Culture

The night the fish ate the circus

| maggiebird

My niece asked me to post this drawing I made for her and her sister several years ago. It came from a dream I had in which my nieces and I were called up onto the stage of a circus. (Had we seen Cirque du Soleil yet? I’m not sure.)

The dream was fun, perhaps inspired by my childhood desire to run away with the circus, a desire which had been fueled by the Disney movie, Toby Tyler. (Mr. Stubbs! Mr. Stubbs! I want to run away with you!) Then, what luck for a day dreaming 10-year old! A troupe of traveling circus performers set up a little ring in a nearby vacant lot and parked their travel trailers in our neighborhood.

My parents romantically called it a Gypsy circus. Where they really Rom? I don’t know. But, gypsy or not, they were fascinating. And when one of the little circus boys told me that he couldn’t play after dinner because he had to go do his chores—he had to feed the elephant!—I packed a hairbrush and a pair of clean underwear in my lunchbox, knocked on their trailer door, and told his mother I was running away with them to join the circus.

She was wiping a dish with a plain dishrag. She didn’t smile.  “You have a good family,” she said. “Go home.” And she closed the door in my face.

That was pretty much the end of my Toby Tyler aspirations. The next morning the circus was gone before I caught the school bus.

But dreams are a different act. In my calliope-filled dream of ringmasters in bird costumes and camels and strong men, lions and magicians, the music played and the crowd roared at our antics on stage. Then that little blue fish that you see in the bottom corner? He suddenly became a big fish. He opened his mouth and -slurp!- sucked the whole circus into his belly. And I woke up, brain on fire to draw this scene before it faded into the mental attic where dreams gather dust.

Some circus coolness

Know of a good circus? Leave a link in the comments.

Un beso del polvo

| maggiebird

Saturday I spent painting from the top of a hill where I had a great view of the bay. I love the bay, and am as proprietary about it as if I owned it outright.

This was turning out to be a rather sweet little 5×7 painting, and I was looking forward to finishing it up next Saturday. I was feeling pretty proud of myself. I put it on top of my palette saver to carry to the car, picked up the palette saver as I spied a brush I’d dropped and left on the ground.

I bent over to rescue the brush.

The painting slid off box.

The painting landed face first in the dirt.

Some of this dirt will brush off, but that smudge that looks like a kiss from the universe? It’s pretty well ground into the paint, and I don’t think it’s going anywhere.

Universe: 2,999,999
Margaret: 0

Happy New Year

| maggiebird

Small hearts
Watercolor
© Margaret Sloan 2012

I’ve been working with this bit of text quite a bit. The letters are Hebrew, but the words are Yiddish. In Yiddish, you would say (please forgive any mistakes in my transliteration): Dos kleine harts nemt arum di groise velt.

It means, loosely, small hearts hold the whole world.

I think it’s a good thing to post on this first day of Rosh Hashanah. In case you don’t know, that’s the high Jewish holiday when the gates of heaven open and you’ve got ten days to make or break your chance to get into the the book of life for another year.

I won’t misrepresent myself here. I am not Jewish; I’m an angry-at-G*d, disenchanted, fallen-by-the-wayside Christian. I don’t attend church, but I do attend High Holy day services with my fiddler. It makes him happy, and, truth be told, it makes me happy.

The way I understand the services I attend, we are supposed to come humbly to G*d and repent of all the bad things we’ve done the last year. But not only that; to deserve our inscriptions in the book of life, we are supposed to be nice to others (and the congregation where we attend includes the earth in the recipients to our niceness, something I can get behind wholeheartedly).

I honestly don’t know if I believe there’s a Big K*huna in heaven scribbling in a book of life, but I do think the world could use a big dose of niceness about now. I hope that in our small hearts we can cradle the world and help heal it of the anger and hate and meanness that hurts us all.

L’shanah tovah, all.

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Something at the window

| maggiebird

I don’t know how you’ll interpret this picture. Well, frankly, we never really know how anyone will interpret any picture. But some have more meanings embedded in the symbols. This on is more ambiguous. Are the children evil shades? Or just locked outside while their mother gets some needed rest? Either way, it’s scary.

A darkened window and someone peering in is one of those things that scare me witless.

True story (and aren’t they all?): While I was designing this painting, I was home alone. Alone on, yes, a dark and stormy night, the first one of the season. I was merrily drawing away in the silent house, enjoying the sounds of the storm, when something started knocking at the window. Jeepers creepers and yikes-a-bunga! I about lost my teeth from fright.

I don’t have cats anymore, or any pet to be a watcher for me, so I simply closed the shades, locked the doors, and hunkered down at my drawing table to work. Every so often there would be a clonk at the window, or on the side of the house. The motion detectors detected nothing. At least, they didn’t turn on the security lights, so I didn’t go investigating. That’s scary movie rule #1: girls should not investigate strange noises outside, alone, in the dark!

