flying into the forties

There's been much going on to keep me away from Antinomia. A dozen things to catch up on, but let's start with the flying trapeze at the Trapeze School of New York.

I knew I wanted to be in the air on my 40th birthday, and I was lucky to score spots for myself and two friends on Memorial Day weekend. I've done it a couple times before, but it's still unnerving, thrilling, and amazing to climb to that platform over the Hudson and jump off. It's a feeling like no other.

The first step is getting up the very tall utility ladder strapped to the rig.

After you make it up, you get harnessed in. You look out across the water, you see 

the Statue of Liberty, you remember to breathe.

It was the first time for my rollergirl friends Jen and Jayne. That's Jayne's first time on the platform. It's shocking to have to lean out and hold the bar, which is much heavier then you'd expect.

And when they say "Hep!", you have to go! Here is Jen taking the leap.

You get reacquainted with the force of gravity very quickly.

Within the first hour they have you in a knee hang,

And somersaulting off the bar!

I got to work on a set split position, which you enter into like this.

Then drop into like this. It's intense, but oh how much it feels like flying! I never want 

to let go when they tell me to with this one.

And then everyone on their first day gets caught!

Which leaves grip marks in the chalk on your arms. Amazing!

Miraculously the rain held off until the very moment the class ended. Then it 

was a torrential downpour that canceled the rest of flying for the day, and drenched 

our run to the nearest restaurant with wine, where ElizaB joined us.

Now to figure out how I can keep flying. I could spend every day up there.

a couple nights at the museum

Luna's Sea, got picked up by the American Museum of Natural History. You know, the one in New York City with the giant blue whale. Really! We have 4 shows on May 12 and 13 you can buy tickets to here.

I took a few fuzzy iPhone photos on a tech trip. Their displays are unbelievable works of art themselves.

threshold

I've mentioned Rumi plenty on this blog already, and favored translations of his poetry for my Bookcrossing adventures, and quoted him over and over and over.

It's not many things that keep my mercurial attention for so long, but Rumi has been a constant companion, in the form of any one of the many books of his poetry stuffed into my bag at all times, and a personality that is always at hand-- a teacher, best friend, and kindred spirit. Humorous, full of joy and anguish at the same time, exuding the kind of reckless enthusiasm that gets you into trouble with everyone. Like me, but he really ran with it. And he can use words like nobody's business, while I'm most often unable to say a syllable about the things that really move me.

Rumi lead me on a wild goose chase that brought me to the doorstep of the whirling dervishes, the dancers of the dance he started centuries ago. When I put my foot in place the very first time, I crossed a threshold, I met Rumi on his home turf. The others I found there with their feet on the same path had the same feeling, that Rumi is a companion, and his is a call to dance they couldn't not answer.

Top photo: a dervish in the doorway after the Ithaca sema in December. Second: initiated dervishes in traditional dress in Ithaca. Below: my first class at Kripalu in January a year before.

Sometimes you hear a voice through

the door calling you, as fish out of

water hear the waves, or a hunting

falcon hears the drum's come back.

This turning toward what you deeply

love saves you. Children fill their

shirts with rocks and carry them

around. We're not children anymore.

Read the book of your life which has

been given you. A voice comes to

your soul saying, Lift your foot;

cross over, move into the emptiness

of question and answer and question.

-Rumi

RollerDurance

I made a video from some blurry iPhone footage I took while rehabbing a sprained ankle at my weekly roller skating fitness class we call RollerDurance. When I was editing it in iMovie I realized how much I love the people I skate with, and how lucky I am to have had every Monday night with them for almost 5 years now.

Two friends and I started RollerDurance a month after my second hand surgery in April 2007 when I realized I wouldn't be going back to roller derby. I was deeply sad, and didn't want to lose the training or camaraderie of derby practice. So Jayne Bondage, Wender Bender and I called a roller rink and began running our own weekly non-contact derby practice that didn't require belonging to the league and scrimmaging.

