Yellow Dogs, Busy Widows and Art Shows

I need to slow down but I can’t do it this week. Monday I had lunch in a near-by tourist town with my Gathering Girls pals. Tuesday it was a fun lecture/slide show about a huge art contest in town that registered 1,200 entries from 40 countries. Wednesday---today---you’ll find me at the cemetery getting my husband’s gravestone ready for winter and stopping for my flu and shingles shots. Thursday I’ll be going to the audiologist to get my hearing aids turned up because sentences like, “I love your cat” are starting to sound like, “I love your fat.” Friday my cleaning service girl is coming. Of course, these things were/will be in addition to all the normal details of living---fixing meals, doing laundry, taking showers, walking the dog, watching ‘Dancing with the Stars’ and the new ‘You’ creepy-but-addictive TV show on Lifetime. And I won’t tell you about how many times Starbucks waves me in to test their new fall menu of drinks. So far the Maple Pecan Iced Latte wins my vote over the Pumpkin Choco Chai or the Hot Apple Chai. Wouldn’t you love sit in on a drink naming session? I would. Same for the paint companies that create so many new wall color names every year. Seriously, how on earth did Sherwin Williams come up with ‘Salty Dog’ for what looks like Hyper Blue straight out of an artist’s tube with a dab of black added in? But I digress.

Back on topic: I am also babysitting seven closed e-Bay auctions and seven active auctions. Are you sick of hearing about my widowhood adventures at e-Bay yet? If you are, you'll be happy to know that I only have October to continue the hard-charging listings before I’ll quit until after Christmas. In the meantime, here’s a pop quiz/history lesson for you. Do you know what the item is in the photo above? I’m guessing ‘no.’ It’s known as a Yellow Dog, popularized by something Teddy Roosevelt said the first time he saw a group of them in the dark of night. A reporter traveling with him wired a story back East and a front page newspaper headline soon proclaimed: “Roosevelt sees Yellow Dogs in Texas!” It was one of my husband’s favorite possessions because after he bought the cast iron what-the-heck-is-it, it took us two years to find out the answer. If only Google had been invented sooner. I showed my niece another what-is-it last year and within a few minutes she took a photo of it, posted it on a website that helps ID things and we had an answer to the what-is-it question that had eluded me for two decades. 

How we found out what the pot with two spouts was used for is the kind of story Don enjoyed telling to anyone who’d come over and spot it in the house. We were on our way to a Romance Writer’s Convention in San Antonio, Texas in 1990 when we stopped at a tourist visitor’s center. Smack-dab on the front of a museum brochure was an unidentified and unexplained two spouted pot like ours. Off we went on a 100 mile detour just so we could learn that it’s an oilfield derrick lamp, the official name that no one uses anymore. At night from a distance the yellow flames coming out of the spouts looked like yellow eyes to good old Teddy and the shadows the lamps cast on the ground below looked like a pack of dog heads below the derricks where they hung. I can’t imagine what it will be like not to live with possessions that all come with stories to tell. 

The art lecture/slide show I went to was billed as an Armchair Art Show. The art show it featured was the brain-child of Betsy DeVos’ son and is billed as the “largest public art show in the world.” It runs for two weeks and the pieces are all over our downtown area. A $200,000 prize goes to one person who is voted in by the public and another $200,000 goes to someone who is picked by a five member panel of art critics and it is possible for one artist to win both, bring their prize money up to $400,000. Five other artists win $12,500 each. Our senior hall took four busloads of people downtown to see the art this year and I have gone in the past years. But the crowds and pressure of meeting back up with the bus a dozen times over an afternoon so it could shuffle us between various venues was too stressful. The ‘armchair tour’ via a slide show was a new addition at senior hall this year and it was extremely well attended. 

Much of the art I don’t understand and much of it is ‘message art’ created to draw attention to things like human trafficking, saving the bees, the environment or white rhinos, or to commemorate things like the Pulse Night Club lives lost or people who suffer from PTSD. The public gets to vote twice---once to narrow it down to the top 100 pieces, then again to narrow the 100 down to the top 20. The winners are yet to be announced but one of the art jurors thinks a bunch of tee-shirts hanging on some clotheslines should be the top winner and I thought it looked like a bunch of ho-hum tee-shirts hanging on clotheslines. She’s too young to remember drying laundry that way, God, I have paint brushes older than her! After the art lecture three of my Gathering Girls pals and I went to the Guy Land Cafeteria for pie, coffee and good conversation. ©

 A video of this year’s top twenty entries can be found here.

