembly at Millard Lefler Junior High in 1970. Made quite an impression on me! Then in 1972, Emerson, Lake, and Palmer had a rock version of Mussorgsky's composition. I have to admit that my favorite album in 1972 was "Fragile" by Yes. If I had to listen to much of the ELP or of "Roundabout" today I would get a needle-sharp sinus headache! We won't even consider Procul Harum's "Whiter Shade of Pale", or the Moody Blues' "Knights in White Satin".



Mussorgsky was Russian, so his folktale inspirations are Slavic, not Germanic like them good old Grimm Boys of the consulting firm Hansel and Gretel, LLP. The wise and powerful Baba Yaga, crone/witch/earth goddess, is a fascinating archetype. Plus, she has architectural implications. Baba Yaga is sometimes cruel, and other times kind, but she always lives in a house that walks about on chicken legs. I wish my condo could go wandering around the neighborhood on skinny legs in fluffy slippers when I have insomnia.

So nice to learn there's a reason for the chicken legs:

A "cabin on chicken legs with no windows and no doors" in which Baba Yaga dwells sounds like pure fantasy. In fact, this is an ordinary construction popular among hunter-nomadic peoples of Siberia of Uralic (Finno-Ugric) and Tungusic families. This was an ingenious invention to preserve supplies against animals during long absence. A doorless and windowless log cabin is built upon supports made from the stumps of 2-3 closely grown trees cut at the height of 8-10 feet. The stumps, with their spreading roots, give a perfect impression of "chicken legs". The only access into the cabin is via the trapdoor in the middle of the floor. Bears are strong, smart and stubborn enough to break into any door, but they cannot use a ladder or climb a rope to reach the trapdoor. A similar, but smaller construction was used by Siberian pagans to hold figurines of pagan gods.

I'm going up in my treehouse now, and pulling up the ladder to keep out bears. It's time to start preparing for the June 17th DSO concert featuring
Stravinsky: Firebird Ballet Suite (1919)
Mozart: Divertimento in D major
Vivaldi: Violin Concerto in C minor "Il Suspetto"
Tchaikovsky: Sérénade mélancolique
Debussy: Prélude à l'Après-midi d'une faune

Why did the turkey cross the road?

The image flashed through my mind again. A wild turkey racing across highway 169 just north of the huge Amazon.com distribution center near Coffeyville, Kansas in mid-March. What was it thinking? Was something chasing it? Black/green feathers shining under a bright blue sky. Yellow forsythia in bloom near the farmhouse. Flagman waving just one direction of traffic through at a time. My mind an old school film projector that clicks as the reels turn. Turkey running fence flashing sun black green blue yellow construction orange slow moving traffic fast moving turkey.



This is a poor reproduction of an old friend from the Sheldon Gallery's permanent collection. I was lucky to find Theordore Wendel's 1886 oil, "Girl with Turkeys, Giverny" on display last month. The Sheldon had a delightful grouping in the Rohman Family Galleries, including one room full of Robert Henri's portraits.



For fifteen years the Sheldon sculpture garden has been the site for "Jazz In June", a free series of concerts on Tuesday evening. It's been many years since I was in Lincoln in the month of June, but an old "Jazz In June" t-shirt is a star in my art classroom. It features a picture of a mosquito playing a trumpet. Ever since I put "the mosquito shirt" in the smock box a few years back, it's been easier to get kids to put on smocks. It's now a game to see who ends up with "the mosquito shirt," and other shirts have also acquired titles and status.

Baby Jeff and Baby Katie

Sometimes I get mixed up. I sort e-mails into my Trash bin instead of into my Recycling folder. Maybe I should rename the Recycling folder "Condo Waste Diversion". Then Trash could be called "Deep Six".

These days I push wheely recycling carts around the condo complex. Recalling a hot day in 1983 or '84 when my college buddy and I pushed our stroller babies around the UNL campus. How did Baby Jeff and Baby Katie become grad students?? They were just playing in the red wagon, and out in the inflated wading pool!

Sorta Supper, Kinda Cuisine

I am auditioning for my own cooking show on the local cable access channel, or at least that's how I feel. Dad is here for an extended visit. I am cooking. A lot. At least by my standards. Normally, I am good for one home-cooked meal per day, preferably breakfast; one fresh fruit smoothie; one salad; and then one Bonus delicious meal per week for the Lunch Gang.

