The Golden Bachelor, the CheerLeader and the Art Class

 

I’ve been so busy I hardly noticed that September turned into October. My first clue that it was happening is that I got a phone call from one of the guys living in my continuum care complex asking me how my dining dollars are holding up, and if I ran out would I like to have dinner with him and his wife. He’s in my writing group and I’m in book club with his wife. They always have extra dining dollars at the end of the month because she eats gluten free and this place cooks with too many things that makes her sick. She’s on the food committee and is responsible for getting a kale salad put on the menu and salt-less butter served with our bread. I'd vote 'Yuck' on both of those if they put them on a ballot. Salt-less butter has no flavor what so ever and the kale has a bitter taste I don’t like. Why can’t healthy food taste like our favorite flavors of ice cream? Life is so unfair! 

The Golden Bachelor

One of the reasons this week flew by was because the management threw several evening events at us which is not common if you’re not a card player: One was a cheese and crackers get-together by our fireplace which is new while playing Quibbler at night is only new to me. (The third night event was a Paint and Sip party, more about that later.) This was my third time playing Quibbler and I can honestly say it’s eating kale---good for my brain, but I don’t enjoy putting myself into situations that makes me feel stupid. One of my goals in playing, though, is to push myself outside of my comfort zone.

The side benefit of playing is you can’t sit next to someone for two hours playing a card game without picking up details about their interests and personal history. For example our resident Cheerleader who, they say, never misses Quibbler and is their ‘rules’ go-to-person didn’t show up this week because she wanted to watch the first episode of the Golden Bachelor. She’s been married three times and is one of only three people here who, gossips say, has tried dating since moving in. Two are guys who lost their wives and they didn’t waste any time shopping for a replacement companion…one with success though he only looked as far as the widow of one of his friends, and the other guy is still looking but gets teased because he’s only dating women from off our campus, found and vetted for him by his daughter. The Cheerleader dated a guy a couple of times who comes to our campus to give massages but that didn’t work out. She's got money. He doesn't, and she's ten years older than him, but I don't know if either of those facts was the reason she didn't continue dating the guy. She says he's "a nice person."

The Golden Bachelor, so named because the bachelor is 72 years old, is the first season of the Bachelor franchise for senior citizens. Since the parent franchise has been going for 27 seasons and this week's show was their 286 episode I’d say it’s about time. It's a popular series and I’ll admit to watching an episode here and there but I've haven’t felt compelled to follow an entire season. Yet.

We got finished with Quibbler early enough for me to catch the last half hour of the show and the Rose Ceremony. For those of you who don’t know how a Rose Ceremony works the bachelor spent two hours drooling over 22 women (in this season they are ages 60 to 75) and at the end of the evening he gave all but six women a rose. And those six are essentially voted off the island or to be more accurate, they are kicked out of the mansion where they all live together during the season’s filming. Each week the show ends with another Rose Ceremony until the bachelor is down to three women and at that point he gets overnight dates with each. The final Rose Ceremony ends in an engagement. Already I'm disappointed in this season because the Golden Bachelor boy kicked out the only woman who had short, white/gray hair and he opted to keep all the women who had dyed and bleached hair with lots of extensions. Only one other woman dared to leave a streak of gray hair in her otherwise black mane of hair. Well, two actually but I don’t know what to call a haircut that is showing the woman's gray roots standing straight up ending in an half inch of black hair on top and close-shaved sides and back. Both of these women are the token women of color in the cast and will probably get kicked out at the end of the 3rd or 4th show. I hate that a standard of beauty is perpetuated by shows like this that women can't be attractive without expensive and time-consuming hair treatments and isn't necessity all your own. Especially for older women. I thought there was a movement to accept gray hair in the beauty industry. And I’d bet money these candidates "looking for love again” kicked off their sky high heels the minute the cameras quit rolling.