Over the years we've helped train hundreds of people to skate, most of whom were headed for roller derby, and many of whom ended up back with us when they became injured or retired. There are not many things I've done consistently for 5 years, but RollerDurance is a fixture in my life. Whatever is going on, good or bad, when I get to the rink and put on skates, I know the next 90 minutes are going to be about nothing but the joy of hard skating, and great friends. Everything else disappears.

This video turned out to be a Valentine's Day love note to them.

the turn

Since 2002 I've been reading with endless enthusiasm about the whirling dervishes of Turkey, practitioners of an 800 year old form of sufism started by Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi, the famous 13th century poet I quote incessantly here. I first heard about them when a dear friend of mine called me a whirling dervish because of my obsession with spinning in ice skating. When I looked them up and found Rumi's poetry, I felt right away that somehow, someday, I needed to try the dance, called the turn. But as you can imagine teachers of this tradition don't come by the dozen in New England, USA. Finally in January of 2011 I found out one very rare teacher would be holding a week long workshop on meditation and whirling at the Kripalu yoga center in the Berkshires. And, by chance, I just happened to find out the day before the scholarship application was due, and I won it. It felt like the stars were aligning.

Though I've been taking classes in practical applications of meditation for 9 years, and done some yoga, and studied world religion, and been an on and off church goer of several denominations my whole life, I've never tried anything like a spiritual workshop of any sort, and had no idea what to expect. What I definitely did not expect was that the drive up to the mountains of Massachusetts was the first leg of a year long journey that would take me to many places, including India 10 months later. But those first 6 days spent at the dreamy snow covered nirvana of Kripalu, with a most extraordinary woman named Sheikha Khadija Radin and 7 other new whirling students, were magic. I took to the dance and the accompanying teaching like a fish that had been stranded on land all its life and finally thrown in the ocean. I couldn't get enough, and I followed Sheikha Khadija to every workshop and silent retreat she held, which summed up to 34 days by December when I was so fortunate to be invited to participate in a sema, the beautiful ceremonial whirling dance of the dervishes. What a year! I am still trying to recover my over-filled senses and process everything I saw and learned. It hasn't been easy to articulate it to myself or anyone else. I just know that I love to whirl, and I mean: I really really love to whirl.

The top photo is my friend Karen at the sema in December, with me and Joseph behind her, both who also started at that first class at Kripalu. When I met Karen there, just two weeks before she had technically died from complications from a traumatic brain and neck injury. She weighed 80 pounds and could barely eat, but she would come to class and whirl, very slowly and carefully, for a few minutes at a time. We spent the year together following Sheikha Khadija, while she got stronger. By December she was able to dance for the entire hour of the sema. She is quite extraordinary. Below is a video I took of her before the sema, of a dance she made for her equally extraordinary husband John.

popularity

For Illustration Friday's theme this week, popularity. A scan, instead of a photograph below. Sharper, but without the nice shadows of paper sculpture. I have to get with my photography skills.

etiquette

I've had an Emily Post book of Etiquette on my pile of nice looking old books for a long time. I started actually reading it this weekend. There are some truly bizarre gems, from so many generations ago the meaning is lost. But mostly, it's solid advice on how to be a considerate person, which we'd all be the better for taking to heart.

Then I cut a paragraph and some tentacular shapes up out of a few pages, and stuck them in my sketchbook. A proper octolady occurred.

The Wiz

While I was doing City Wide, I also rebuilt the giant sea spirit puppet to be used as the wizard for Sacred Heart Academy's The Wiz, at the formidable Shubert Theater in New Haven. This required a new head, which I built out of cardboard so it would be lighter then the massive chicken wire torture devise I originally made. Here it is not quite finished, and then filling up the back of my car in transit.

Here's a video I took during their first half hour working with the wizard, (while it's still unfinished- excuse the drooping fabric and unfinished hemline and all). You can hear how giddy I get when I get a group of great kids playing with puppets like this. It is crazy fun. And they came up with their first choreography like pros by the end of just 30 minutes.