Dad sits at the table to visit with me while I cook, but sometimes he just stares as I attempt to put together a meal with wholesome sidedishes. "And what would that be called?," he asks.

[I need to work up more patter for my cooking show. Witty banter with the celebrity cohost. Product placement. Testimonials for smoke detectors and grease-cutting cleansers.]

A. "Well, Dad, this is my famous Kinda Chinese Chicken Without Cashews." Dad had already eaten the cashews to go with his beer.

B. "Well, Dad, this is my famous Tostita-less Spanish Pork Chops With Canned Black Beans, 2 for $1.00 On Special".

C. "Well, Dad, this is my world-reknowned Roast Beef With Spackling Paste Mashed Potatoes", so you need to sing the song about "Scram Gravy Ain't Wavy". You've always said Scram Gravy was made with cornstarch.

*****
The closest I get to gourmet ingredients is the jar of Lyle's Golden Syrup given to me by the dear ex-wife of my organic cousin. It is GOOD STUFF. Put some in a little Tupperware container that still has a matching lid. Add the last of the soy sauce, some vinegar, some lemon juice, a shake of cayenne pepper and of ginger, and 2T of cornstarch. If you use a measuring spoon, go back two spaces and do not collect $200. Put the matching lid on and shake it all up. My preschoolers would say, "shake your booty," which is another sign that our culture has gone to hell in a hand-basket. Cook some cut up chix boobs in the electric skillet in hot Crisco oil. Add cut up celery, summer squash, red pepper (or other colors), mushrooms maybe, frozen peas, and leftover Minute Rice. When it all seems warm and crispy, pour the Golden Booty Shake Mix over everything, and stir as it cooks for about two minutes. As an afterthought, set the table. Get out the chow mein noodles for crunch.

Back in the Wonder Years, I was a Camp Fire Girl. In sixth grade we had to have a progressive dinner to meet a basic requirement. The girls divided into three groups to plan for the dinner. My group chose a Mexican theme. I was blasted out of my sheltered childhood by this introduction to Doritos and pinatas. The next group chose to cook Italian. I learned about the joys of candles stuck in wine bottles, spaghetti, and Ragu. Last in the progressive dinner was the Hawaiian group. Terrifying stuff of coconuts, pineapples, and Jello.

The next year in 4H Club I learned of another cuisine--the one made from canned corn, Quaker Oats, ground meat, and cream of mushroom soup. This is the second tier of comfort food, after food actually made by my mother and grandma. 4H cuisine is down-to-basics satisfying. My "4H You Learn To Bake" pamphlet is grease-stained, water-rippled, and held together with yellowed Scotch tape. We were learning to bake in 1967-68. It was a tense time for our nation, and I was a very tense junior high student. Garrison Keillor can carry on about ketchup solving all our problems, but I think 4H cuisine might work better.

In college I learned about Chinese food at the Hong Kong Pizza King just south of the UNL campus. The only link I can find on Google leads to a conservative forum discussing gay Norwegian elk, immigration, and Minutemen. As a student in the mid-Seventies, Hong Kong Pizza King was an inviting spot the size of a postage stamp just beyond campus for meeting friends and eating egg rolls. The windows would steam up from Thanksgiving to St. Patrick's Day against the solid layer of packed snow and ice on the sidewalk.

Steamed windows make everything taste better. Make a note to the set designer for my cooking show.

Long May It Wave

We sold the Batmobile yesterday to an auto salvage yard dealer who drove down from Ada, OK. Chris looked only slightly older than my seventeen-year-old son, but has already bought, rebuilt, and sold nineteen Nissan Z cars, and is the boss of his auto supply company. He loaded the Batmobile with amazing care and concern. The 1990 300ZX only lived with us nine months, but it will always leave an oil spot in our hearts. It was far more of a symbol of a Dream than an actual driveable vehicle. I'm thinking we should sell commemorative ribbon-shaped auto magnets...



One-point perspective is teachable in elementary art class.

Two-point is possible if the kids are older.

Three-point gives me the willies just thinking about it. My college drawing professors sent us off to the Sheldon Art Gallery and the UN-L steam energy plant to do three-point drawings, and I never fully recovered.