One of the fan favorites of all the contestants, I read, put in her bio that she "loves to play ping pong, reading and body glitter." Body glitter? In your sixties? What will they think of next! Another woman loves to swim with the sharks. Other contestants listed as their 'fun fact' things like: Christmas enthusiast, makes hand-crafted greeting cards, enjoys 100 year old brandy, loves horseback riding, wants to have lunch with Kris Jenner and my personal favorite answer was the contestant who said she has three master degrees. She'll be kicked off the show early on because she's also the one who dared to leave two streaks of gray hair framing her face. Still, I had hoped that this senior season they'd place more value on brains and less on looks but I'm guessing the producers will stick to their not-so-secret formula that has kept the show in production for so many years.

Every season has a so-called bombshell like two women falling for each other or a former boyfriend shows up at the mansion and wants his woman back. I suspect one of the women from this season is transgender. If I'm right I hope The Cheerleader has set up a few viewing parties and a pool to see who is still standing at the end like she doesn't for fans of football and basketball. It would be fun to watch a few of my fellow residents react, knowing they think Trans people are a threat to society and all children everywhere.

Enough on that topic. Also this week was our ‘Paint and Sip’ evening which only costs $10 plus $5 for wine if we wanted a glass. I didn’t but those who did barely touched their glasses over the two hours of painting. One guy accidentally used his wine to clean his brush in so my hint to any who goes to a ‘Paint and Sip’ party is to only order red wine so you can tell if from the brush cleaning water. 

When the instructor first came in I was kind of insulted by the simplicity of the picture she wanted us to paint. By day she teaches kindergarten and she must have assumed we were like the people on campus who reside in the memory care building. She gave us little pools of the primary colors on a paper plate and I asked for some white so I could mix colors. I also teased the guy next to me that I was going to steal his brush because I didn’t like mine. So the instructor gave three more and loudly announced, “There’s always one in every class.” At the end, though, the consensus was that my painting turned out the best of the twelve. I had fun but the painting I came home with is nothing to write home about. (It's below.) And thank goodness it was done with the same paint that her kindergarten kids use because I managed to get white paint all over my favorite pair of jeans.

 Until Next Wednesday… ©

It's supposed to be the lake we live on but

 I didn't get the swans on it like everyone else did.

New Year's Resolutions Report - Week Four

 

As you may or may not remember I’m taking a 12 week course called Stronger Memory and one of the three requirements is reading out loud 20 minutes a day. Sounds easy enough, doesn’t it. It’s not! My voice box hasn’t gotten this much of a workout since…well, since never. I wasn't a mother who got to read to kids or grandkids and I’ve never taught classes or had a job where I had to give corporate reports. The closest I got to speaking out loud for any length of time was back in college when I took a couple of classes in public speaking, and I was a second stringer on a debate team but even back then our preposition and rebuttal speeches were limited to ten minutes.

A quick google search of how our voice changes over the years brings you information like: “As you age, all of your muscles naturally lose mass. This includes the muscles of your vocal cords and voice box that make your voice work. The older you get, the more your voice may become hoarse or ‘tired’ feeling as a day wears on." Even before I signed up for this course and discovered how hoarse my voice really is I’d been concerned that my voice was cutting in and out when I talk. I spent so much time alone during the pandemic of 2020/21 that if I hadn’t had a dog to boss around my voice would be even thinner and more cracker-ly than it is. (Oh, look, I just made up a new word.) As one website describes the aging process of our voices, “Weakened and dry vocal chords become stringy, which prevent normal vibration, causing higher pitched voices that sound thin.” That’s me. My voice sound ten years older than I am by the calendar.

The above paragraphs are the long way of saying that after ten minutes of reading out loud, it gets hard to do! I have to push myself to get through the next ten minutes. I have to keep reminding myself that I’m supposed to be reading out loud. (And I'm not alone in these complaints about our homework.) I am, however, enjoying the content of the book I’m reading: Painting Techniques of the Impressionists. One of the things I’ve learned that gives me hope for my own work is how long it took various Old Masters (by contrast to the Impressionists) to complete some of their famous works of art. Notes, sketches and color samples in a notebook of Turner’s for example resulted in a finished painting ten years later. Impressionists were not like that. According to my book they were “…painters of fleeting effects, as no other painters had done…” Impressionists would paint outdoors then come back with paintings they’d show and sell in galleries while the Old Masters would have taken those same paintings back to a studio, refined them and worked on them for long periods of time---years even---before they’d declare them finished. No wonder the Impressionists were scorned by some in the art world. (The invention of the camera factors in here, too, but that's a whole another topic.)

