No, Thursday's Out....

There was a moment on the choir tour when I got very snippy. The choir was migrating from the crypt, where we rehearsed, up to the quire, where we sang services. (YES! Yes, the choir sings in the quire! Is that not the best thing ever?! Also, if you play Scrabble with me, you can play the word “quire,” and I will not argue.) And right at that migration-upstairs moment, one of our handsome young choir rock stars came up to me and said, “Ma’am, would you have any ibuprofen?” (Pause.) I have told this story half a dozen times now, and each time, I stop here, and the other person gets it. They frown and   say something like, “As if you were a stranger?” or “Not even facial recognition?” I am wildly gratified that other people get it right away, because it makes me feel like my getting snippy wasn’t totally uncalled for.   Unlike some, I don’t mind Ma’am from strangers, nor from checkers,   salespeople, or the occasional Boy Scout. I am solidly into my Ma’am years, a...

My choir got to sing at St. George's Chapel, Windsor Castle just last month, so seeing it today felt strange and wonderful. We were granted an impromptu tour before we left, and the dean showed us which stone would be lowered down, when Queen Elizabeth died, to an area of underground passageways. There she would "rest," before she and Prince Philip, who had been "resting" down there since his own committal, could be interred together. Apparently, it was important that they be buried at the same time. I was there for the music, of course, but I just watched that stone go down, with her casket on top, and I remembered how much I liked the Dean and enjoyed his tour guiding skills. One of the choir folks asked him if he could tell us exactly where, below us, the Prince was, and he said, "The short answer is Yes, I could. The long answer is Yes, but then I'd have to kill you."

The only part of my COVID experience that was interesting was the taste-and-smell bit. I’m sharing it for you Biology types. I don’t know when I lost my sense of smell. My nose was so blocked as to be useless. But in my occasional moments of nasal breathing, I found it surprising that I could be feverish, sweaty, and unbathed, but not stink AT ALL. (I was by myself, and none too bright. That’s my excuse.) On about Day Four, I heated up some grocery-store Thai Chicken soup my daughter had dropped off. It had almost no taste. I thought: OH! There’s that loss-of-taste symptom! Unless… unless maybe it’s just bland grocery-store soup? But then I noticed that although I couldn’t taste any hot pepper flavor, (or chicken flavor, or anything), my tongue was burning. So! I had lost some sense of taste! The soup had water chestnuts in it. They had no flavor (not that they ever have much), but I was overly grateful that I could appreciate their texture, and the sound of them crunching. (Ov...

"Insomnia" is the name of the coffee shop where my paintings are hanging for the month of September, and I think it's a great name for a coffee shop.  It also neatly describes how I felt, in the two days before the show went up, when I was racing around trying to get everything prepared, and to remember what I'd forgotten. Prices? Labels? Contract? Artist Statement? (A "woeful genre," as Peter Schjeldahl writes in the New Yorker.) Cards? Stickum? Tape? Levels?  If I hadn't spent an extra week in England, isolating with COVID, I would have had nine days to prepare, and I'd pretty much left a bunch of tasks for that stretch of time. But then in the event, it was two days. Yikes. The night before I drove out there, I wrapped all the painting in brown paper, and numbered them, and put them in totes (except the really big ones, which were just stacked together) and ... one was missing. A big one. Too big to be hiding anywhere, and yet I still searched und...