Fun Parties, Ugly Parties and Taking Personal Responsibility

This weekend I went to a surprise retirement party for my niece-in-law’s husband. It was hard to count how many people were in attendance because his family had rented a small town bowling alley with a sports bar and people seemed to be in constant motion either filling bags with candy or popcorn at the ‘50s theme candy bar or filling plates with hot dogs, salads and cake or getting drinks and bowling for free, of course. I’m guessing there were a hundred guests and all sixteen lanes were filled with bowlers for the entire four hours I was there. I met my husband at a bowling alley. He had set pins at that very place back in high school when humans actually set pins instead of the automated machines we know today. And while my heart wanted to try bowling at the party my head told me I could undo the shoulder surgery that I had a few years ago. My great-niece who had the same labrum tear surgery I had, on the same day as mine, is scheduled back in the surgical room soon.

The retiree’s daughters had asked people to come dressed in ‘50s theme clothing and a prize was given to a girl wearing a poodle skirt, a pink silk jacket, a small neck scarf and a hat made out of an old vinyl record---the skirt was not as nicely made as the skirt I had back in the day but it was fun to see it. (What does that say about my age when the fashions we wore in my youth are now available for Halloween costumes?) On the tables, they had vinyl records, boxes of Cracker Jack, fake sodas, candy cigarettes and, since he retired from the post office, reproduction postal stamps from the ‘50s were everywhere plus ‘50s music was playing nonstop. The lights were kept low and one of those projectors that makes it look like colored bubbles are crawling all over the place was keeping time with the music. What a noisy and busy place! But it was fun and I’ve never seen the guest of honor as happy as he was at the party. That was Sunday afternoon and if not for the party one of my niece-in-laws would have still been in Los Vegas and at the concert where the carnage happened. The posts on her Facebook page the next day were full of glad-you’re-safe kinds of posts.

Monday morning I had a date to go to an art show and lunch with the Gathering Girls. Actually, an art exhibit, a chrysanthemum show and lunch all under the same roof. The sculpture garden was hosting a Rodin show mixed in with Rodin inspired figurative entries into a yearly competition we have in the area that draws artists from all over the world. The garden was just one of 175 venues exhibiting both juried and unjuried art. Five hundred thousand dollars in cash prizes will be awarded this year and the public gets to vote on who gets half of that cash, art experts get to decide who gets the other half. By the end of the three weeks show, 400,000 votes will be cast. Registration to vote must take place in person at one of the venues.

At lunch the seven of us laughed a lot as we always do, but we also talked about the massacre in Los Vegas. I was grateful for the opportunity to express disbelief with others in person but at the same time it felt hollow to be talking about yet another mass shooting after the way our country’s leaders in Washington have sold their balls off to RNA. For example, the only reason the House didn’t vote on the NRA’s wish-list bill regarding striking down an 80 old law that limits the sale of gun silencers is because it was quickly taken off the schedule because of the Los Vegas massacre. It will get rescheduled when things settle down and the Republicans will pass it because Citizens United allows the gun lobby to pour millions into their coffers. (Citizens United was the single worst, country-changing decision ever made by the Supreme Court.) Can you imagine how many more people would have died in Los Vegas if the shooter had had silencers, how much harder it would have been for the police to find the guy and for people to run when he stopped shooting to reload or one of his weapons jammed?

When one of these mass shootings happens we wring our hands, offer prayers and look for someone or something to blame. We might turn off the media and criticize them, too, for “sensationalizing the story.” But where was the outrage when one of Trump’s first acts in office was to undo an Obama era law that made it harder for people with severe mental illness to buy guns legally? Where is the outrage at ourselves for not being outraged enough to get involved in a concrete way? It might be a myth that ostriches bury their heads in the sand but it’s not a myth that we Americans do it when we don’t want to face our own culpability. At the very least, we all should be signed up for MegaVote to get a weekly report on what our own house and senate representatives will be voting on and did vote on. We can’t hold our lawmakers accountable if we don’t know their voting records. And before someone says, “But you don’t understand…blah, blah, blah." I acknowledge that passing sensible gun control laws is just one element in the box of solutions we need to work on if we’re going to turn this ugly trend around. Pick an element---any one of them---and make a pledge to take personal responsibility to help bring about the needed changes!  © 