Anyway, back on topic: New Year’s Resolutions kept and discarded. I have started a painting but I had a least ten false starts before I settled on a subject to paint. Check that resolution off the list since the resolution was about starting a painting…nothing was said about finishing one. Okay, so that’s a technicality and some might say I’m cheating but it’s my Resolution List so I get to make up the rules here.

Although by the end of the year I do hope to finish a couple of canvases I’d been working on when my husband had his stroke in 2000. I recently found the photo and notes I’d mourned as lost about what color formulas I’d been using on a painting I truly want to finish. It’s of my great-niece when she was a little girl and now she’s a woman with two children of her own. If Turner could take ten years finish a painting and some of the Old Masters work on the same paintings for half a decade, then Amateur Hour Jean can take twenty-two years and not have to feel like such a failure about it. And Manet had once scraped a face off his canvas 25 times before being satisfied that he got it right, so I guess there's no shame in me redoing a face for a second time. Still, my mom in the last few years of her life made a conscious choice to finish up all her unfinished projects and sometimes it feels like her ghost is haunting me, telling me to hurry up and tie the loose ends of my life up because time is running out. Mom, quit nagging me, I'm trying!

The above paragraphs cover two of my New Year’s Resolutions, a third one about improving my personality has already been moved to the discard pile as being too vague. I’ve changed that from “improve my personality” to “reveal more of my personality” and I did so recently at a lunch table when the topic of Chick-fil-A came up. Someone asked if their chicken is really that good that people would wait so long  in line to get it and I mentioned that I wouldn’t know because the place is on my Boycott List. When I was asked why I boycott it I kept it simple, just saying that they support a lot of conservative causes that I fight against. That statement opened it up to where three others revealed that they boycott the place too.

Then one of the Skinny Minnie Twins admitted to buying a My Pillow pillow before they knew the company owner was so off the rails Trumpian and how much it hurt to throw that very comfortable $100 pillow out because she couldn't put her head on it without negative feelings filling her head. Another woman admitted that she will only go to Hobby Lobby when she’s exhausted all other sources to find what she’s looking for. Because I had the guts to drop the ‘Boycott List’ into a conversation I’ve found my political tribe on the continuum care campus. And here I didn’t think there were any other Liberals around.  However, The Cheerleader causally mentioned that we all have to live together for the rest of our lives and there are so many other things in the world to talk about that we should keep politics and religion off the table. Okay,  then. ©

Photo at top: J.M.W. Turner's 'Dutch Boats in a Gale.'

The unfinished portrait that I'm pledging to finish by the end of the year. (Need some practice time on other stuff before I tackle her face again.)

 

The shelves I mentioned in an recent blog that I had added to have a place to store wet canvases and various things I need for inspiration or to have handy in my painting nook. The thing to the right of the easel is a fold up, antique table that I can put my palette on when working.

Weird Dinner Experience and Painting Class

 

I ran into weird situation that put me in a mini meltdown during dinner in the fine dining restaurant on campus. I’m getting used to having people invite themselves to sit with me or me with them but something happened last night that flustered me to the point I embarrassed myself, then tried to back-track so I didn’t hurt a woman’s feelings. But what about my feelings? Why don’t people listen to others when we say, "No thank you" so many times we sound like parrots in a pet shop? 

We were total strangers who ended up sitting across the table from each other and when her dinner came I remarked that I had ordered the cider chicken last week and it looked entirely different than what she was served. “How so?” she asked and I told her, “for one you got five times the amount of yams that I got and I didn’t get any of the dried apple embellishments on top.” 

