My old life

My old life is gone, you know, and I'm okay with that. With a new baby, there's very little time to grieve the hundreds of little things I'll never, it seems, have time to do again, like go to a restaurant or see a movie (I know, everyone says we will do those things again, but that remains to be seen). Tonight, though, I'm feeling a bit soppy over the dumb, fun things I used to sometimes have the opportunity to do. I've been reading one of my favorite blogs, written by an unusually smart and thoughtful* 20-year-old college girl who bobs about going to classes and visiting yarn stores and eating in sandwich shops, and, wow, nostalgia just grips me as I do so! Tethered as I now necessarily am to the house (and for Christ's sake the Minnesota snow doesn't help), I miss a few small things, you know? I miss walking around downtown (any downtown) and popping into shops (oh, used bookstores!) to kill time, all the while wearing a cute vintage thrift-store coat, and then wandering about until I'm hungry and irritable, and stopping for a coffee and an onion bagel, and then relishing the relief of getting back home again, and taking off my shoes and picking up my knitting or a book, and cozying up next to the radio to hear the news as I knit or read or think about what to make for dinner.** Spending time alone, and having the pleasure of getting home after being (imagine!) away from the house for an afternoon -- those two things sum it all up, because that's the thing about this new life, Dear Reader: there is time for verily nothing besides taking care of my sweet little girl.*** And that's alright, and God knows I'd do it a thousand times over to keep her happy and healthy, but I will find myself remembering the unhampered flitting-about of my early adulthood. It can't be helped. In fact, I'm quite sure that a bit of fond, benign remembering of one's days of comparative liberty (and of the wearing of thrift-store coats) is a time-honored tradition among new moms, and is to be anticipated.

So many things about this new life, I assure you, make me immeasurably happy. You would not believe, for instance, how I love this baby's scent. It's quite dizzying; she just... smells like my baby. I love when she looks up at me with milk on her face, big-eyed and blissful. And how she sleeps with such sweet abandon. And even this: I hold very dear indeed the sound of angry protest Bee is capable of emitting when jostled a bit too much -- the very fact that she expresses herself so ardently and with such assuredness of her right to not be jostled. I adore it. And she smiles and laughs so easily -- a wide, toothless grin and a mirthful, hilariously voiceless laugh. I love, too, that -- for now at least -- Bee needs me, and seems so happy to see me when she wakes. So I will always be here. And someday when I can't hold her in my arms anymore, the world outside will still be waiting.

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* It's because she's British, I'm sure of it! How many American college students do you know who write/think/knit like this?
** Proper dinner, not the by-the-seat-of-our-pants power meals we've been bolting down each night to, all too often, the sound of a crying baby.
*** I can blog (one-handedly) and examine the Internet while sitting up with Bee all night every night. Every cloud has a silver lining, and in this case that silver lining involves groggy blogging.

Whoopee!

I ate my first whoopee pie at the age of 19 while doing the summer camp counselor thing at a sleepaway camp in New England. When whoopee pies were served for dessert in the dining hall, I'm not kidding, joyous shouts of "whoopee!" were emitted by kids and 'dults alike.*

I came up with these vegan banana whoopee pies last week, having at my disposal a pan like (but not as expensive as) this. And I whipped together a variety of things you'd expect** to create the creamy filling, with the hyper-banana-y flavor being owed to actual bananas and some cheating. Since this was sort of a baking experiment (successful, unlike sometimes), I didn't really keep track of what in god's name I was doing, so I can't share a recipe, but next time I'll write something down for my banana-lovin' comrades.

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* This is one of the happy memories of my various summer camp jobs in Connecticut, Ohio, and upstate New York. There are plenty of less idyllic memories too, such as complete and utter exhaustion, living with a dozen children in a tiny log cabin (not as cute as it sounds), and being taken to the emergency room after a camper-caused cycling accident somewhere in Vermont. But still... whoopee!
** Like this and this. Just because it's vegan doesn't mean it's healthy.

I retroactively wish for this.

That's right, I am adding this to my 1981 letter to Santa. Incidentally, did you know that the illustrator who created my girl Holly Hobbie is actually named Holly Hobbie?? How weird and interesting is that?

If you live in Chicago, you should go.

My friend Alicia* sings in the Chicago-area band
Oh, Alchemy. I created this nostalgic little poster to
advertise one of their December shows. Click to see
bigger and better!















* I've known Alicia since we became pen pals more than
twenty years ago!

Swimsuits in the snow, seventeen years ago

My high school friend Krista sent me this photo of us at age fifteen. We took a swimming class in high school, and apparently it was during the winter.

Thank you, Irvin Kerlan!

This morning I spent several hours looking, white-gloved, through boxes of original illustrations by some of my favorite children's book illustrators at the Kerlan. Theirs is one of the largest collections of children's book literature and illustrations in the world!

The pieces donated by Richard Scarry were my favorite. I've long admired his hilariously anthropomorphized watercolor-and-ink animals, and was really looking forward to seeing some of his original artwork today. What I found in the Richard Scarry boxes was a real treasure... no photos allowed, but I took mental snapshots of:

a) a "miscellaneous" (i.e. unpublished) painting featuring HUMANS! If you love Richard Scarry, you know that this is extremely rare! And...
b) a number of original, completed illustrations from Busy People. These really show Scarry's process. There were two layers to each image: watercolor on one sheet of paper, with ink line drawings on a transparent overlay. I noticed that he did all of his pencils with non-photo blue pencil. (An hour later, I was in the art supply store buying non-photo blue pencils.) AND...
c) An ink and watercolor book jacket study. It was for Tinker and Tanker out West (1961), a picture book I've yet to come across. The back of the jacket, featuring a few buffalo dressed in traditional Native American dress, had me in stitches. Scarry's mastery of visual gags is just unrivaled, you know?

