Preparing for My Art Gallery Opening in a Week!

Sweetness, Mary Jehoshaphat. June is actually turning out to be a very good month for me! 

     I went to check out the gallery space last Thursday, and it turned out that the curator was giving me a lot more space than I had originally assumed: I have one 100 sq. foot room, plus the hallway -- which adds (wait a minute, what's seven feet times eight feet time three?) . . . that adds another 168 sq. feet for a grand total of 268 sq. feet of display space. Wowsers. So far, I've been working and re-working sketches to make sure all my pieces are cohesive -- and now that I know I have this much space, I may need to provide an interactive arena on one wall just to keep it interesting. I'm all about circulating the chi.

     While I have been incubating ideas for the June collection's showcase (think pastel sugar flowers, Ron English, Americana kitsch, and Grant Wood's "American Gothic"), my publisher from New York City contacted me and alerted me that I am the only writer who is doing a graphic novel adaptation in the MediaBistro e-book/print-on-demand literary reinvention of Horatio Alger, Jr.'s 1913 novel, Joe's Luck; or, Always Wide Awake. They've partnered with Blurb.com, Scribd.com, and the hilarious folks who wrote and published the wildly-successful literary mash-up, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. A huge publicity campaign for the final product has been lined up, or at least *promised* by my publisher, and I will be quickly churning that one out for the deadline -- which is literally a few days following my gallery reception.

     I feel ecstatic, to say the least -- BUZZED, I think, is more like it.

     Now that the wood panels have been sent out to the New England chapter of the Anti-Defamation League's seventh annual Youth in Leadership Awards ceremony in Boston, MA, in time for their posh gala on June 5th, I can focus on this gallery opening and the reception party to ensue . . . . . What should I do for the party? Perhaps a wedding theme?
     My boyfriend was invited to read in Boston last fall at Harvard Square, and in New York City, and brought back so many beautiful pictures of the two glittering metropolises in the midst of a brisk New England autumn. And stories of riding the subway alongside PEOPLE WHO READ! I know this probably doesn't blow many people's minds, but having left San Francisco and the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) for almost a year now, I have been starving for good transit with time-worthy stops, let alone people who read anything outside of The Bible every Sunday morning.

     "Each subway stop was like a Who's who of New England colleges," he gushed.
     "After my poetry reading, I just marveled at the city itself, and rode the subway for a while, watching people getting on and getting off -- Emerson, MIT, Boston U. It was amazing," he said, while laying out a new pair of gloves from the trip. "It was freezing cold, unbelievably cold, but it was also just amazing."

     It had started raining when he got back home late that night from the airport, and the fat gobs smacked the wet concrete, a crescendo of snare drums at midnight.

     "There was this older woman," he said, "who was just quietly reading a book on transformative philanthropy -- imagine that! Transformative philanthropy! Ah, Lisa, you would have loved it there. We must go together. It's such a different world over there, I can't even believe it's in the same country."

     Sigh.
     I think I'm allowed to have my Beverly Cleary moment, here. Perhaps every Oregonian who makes the move to the Bay Area in California, then back to the farm, feels my pain. In fact, let's step it up.
     Gah.


     "Transformative Philanthropy." Feh -- I'm lucky if, while sometimes riding the bus to work at PBS, I catch someone reading the ingredients on the back label of their candy wrapper. The buses here churn and fart, blowing black balls of smoke wherever they go and spitting pulverized rubber flecks at anyone near a street curb. Spitting and snarling cages on wheels -- the buses assault with the grinding noise of their thirsty brakes, threatening to clip off your feet at the ankles if you miscalculate. And once inside, the threadbare seats brag of their March beauty: peacock blue flocking with mad dashes of yellow and poppy red lightning, all rubbed bald by the endless scalloping of legs never resting from daybreak till police curfew.

     Yes, there is a police curfew.

     Every middle-of-the-way citizen here rubbernecking to check out the latest car accident, the most recent arrest and death-by-cop incident, blasting music so loud the rims rattle and the tinted windows begin to crack. I find myself here because, despite it all, the grit feeds me . . . I must admit. I couldn't create anything in San Francisco -- it was too soft, too submerged in the lexicon of the bohemian bourgeois, of homegrown-this and hand-churned-that. The privileged few extolling dirt, speaking of mud while their white gloves were always washed clean with brown hands; San Francisco is full of sparkling people who deny disease. Dis-ease. Malaise, and ennui. Here, the bullets make soft craters in the sidewalk, along the unpaved road a cracked window and door ripped out -- the raw nails rusted with blood or decay. Ennui and boredom slip away from my body; in the sieve of this landscape, all my sorrows finally spill into the San Joaquin River and I am filled, instead, with my nerves tingling and skin peeled-back -- the distinct memory of rawness, of feeling my hands for the very first time, the thin bones like underground roots. And I note to myself the pale bone echo of my skeleton glowing moon-bright each I time I blink my eyes.

     I do believe my sense of smell is sharper now; my eyes see much farther than ever before.

     But, also here, the sunlight catches in the apple light of the trees in the afternoons, and there is never any snow to dull the air. Here, there are horses in the footfills, and orchards carved in bedrock. And the wind-scrubbed black oaks gnarled along the country lanes snaking up to the Sierras - those impassive and burnt mountains capped with ice. A warm gust of wind reveals the faint odor of french fries and carnitas, the rickety kiosk down the street pushed by leathery hands with smooth knuckles, the sliver flick of a key cleaning the gristle under a spatulate thumb, and throat-clearing growls at every stoplight . . . Yes: Boston is an entire world away from here, even though we're in the same country.

     And I think I'd like to hear what they have to say about these abstract feelings rendered in color.