Antiques, Art and Soap Suds

October 15^th my lease will be up in the antique mall where I’ve had a booth this past year and since they are going out of business before the end of the year, I wanted to move out before we get into the unpredictable cool, wet and windy weather of fall. I could have stayed for a 50% reduction in rent but instead I spent a crazy long Monday packing stuff and wheeling and dealing with a friend (the son I wish I had) who used his truck to help me move all my things home. I gave him a 1940s coin operated motel radio/night stand for the use of his truck and he was elated. (I hope his wife feels the same way when he brings it home.) We never had the key to the coin box so he took the piece to a locksmith to see if they can make a new one. Part of the thrill of old things like that is the mystery of not knowing if you’ll find a rare coin inside. I hope he does. Then I traded him a hot fudge dispenser from a 1950s soda fountain for a set of snow shoes to go with my Adirondack backpack basket, circa 1900. He’s been lusting after the dispenser all summer and I’ve been lusting after the snow shoes. Bartering makes us both happier than exchanging cash. Most antique dealers are like people giving away a litter of puppies; we like to know when something has found a good home.

Moving out day I also sold a lighted showcase to a guy who will use it to display his hood ornament collection which turned out to be one of those happy/sad sales. Happy that a showcase I’ve always liked will be used in a way my husband would have wholehearted love and sad because the decision to sell it signifies a formal acknowledgement that I’ll never have a booth in a mall again. Having a booth when I no longer own a truck isn’t a good mix which is just a cop-out excuse so I don’t have to admit I’m getting too old to work that hard. All totaled this was my fifth booth and it was the least prestigious mall of all of them. Before my husband’s stroke we were in one of the biggest and busiest antique malls in the state---over 200 dealers all in one beautiful, well managed building. Those days were fun. The mall would throw huge Christmas parties for their dealers and customers to co-mingle and they’d have annual outdoor swap meets in the summers with pig roasts to feed us all. The owners also had an auction service and we’d often go to them as well. We sure accumulate a lot of memories in one life time, don’t we?

Tuesday I shifted gears and went to the senior hall to: 1) To hear a lecture on our city’s free public outdoor art, and 2) to register so I can vote in the world’s largest art competition hosted here in town. Art Prize, as our 19 day art competition extravaganza is called, is giving away $560,000 in prize money this year, half as jury selections by a panel of experts and half awarded by popular, public vote. (Ten cash prizes in all.) This year there are 1,536 entries that came in from all over the world. You never know what someone will call art. The most controversial piece this year is a collection of silhouettes of armed men standing on the tops of buildings downtown…totally creeps me out but the experts put it on their short list. I took the tour bus down last year to see the top 25 that resulted from the first round of voting but this year I’m having too much knee pain to get on and off the bus twenty-five times in two hours. Boo-hoo! (An appointment with my orthopedic doctor is coming soon to check on the knee replacement he did seven years ago.)

The guy with the deep pockets who has $560,000 to give away is the son of one of the co-founders of a local business that made their money making laundry soap. You guessed it, there’s big money in selling soap via a method that was once investigated for being a pyramid scheme. The Federal Trade Commission ruled in the company's favor, though, because the company had a little known policy of buying back unsold products. In a true pyramid scheme distributors are stuck with what they can’t sell. Still, everyone who lived in this area when they were first growing their business knew someone with a basement full of unsold soap. And you couldn’t go anywhere without a friend or relative popping their trunk open to try to sell you laundry soap or to try to talk you into becoming a distributor so they could become millionaires like the recruiting seminars promised to those who worked hard at bringing others into the pyramid. The company was, however, found guilty of “making exaggerated income claims” and they were ordered to stop but they violated that order several times and paid some hefty fines. Just think, I met the co-founders of that company back when we were still all single and all they had was a pyramid scheme---I mean a pyramid dream of getting rich. Hummm…maybe I should have titled this blog entry, Lost Opportunities to Marry a Future Billionaire. ©

Here's a taste of Art Prize 2013
2014 Art Prize but the 2013 video is better done.