I again wasn't able to be at the show and didn't get photos!

tent of pants

Right after the float came City Wide Open Studios. I didn't know the float was going to happen right before when I signed up for CWOS, nor did I know India was going to happen right after. So this little installation of a tent made of blue jeans was squeezed as tightly into the weekend as it was in the tiny downtown office mail room I was assigned to. (Also for some reason, all this fall I failed to get decent pictures of anything. Luckily ElizaB took these for me.)

In my head were tents, horse skeletons, eyes, and the Vermont floods. At hand was an mountainous surplus of blue jeans and a new skill for jigsawing plywood. I made another pavilion for an exoskeleton structure, and sew-sculpted a tent of jeans right into it. And with all the extra jeans I made a rippled flood of denim flowing out of the tent to fill the rest of the room. I'd originally planned to be a living sculpture within, but with the soundtrack of rain, dim blue lighting, and the bizarre halloween weekend blizzard, it was too cold for anyone to stay in this space for very long. I left my horse skull mask to take center stage on its own. But I've got more to do on this.

On the wall, eye clouds.

paint parade

I made a time lapse movie of me painting one of the arches because I finally discovered the timer function on my camera. (Parade float making begs for the accompaniment of Nino Rota music):

.

float!

Phew is there a lot to catch up on. Let's go bird by bird, starting with my first ever parade float in October.

The Mystic Aquarium asked me to design a permanent float structure that incorporated fiberglass animals made by their shop carpenter Gary Grimm, including a 14 foot beluga whale. It had to come apart so it could be stored in a small space, and be able to change from season to season.

For the pitch I made a model of a wave pavilion, two crossing arches that could come apart to be stored flat, and sides to cover the trailer. Then I had fun making a stop animation of how it would look as it traveled by (the column in the center represents a human figure for scale):

By the time I got the green light I had two weeks to build it by myself, the staging, plus 3 penguins and various sealions, corals and seaweeds. And all on this challenging metal U-Haul trailer. Hello float marathon!

Thankfully my mum lent me her ballsy jigsaw, and do I love cutting plywood with it.

With cutting, painting and carving all going on at once, my makeshift studio expanded from my living room, to the dining room and kitchen. And with the pieces all being BIG (and almost always wet with paint), I was at over capacity.

And luckily my mum lent me herself for a many long days and nights. I worked her hard. Here she is carving penguins. The picture is fuzzy because she made me promise not to post her.

A few days before the first parade I drove it all up to the Mystic Aquarium shop where I spent the day helping to cover the U-Haul with my staging together with Gary's amazing whale and Ron's beautiful fish. We found a spare rock from the aquarium grounds that fit perfect.

Here's Gary and Ron, who were so gracious to let me in their shop:

I couldn't be at the first parade, but the aquarium took some photos.

I'd loved this project, a float was so right up my alley. I hope I get to keep working on this one, and get more opportunities like this. Though I could really use a warehouse next time.

City Wide Open Studios 2011

I'm squeezing in an installation this weekend right before a sudden and unexpected trip to India. After doing City Wide for 7 years and taking a few years off, I'm back in a gloriously abandoned downtown building at 200 College Street. I'll write about the project here on Monday, but you can read where it started in the post below. The horse skull figure is up at Artspace for a few more days in conjunction with the City Wide festival.

feeling with the bones

There are things in you sometimes that just demand to get out. They don't care about your work schedule or your dinner plans, and they'll wake you up in the middle of the night, or sprain your ankle so you're forced to sit with them till you do something about it. They bypass the brain and go right to the body making irritating disturbances. But if you're quiet and open enough you can feel exactly what they want you to do.