If you need any parts call and ask for Chris:

Dave's Auto Sales & Parts
1901 N. Broadway
Ada, OK 74820

Parts: 580 436 7149
Toll Free: 1 888 436 7149
Auto Sales: 580 436 7130
Fax: 580 436 7145
Email: dasp@davesparts.com

Chris can help you get into a Nissan Turbo that will retain its value before the 2006 Z Car Convention here in Dallas!

Optional consumerism

As a very young Cornhusker football fan, just after the dinosaurs died out, I was impressed that the Kansas State fans had lavender toilet paper to toss down onto the football field at Memorial Stadium. Nowadays I am frustrated by the search required to find some plain white or recycled brown paper towels amid the tacky purple drawings of herbs and tea cups. It's just a paper towel for wiping up spills, not a personal aesthetic statement for heavens sake!

My young students often come to blows just to get the pairs of hot pink Fiskars scissors. "Scissors are a tool," I say. "It doesn't matter what color they are. It matters how you use them." I tell my high school senior son that it doesn't matter where he goes to college. It matters how he applies his abilities when he gets there.

We are overwhelmed with choices that are so often insignificant. In my spells of depression I've been unable to choose between cans of stewed tomatoes or Milton Bradley games for birthday party gifts. I've been sucked into panic attacks when I had to order from a menu. The first time I saw a "designer" switchplate cover I felt a jolt of future shock. We are so caught up in choices for meaningless items that we accomplish nothing. Go to a mall, and you will see the buzzards of meaningless choice soaring on the hot air up-drafts above the asphalt parking lot watching for dead meat.

I wasted time today searching out personal checks that reflect the real me. I have been reflecting the real me with Audubon bird checks for several boxes now, but they were a luxury I can't really justify. Just for one day it would be interesting to work the check-out lane at the grocery store to see what checks people buy----Sponge Bob with Bible verses. Most of the choices look like the cheapo kitchen towels at the Dollar Store. I ended up with some dragonfly checks that don't contribute any money to a nonprofit cause. I couldn't find any checks with perimenopausal women peering over their bifocals telling the baggers to carry the $108 of groceries out to the Buick. I'd like to mail my gas bill off with a check proclaiming "Hot flashes save energy", but I can't even find checks that Shave the Whale.

What I really wish is that all checks would remind us that we vote our conscience with every dollar we spend. Choose wisely.

Jazz Sneaky Smock Attack

My dear, demented friend sent me a link to the Daily Nebraskan today about a university opera production of Madama Butterfly. I spent many years in Lincoln reading The Daily Nebraskan aka The Rag. That is how I became a NYTimes crossword puzzle junkie. The Kimball Recital Hall, where the opera will be performed, is a nice hall. I saw many music and dance performances there. It sits on the south side of the sculpture garden. The art department building, Woods Hall is on the north side. My dear watercolor professor's classroom windows looked out on the garden and toward the Kimball. I made countless drawings and paintings outside in the sculpture garden. The front of the Kimball Hall is designed to be a band shell for outdoor concerts in the sculpture garden, so it looks like it has a Neanderthal forehead. The third side of the rectangle is the simply elegant Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery designed by Philip Johnson.


The building is far more beautiful than his Amon Carter Art Museum in Ft. Worth, Texas. The last side of the rectangle is formed by the oldest building on the University of Nebraska-Lincoln campus, Architecture Hall.

This very funky 19th century building shows up in the movie "Terms of Endearment". It was while Debra Winger was in town to film the movie that she and our governor, Bob Kerrey, future member of the 9/11 commission, began their affair. At that time my boyfriend lived in a third floor apartment that overlooked the patio of the governor's mansion, and the driveway to the gubenatorial garage. The highway patrol officers would chauffeur Ms. Winger to the mansion.....the grill would be hot.....

The last time the boys and I drove up there, in 1999, we went to a Jazz in June concert in the sculpture garden. We got a t-shirt at the concert that is now the star of the Smock Sneak Attack. It sports an image of a giant mosquito playing the trumpet.