Yeah, I have to admit, when the mathematician got home, he investigated (he was not fed a steady diet of scary movies as a child, and as a result, does not know scary movie rules), and found the summer shade had come unhinged from the plastic sleeve that holds it against the wall, and the wind was blowing it around, and every so often it knocked against the house. No ghosts.

But it was a good cheap thrill while it lasted.

Days of miracles and smart phones

| maggiebird
Pen and ink
Copyright Margaret Sloan

I made a phone call to my mother a couple weeks ago using Google Voice. I sat at my kitchen table and chatted into my computer. It was the coolest thing.

Mind you, it’s mainly cool because for the last  5 or 6 years I’ve been with AT&T. During that time, I’ve not been able to use the phone in my house. I’ve had to stand in the street to make a call. Yakking on the phone at my kitchen table in my pajamas, with a cuppa and unkempt hair? What a luxury.

The farm in Oklahoma where my mom grew up didn’t have electricity, let alone a phone, until 1949. When I told her I was talking on the computer, my mom laughed. “It’s a far cry from the days when I was a little girl. If we wanted to talk on the telephone, we had to walk a few miles to the one farm that had a phone. That phone was an old hand-crank phone you had to yell into.”

Last week I got a super duper smart phone, a Droid X that does just about everything except wash my car.  And yes, I can use it in the house, at the kitchen table, to make phone calls! 

We are all shaking our heads at the wonder of it, and a Paul Simon song has been ear-worming my head ever since I got this silly phone.

These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all
The way we look to a distant constellation
That’s dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don’t cry baby, don’t cry

Mikado abridged

| maggiebird
Yum Yum and Nanki-poo

Some of the funniest entertainment at the Great Dickens Christmas Fair is in the Victoria & Albert Bijou Music Hall. This year they’re performing the Mikado in an hour, and it will make you laugh.

It’s like a send up of a Victorian Thespian Society putting on community theater in their bathrobes. Most of the voices are Gilbert & Sullivan worthy. Yum-yum can hit those high notes and be heard in the next county. Nanki-poo has a smooth tenor. But even if the actors don’t have an operatic voice, they are still fun to watch. Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner was very fun to watch as the actor (what are these player’s names anyway? Is there no cast list anywhere?) played a slightly nerdish Victorian banker-type who’d been cast into the role because he was just really funny. And the Mikado is as pompous as any businessman playing an emperor might be.

The Mikado and Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner

Plus, the play was a great sketching situation, as I could get a grip on what each actor looked like and have plenty of time to do gesture drawings as they posed and sang.

The Great Dickens Christmas Fair

| maggiebird

We kicked off the Christmas season with the Great Dickens Christmas Fair Sunday. It was delightful and entertaining as usual. Dickens and the Victorians practically invented my idea of Christmas, and I love the play-acting.

This year I went prepared to sketch with a Tombow dual brush pen, a Niji waterbrush, and several Staedtler pigment liners. I used the same 7″ x 7″ hard-bound Daler Rowney I used last year for my first foray into public sketching. I have to admit I still haven’t finished that journal, and besides, I thought it a proper and fitting way to round out the year.

I decided that I’d do at least 10 pages of sketching. I counted journal pages, and put a big number 10 on the tenth page so I’d know I’d reached my quota of sketching for the day.

And I did it.  Some of my pages aren’t anything I’d want to show anyone, but oddly, the least successful as sketches have the most possibilities for future projects. I’ll blog about the completed projects later.

Sketches I will show you

Polka at Fezziwig’s Dance Party

Fezziwig’s Dance Party was as fun as always. In fact, it was more fun this year because the players asked us to dance, and then they taught us to waltz.

Waltzing with someone who knows how to do it is an experience verging on the sublime, and I recommend you run right out and find someone to teach you. In fact, any of the old-style dances are barrels of fun, and I think everyone should try them. Fortunately, the Bay Area has a lot going on. Try the Period Events & Entertainments Re-Creation Society  (Peers) website. They sponsor scads of events, and their links page gives even more info on other local and national period reinactments and events.

Irish Step Dancer

The Siamsa le Cheile dancers put on a terrific exhibition of traditional and modern-style Irish, Scottish, and Cape Breton dancing. After all these years of being involved in the music and dance, this stuff still makes my heart stand up like a 4-year old kid and whirl around till it’s dizzy.

The Dark Garden window displays seem like a perfect spot to draw, since the models hold their creative and cute poses very well, and let’s face it, just about everybody looks better in a corset. Unfortunately, the windows are also a perfect photo-op, so there’s a lot of jockeying for position with photographers. Also, people do love to look over your shoulder and comment on your drawing. Maybe some year, when I’m more confident sketching in public,  I’ll get a hoop skirt, set up my easel, and become a part of the show.