I was wondering if the chef was reacting to complaints about not serving enough vegetables with his entrees or if someone else was plating stuff in the kitchen and I wish I’d said that out loud because the next thing I know she picked several of the dried apples rings off her chicken and was trying to hand them to me. “These are really good, try them” to which I politely rejected her more than five times before she handed them to her husband. Hey, I didn’t know where here fingers had been! For all I know she could have been expressing the anal glands on a gerbil before coming down to dinner.

Then she started spearing yams with her fork, a fork she’d had in her mouth already and she was putting them on my plate. “Take them. I can’t eat these all.” I panicked. “Please don’t do that! I don't want them," I said, my voice getting more demanding with each time I begged her to stop. She had eight cubes of yams on my plate before I took my spoon and started transferring them to my bread plate. I’d had enough of her pushing food at me. In my mind’s eye I could see cartoon-like germs about to jump off those cubes of yam and contaminate my sea bass.

“I can’t stand eating off other people’s plates or have them eat off mine!” I told her and everyone else within an eight foot radius. Call me a germaphobic if you want but swapping germs with a total stranger is not in my wheelhouse. Sure, if she had been a cute guy and it was 50 years ago and we were clearly headed toward a night of playing kissy-face I have shared food in that situation but that was then and this in now---whatever that means. I've even taken a few offered fries from someone I know well, but only if my fingers alone touched them. My husband and I never ate off each other’s plates---at least not after his stroke when I knew exactly where his one working hand had been and it wasn't under a water facet as often as it should have been---and this total stranger wanted me to stick food in my mouth that had her fork germs inside? During a world-wide pandemic no less!

Trying to explain my outburst I said, “It’s a childhood thing. I was punished at the dinner table for sharing food.” I didn’t mention it was the dog I was sharing foods with that I didn't want to eat and it was my brother who'd sneak food onto my plate that he knew I didn't like. I got caught, he never did. She snatched my bread plate full of yams off my side of the table and passed it her husband who then asked her if he could try a bite of her chicken. Shockingly she turned him down with a, “No, I like it too much.” 

There was a fourth person at our table. A woman from my painting class and we had a conversation about our last class before the couple joined us. She was upset with the teacher and says she’s not going back. When arriving at class she told the instructor she was expecting a call from a furniture delivery man, that she’d have to go let him in but would be right back to class after her new table was in place. When the call came and she got up to leave the instructor barked, “This is not a good time to leave! I’m teaching something important here.” She left anyway and who could blame her. 

When she came back the instructor ignored her and sat down at another student’s place and painted on her canvas for 15-20 minutes. I’d be livid if she done that to my canvas. That’s not teaching in my opinion. At one point she said, “It’s still your painting. I’m just moving the paints around.” Ya, sure.

When she critiqued my work, she said, “The side of your barn would be perfect if it was on other side of the building and not that one. It’s not dark enough. Remember the light ALWAYS comes from the right.” “Unless it comes from the left,” I said, not meaning to be antagonistic. It just rolled off my tongue. “No, remember the sun comes up from the east, so the light source is on the right side. Always.” “Maybe my light is coming from a sunset instead of a sunrise,” That time I did mean to poke the bear. She walked away shaking her head and I darken my barn's siding.  

To be fair, I'm not entirely sure if the instructor meant to say the east sun/right side "rule" applies to all paintings. It's more logical to think that she misspoke and meant just the canvases we were working. She did, however, plant doubt in my head about lighting rules so after class I looked through some art books and got reacquainted with the four basic light sources: back lighting, front lighting, form lighting and rim lighting.

That said, I need to once again post a disclaimer. I really do like this feisty Elf of a woman. She’s over 90 and speaks her “Truth” with conviction. Me? I have been known to panic with my Truth, letting my inner child's feelings get hurt (see top half of this blog entry). She also has me thinking art again and acting like a mouthy teenager and I like that. She’s also got what I don’t have---a great eye for mixing colors. It was amazing in an appalling sort of way to watch her turn my classmate's blue barn into a brown one. ©

Painting Class, the Art Show and Coming Back from Heaven

Painting class is going to be more challenging that I thought but not in the way you might be imagining. On one hand just hearing the instructor talk about what the different brushes are used for got me excited about painting again but on the other hand, when she started telling us precisely how she wanted us to fold pieces of paper towel to wipe our brushes on I started getting the idea she’s going to teach in micro-controlling steps. “When I tell you to clean your brushes,” before changing colors, “this is how I want you to do it,” she said while blotting a brush with the folded paper towel in her hand. Okay, brushes are expensive so I get her point here. I must not beat the crap out of my brushes anymore while trying to clean them. No hard surface should ever touch the bristles in my brushes.