Nowadays that mosquito t-shirt provokes a new buzz. After years of expecting preschool kids to don a paint shirt without complaints, and having my expectations drowned in a sea of whining and resistance, I started a new game. I just have to announce that it is time for the Smock Sneak Attack, and each kid quivers with excitement about having a t-shirt popped over his head while he is pretending extravagantly to not expect it. The t-shirts are becoming costumes and characters! The jazz shirt from Lincoln is the star. Many kids also groove on my sons old soccer and baseball uniforms sporting the number three.

Walking the labyrinth

This is the day I've been looking forward to for the whole summer. Today I will visit the Museum of International Folk Art, and tonight I will attend the Santa Fe Opera production of Don Giovanni.

My previous visit to Santa Fe with young boys did not allow much time in art museums. And that was a good thing for everyone but me! We have wonderful memories of Bandelier's cliff dwellings, the Los Alamos science museum, hikes in the ski area, wading around Nambe Falls, and taking other excursions. My ex generously watched the boys for three hours one afternoon so I could visit the Palace of the Governors and the Santa Fe Museum of Fine Arts by myself. I never knew about Museum Hill.

My life was very different then. Sometime soon I will post some links about Anxiety Disorder. The summer of 1992 was the very worst time in my life, but I never lost my interest in returning to Santa Fe.

I allowed plenty of time for getting lost, so I arrived on Museum Hill before the museums opened. My swimming buddy and I have always wanted to walk a labyrinth, so I walked the labyrinth on the museum plaza. I wasn't meditative, but just astounded by the gorgeous view each time I took a turn in the path. My composition professor used to explain that you can never go wrong with a blue/brown color scheme. The blue mountains and flowers against the adobe walls and terra cotta tiles with the turquoise sky and dark log beams seem to support his thesis! He would then tell us of the accent colors--pimento red, lime green, and cobalt blue oil pastels. A wash of cobalt violet...silver ink mixed with phthalo green wash and lighter fluid to add the sagebrush. Cadmium yellow butterflies flit around this painter's paradise.

Over-working

I am reading through nearly thirty-year-old notes written in Professor Butt's classes. Some are written in Ebony pencil on brown paper towels from the classroom dispenser. Others are written in ink on scraps of quality drawing papers. All are loaded with memories.

"Stop your work when you don't have to do anything else: don't do all that you want to do to it. Pull off prior to compulsive/therapeutic!"

Often parents of my little preschoolers ask me if little Buffy or Skippy will ever paint anything besides edge-to-edge swoops of mud. I try to explain that their child had a pretty fierce T-Rex in that painting at one point, but the enjoyment of the tactile experience of painting eventually submerged the T-Rex. The tactile experience is developmentally important. Then I explain that my professors told me that getting a student to stop work on a painting was the most difficult lesson of all. Sometimes I can smell Mr. Butt's cigar when I give this little speech.

Mary Lou Williams

The three calligraphy brush strokes I learned are "bone", "needle", and "growth & decay"

Just last night I wrote a little story about the three college painting professors in the art department at the University of Nebraska thirty years ago who influenced my life. The story wasn't quite ready for prime time, so I only sent it to my college friends. By email reply I learned that the last surviving professor passed away yesterday. My reaction was immediate and physical--goosebumps, a sense of neon energy shooting through my arms, and a kick in the gut.

All day my mind has replayed scenes from Mr. Butt's classroom where I studied drawing, composition, and watercolors. In my mind's eye, the day is an overcast April Saturday. The air is heavy with tornado potential The sculpture garden below is rich in greens and pinks. The trees Mr. Butt has taught me to read are swaying and floating. I draw them with cobalt violet, and trace over the lines with a watery brush.

I have a privileged key to the classroom. The room is my sanctuary. I add silver ink and rubbing alcohol into the Windsor Newton "Neutral Gray" washes to create the loaded storm clouds above the paths of the sculpture garden.

Mr. Butt arrives. He lights a cigar, and unlocks the stereo cabinet to play some Mary Lou Williams piano jazz. I am mixing olive washes with hints of gold ink. Mr. Butt is watering his bromeliads. Bromeliads line the shelves in front of the windows, in all their varied greens. The clouds outside turn to charcoal and resemble a pregnant woman ten days after her due date.

To Mr. Butt for teaching me to know when the painting is finished, and to strive for clarity within richness.