I also pawed through a ton of Gustaf Tenggren's work. Tenggren was a classic Little Golden Books go-to illustrator during the Golden Age of the LGB.* And man, he did some great books, including The Tawny Scrawny Lion and, most famously, The Poky Little Puppy. Today I got the chance to look through all of the originals for The Poky Little Puppy, and that shit is beautiful! He even gave the Kerlan a few extra illustrations done for the book that didn't make it into the final picture book. I mean, Tenggren just drew that fkg puppy over and over and over and over.

Ooh, I also saw tons of Eric Carle originals! Nothing featuring the famously hungry caterpillar, but many beautiful cut-paper pieces from The Secret Birthday Wish. The back of one of those illustrations was scribbled with notes by Carle about how he'd had to repair the piece because he'd run into some archival issues. "I used to use rubber cement," he wrote, "but I didn't know that " " didn't last." The " " marks were beneath the words "rubber cement," to repeat them. Anyway, it was followed by the illustrator's revised glue recipe, which I can't remember. Something scientific-sounding + a bit of Elmer's glue, I think. Carle also wrote about how he stopped using "tinted" tissue papers, because the tint isn't lightfast, and began using only tissue paper painted with acrylic (which is what I always thought he did anyway).

Next time I visit this collection, I've got to get my hands on the Beatrix Potter collection. Can you imagine?! All of those lovely watercolors! And bunnies in jackets!** Anyway, that part of the collection was in use today. I'd also like to see anything they've got by Felix Darley or Howard Pyle... how'd I forget to request those boxes?

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* Tenggren drew for Disney, too! Much like my FAVORITE illustrator ever, Mary Blair, whose work is so expensive and in demand that the Kerlan hasn't been able to acquire any of it. Here's some more of her work, and yet more...
** Incidentally, Richard Scarry was a great admirer of Beatrix Potter. Who isn't, though, I suppose?

On Michael

Thriller was huge when I was in elementary school
at Cleveland's St. Michael parish school in the early
'80s. I mean HUGE. Even I, whose record collection
consisted of a handful of read-along-with-me
Fisher-Price records, was familiar with the songs
on Thriller.*

A few years later, my friends and I were all hysterical about acquiring the "We Are the World" record. (Yes, record... and not in a "we're so punk we only buy vinyl" way, but in an "it's 1985 and tapes have barely been invented yet" way.) Vivid is my memory of a birthday party at Julie Hilberg's house, where a fanatic crowd of pre-teen girls, of which I was one, played and replayed the seven-inch, singing along badly but enthusiastically. We reluctantly tore ourselves away when our various parents picked us up at 8 PM.

As an adult, I've rarely thought about Michael Jackson without wincing. For decades now, the guy has been both horrifying and piteous, and probably a sex offender. In a phrase, intensely troubled. But it's hard to sever the emotional connections that we have made with music, so I and others will continue to have a place in our hearts for the best of MJ's pop songs. Have you seen that dumb Jennifer Garner movie, 13 Going on 30? If so, you remember the actually-really-cute club scene where everyone is too cool to cut a rug until the DJ starts spinning songs from Thriller.** For me, that scene works as a microcosm for the public's relationship with MJ... even when you don't want to, even when it isn't cool, you just can't help shaking your ass to some of those dance songs.

Because I don't want this blog entry to come off as a loving tribute to a guy, intensely troubled or not, who almost certainly molested children for Chrissakes, I have to include the 2004-ish "I'm done with Michael" riff by the skillful Chris Rock. Watch and listen here.

* Hell, even my friend Donna, growing up in the Soviet Bloc around the same time, knew those songs. "Michael was my first connection to life outside of communism," she says.

** I heard a story similar--extremely similar--to this on NPR on the day of Michael Jackson's death. Some reporter with a sincerity-leaden Sarah Vowell voice recounted being in a club where everyone refused to dance until the DJ played "Thriller." I was like, that didn't happen to you! That's a scene from that Jennifer Garner movie!

Dear Lovey Hart: I Am Desperate

It's no Degrassi, but I've been working my way through the complete collection of 1970s and early- to mid-'80s After School Specials for the last couple of years, and I totally love them. If you're my age, you probably remember watching these grainy cautionary tales at 4:00 in the afternoon.

The relentless moralizing is one of my favorite things about the series, but I'm guessing that Americans of my generation remember the After School Special (and its rival, CBS' School Break Special) with a near-toxic mix of fond nostalgia and resentment. Often based on young adult novels, the highly alarmist series addressed such social issues as alcoholism, teen pregnancy, shoplifting, runaways, dyslexia, and mental illness.* (I've got "Andrea's Story: a Hitchhiking Tragedy" cued up on the DVD player as I write this.) But some of the most awesome After School Specials were slightly less sermonizing, and presented teenage characters turning into dogs, becoming millionaires, switching bodies with their dads, having wishes granted by genies, defeating their boyfriends in violin competitions, and writing anonymous advice columns for the school newspaper.

Captivating though these plots might be, spotting pre-fame celebrities is really the latent purpose of watching these [mostly badly-filmed] old Specials. Recognizing Dana Plato, Melissa Sue Anderson, Chris Knight and Eve Plumb (in the same ep!), Kirk Cameron, Robert Reed (RIP), my girl Nancy McKeon, Malcolm Jamal-Warner, and Felicity Huffman is a ridiculously happy experience, and would make a first-rate drinking game, if I were into that.

Gotta go, it's almost 4:00!

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*I'm sure there was one about latch-key kids, too, since this was the '80s.