The Vermont floods really got into my psyche, so did the trip back to the town and my home where I hadn't been for so long. I don't know why I couldn't stop thinking about my horse's grave, but it was an itch I had to scratch, and scratching it was to sculpt a little horse skull while I laid in bed with my ankle. When that turned out, the rest of this scene followed, revealing itself step by step exactly what it wanted. I had no idea myself where it was going, it didn't feel like it had a point or purpose. But when the torso cracked in the oven because of a poor mix of clays, without missing a step I felt my fingers making a rose to grow out of the crack. Adding that last detail was deeply satisfying. It's funny how the soul works things out without you even knowing it.

Still not quite finished, but most of the pieces in place after two days of obsessive making.

studio 9-10-11

Apparently I get the most work done when I'm incapacitated. Yup, I'm incapacitated yet again, this time a giant swollen sprained ankle I'm trying to stay off of. I've got it propped up on a cot in my studio, finishing up some half finished projects. Some hipstamatic snipits of the many things growing in here right now.

love fish

Did some watercolor for the first time since college for a friends' wedding card (the ones who got married at the aquarium, of course). I'm out of practice, but I can't believe it was actually fun.

paper doll & stage how to

I'd always wanted to make paper dolls. I'd had a bunch as a kid, this one was my all time favorite, and when I dug it up recently I was flooded with distinct memories of carefully cutting out all the dresses. I loved that it came in a package with a little window like a puppet theatre stage. (This is clearly a pretty strong continuing theme.)

I wasn't sure what to make a paper doll of, until my friend and go-go partner's birthday came around. Dot Mitzvah is an aerialist, roller derby skater, and burlesque artist. Her own wardrobe of costumes was ripe with paper doll possibilities. When this shot was taken at one of our go-go shows with the surf band, the Clams, I knew this was the pose for it.

I printed out the photo to the size I wanted the doll, just big enough to fit on 8.5 x 11 paper. I traced her on tracing paper, changing her costume to something easily coverable with other paper outfits. I xeroxed the sketch (copy machines have waterproof ink, unlike inkjet printers), glued it down to bristol board, and painted directly on top with acrylics. I printed her out on card stock, cut her out, and I had a doll to work off of.

I used the same method for the costumes. Using photos from her events I sketched her costumes on trace paper right over the doll so they would be precise. It was tricky figuring out which body parts to include in the costume, and which of the original doll would be exposed. This took a lot of trial and error.

Again, back to Staples to make black and white copies from the sketches on tracing paper, pasted them down on bristol, and painted them in with acrylic.

I painted four costumes, then scanned them into Photoshop. This is where most of the work was. I drew all the lines in on the computer so I could revise them. This was all the tabs for each costume that fold back on the doll so they stay on. This was hard, and took a week of experimenting, by printing them out and trying them over and over. I had to manipulate some of the painting in Photoshop because they were never quite perfect. It's a very precise art form. I had little paper dresses all over my studio.

I wanted her to have her own stage that was part of the packaging of this kit, so I scanned in some theatrical etchings from a Dover book of ornamentation, and with piecing elements together in Photoshop, built up a proscenium and back drop.

I altered the color to be a nice old sepia tone. Because Dot is a burlesque performer, I wanted an old vaudeville look.

Packaging was an important aspect too, because I wanted to give these to her as if they were a printed published kit, and I wanted her to be able to sell them or give them to her fans. To economize on paper I placed the Dot doll in the proscenium to be cut out. Here I had to go into Photoshop with that darn pen tool to make lines for her stand, and add directions for construction, also a very important and complicated task.

Engineering the stage was also tricky, but I went with a tab system, and with just 2 pieces of nice card stock made a sweet little 3-d stage. I am so excited about this stage! It's a step towards those elaborate paper theaters I've been obsessed with since I first saw them in the Albuquerque folk art museum.

Then I set her costumes up with titles, honoring each of Dot's many characters. These two are from our go-go group, the Nouveaux Pony Banditos.

After I'd tested all of these endlessly with print outs from my Epson, I took them to Tyco printing in New Haven and had the amazing Kick do her color copy magic with them. On good card stock paper, they came out gorgeous! I'm so happy with the rich color, sharp details, and the feel of the paper.

The kit is backed with an instruction sheet with photos of the constructed piece. The 5 sheet kit fits in a clear print sleeve, and looks very handsome. They'll be up on an Etsy site soon.

hometown

After putting the word out in Connecticut, my friend Caitlin and I collected a mountain of food, clothes and supply donation for flood relief in Vermont that barely fit into her suv, and headed north for my hometown of Wilmington. I was unsure if we could, or even should go there, because of the dire state of the roads. But with all the conflicting information on the internet about what was going on there, and what they needed, I had to go find out myself.

We weren't sure if the route we chose would even be passable. It was, but barely. In many places the road was more then half gone, fallen into the creeks, and just a few orange cones directed you to drive precariously around it. There is so much to fix, with such massive amounts of new rock and fill to be brought in, it seems an impossible task.

In Wilmington we dropped off our carload, and drove to my old house, formerly the Fjord Gate Inn and Farm. I was obsessed with the idea that the bones of my horse, who we'd buried next to a pond, had been uprooted and floated away. The grave was fine, the inn now whitewashed and seemingly long-since closed for business, our old pastures and barn completely overgrown and abandoned. The bridge next to it missing a large triangular chunk of cement. It was apocalyptic. It was a strange thing to see.

In downtown, the volunteer work crews had wound down for the day and not many people were around other then police guarding the closed road areas. I checked on the places I could get to that had been intrinsic to my youth. Happily, Memorial Hall, the place I fell into theatre, looked pretty good, being slightly on a hill.

But just next door, the Incurable Romantic, once filled with fairies, victorian hats and all sorts of things that I coveted, was now full of the grey toxic muck that came with the flood and clings to everything. Across the street, the relocated Bartleby's Books, is gutted, nothing left. And the 111 year old Dot's Diner, the only place a teenager in the 80s could afford to hangout, is a broken box balancing on a few lose rocks on the edge of the river, the roads fallen in like a moat all around it. A few guys lingered on the porch of an unidentifiable restaurant nearby with a box of dusty liquor bottles, drinking beer and kindly offered us some.

The dramatic ancient cemetery where I idled many hours drawing grave stones as a teenager was thankfully ok.

We didn't stay long, wanting to get off the roads before dark and new rain. The ride home with the pink sunset over the silvery grey coated fields offered a whole new palette of light probably not seen in many places.

I'm happy we got some donations in, but with Vermonters worried most about their roads above all, I'll wait before going in again. I am glad I saw my hometown. Despite not having been back in a dozen years, I found pieces of me are still there, uncovered from their burial grounds by the hungry water. Back home in my untouched coastal house in Connecticut, I pick over the river-washed bones.

badges of honor and flood marks

I've just learned that this blog feeds onto sites I was unaware of, causing me to have readers I don't know, and didn't know about. That's awesome! Thanks for reading, however you came to see these posts. Now I'm compelled to explain myself in more detail, since it's not just my mom and two cats I'm posting for.

So let me tell you about these merit badges. I can't express in words how much I love badges. I cannot walk by an army navy store without going in to dig through their patch bins. I even love the name patches on utility shirts. Why is this? I'm sure it originated in my childhood (as the root of all obsessions do) when I was a member of several badge-driven activity clubs, starting, of course, with the Girl Scouts. Though my memory of actual events in the Girl Scouts is hazy, I can remember the badges so clearly I can feel the stitches. I was crazy about the badges, and how they would fit on my sash, and how much space should be left between them in order that I could fit many more.

(Brownie "Puppets, Plays, & Theater" badge!)

In sharper focus is my memory of the club I left Girl Scouts for, the Indian Princesses. Yes you read that right. Though now considered inappropriately named and apparently disowned by the YMCA which founded it, this was back in the 70s before they figured that out. Indian Princesses was a bigger deal to me then Girl Scouts because Indian Princesses was a father-daughter outdoor club, and I was the only girl I knew whose father had died, making it impossible for me to join. But my best friend Whitney lent me her dad, and the three of us went to Indian Princess club together. We made native american inspired crafts, went hiking, and tacked badges of accomplishments onto the tan felt vests we wore. It was marvelous. I mean, look at this!

(That's not me, by the way, that's an amazing web find.) We had to come up with an "Indian" name for ourselves. I was at a loss, so a girl in the club gave me the name of her retired sister. It was "Morning Dove", a name I see listed on the remaining Indian Princess club websites. Of course, the bird "mourning dove" is spelled so because it sounds like it is lamenting, which was more appropriate for me then I understood back then.

And all during this time I took very formal, regimented figure skating classes with a USFSA club, with its highly organized system of testing to promote future Dorothy Hamills through levels. Which was recognized with: patches. I was crazy most of all about these patches, probably because they were the hardest to earn. My mum sewed them onto the left sleeve of a red Scandinavian patterned zip up sweater, which I wore to the ice rink with a ridiculous amount of pride.

(That IS me. I wish you could see the sleeve!) I would sit and study these patches for hours, and dream of the next one with its new 2 color combination, which I could see in the window of the skate rink office.

And even when my family moved to a rural area with no scouts or princesses or ice rinks, I still managed to fall into a patch-club by becoming a 4-H'er.

And then I grew up, and nothing I did, no matter how accomplished and hard, would earn me a badge. I find this inexplicably unfair! Adults put immeasurable thought and effort into making fun, creative, and meaningful experiences for children, but we completely neglect ourselves and each other of the same. And I don't think it's that adults aren't interested in things like badges. In just a few hours I've taken dozens of requests for Irene merit badges. I'm not sure, but I suspect it's that we're all trying to give the impression that we're grown ups, when deep down we all know we're not, and we think we'd better hide it. But I wouldn't wish that kind of growing-up on any kid. I'd wish them a lifetime of striving for new experiences, with a beautifully stitched badge to mark each one. And so I've gotten into the habit of making badges for my friends for all kinds of things we've gone through together. This was for the first time two of my friends and I got brave enough to do a marching band street performance. We called ourselves the Boom Boom Brigade:

All of my work has the purpose of bringing playfulness and enthusiasm back into adulthood. I love working with kids because they teach me how to do this, and they alone can remind me what is really meaningful so that I can bring that back to the grown ups. Kids are my teachers. Grown ups are my life mission.

So, this is how I take the news that a big portion of Vermont is in trouble, especially my hometown of Wilmington which was totally wrecked by Irene. With collapsed roads the town got cut off, people were unable to locate their families, people lost their houses and businesses. The famous 1938 flood mark on Town Hall I always assumed was exaggerated, was surpassed. Because I couldn't get there to help or get any information, I drew while I anxiously waited to hear from my friends.

The Girl Scout's Juliette Gordon Low said this: "Badges show that you have done something so often and so well that you can teach it to someone else." Vermonters, and many people in other states, have a long haul ahead to put their lives and communities back together. By the time roads and houses are rebuilt, they will be experts. As in tragedies that happen everywhere all the time, most of them won't get any recognition for what they've been through. I made this for my friends because I want them to know they are seen.

There are lots of ways to help, by the way, from financial donations, to physical volunteering. Here's some pages with good resources:

VTResponse

7 Days How You Can Help

Vermont Foodbank

(I'm relieved to report that my mom is a-ok.)

Hurricane Irene merit badge

If you want one (and of course you do), either find me or email your snail mail address to me at merfire@gmail.com. 2 1/4 inch fabric patches you can sew on anywhere you like.

refuge

The anticipation of Irene brought my porch garden in to the living and dining rooms. It's like a tropical jungle in here with all the foliage and steamy pre-hurricane humidity. The tomatoes are making the place smell so good. Another pleasure of a storm.