She’s been teaching classes since the ‘70s and when I asked where she taught---because I thought maybe I’d taken one of her classes---it came out that I "painted some back then" and that I've been away from art for a long time. She asked what style I painted in and I replied that I want to develop a new style from what I used years ago similar to the Impressionists, using short dabbing strokes and with less detail than in my past. “You won’t learn that in my class. I will teach you the proper way to make a paint stroke.” Maybe my memory is faulty---it's been 35 years ago since I've taken a serious art course---but I don’t recall an instructor ever saying one type of brush stroke is better or more “proper” than any other. Georges Seurat with his pointillism style would have been sent to the principal’s office for not staying within the lines, so to speak, in this class. 

Okay, I do get it. Again. She wants us all working on the same thing at the same time and we’ll start with the sky during the next class and working our way down from top to bottom. In my college classes we were taught to kind of paint all over the canvas, balancing out the values before getting down to refining the details in any one area and this class is more like advanced paint-by-number. I'm totally okay with that. I need to start some place on the long road back into getting obsessed again with painting.

She had us trace a drawing of a barn on a canvas and mine was too dark, she said. “You’ll have to erase your lines because you won’t be able to cover them with paint.” I didn’t think they were dark at all but then I'd just had eye surgery the day before so what did I know. I figured if we were using watercolors she would have had a valid point but we’re using oils. “I’ll just use thicker paint,” I said without thinking that I was being a cantankerous student who I wouldn't want to be teaching. "That won’t work," she replied. Vincent van Gogh and Jackson Pollock are lucky they were not students of this feisty, elf--- the top of her head lines up with my boobs. They may never have learned to use an impasto technique, laying on thick paint with a palette knife. I really can’t complain, though. The series of classes is only cost $15 with all supplies included and I’m learning (or relearning) useful things about our paints, brushes and canvases. The first three hour class was just an introduction to the supplies and her doing a demonstration. I needed that review.

But I will be challenged not only by her teaching method and my rusty skills but also by my classmates several who talked extensively about going to heaven and coming back and how everything will be revealed at death and there is nothing to fear. I once had an out-of-body experience when I was being rushed to the hospital with a high fever but all I saw while looking down on myself were snakes crawling everywhere. No white light for me to follow. Ohmygod, I really am going to hell, aren’t I! I did not share my experience with the class. I know when to keep my mouth shut.

We've had an art and crafts show on campus already---not from this class. It was organized by the girl in charge of the Enrichment Programs. She is one busy girl! I wasn't sure I wanted to put either one of the only two finished paintings I still have around in the show because I had no idea where I’d stand on the scale of talent on the campus. (I didn't want to be embarrassed, if I didn't measure up.) My dog Jason's portrait is artsy-fartsy better than an old house in other piece. The portrait was done in a true painter’s fashion while the old house was done more like a Bob Ross formula painting.

So instead of a painting I entered a quilt that I knew would wow anyone who sees it. (In the photo up above it wasn't married to a backing yet and I'm too lazy to take a new photo.) I ended helping the organizer set up the show because she had some easels that she didn't know how to work, and at the last minute I went back to my apartment, grabbed the house painting and put that in the show as well because it fit an easel still left.

We have a wide range of talented people living here---an accomplished metal sculptor, two wood workers, several knitters, a weaver, a tailor who made a to-die-for artsy-fartsy jacket, two photographers, five painters and four quilters. Even had an x-florist enter floral arrangements. The instructor of my class brought in a large and lovely winter landscape---nicely done, a real crowd pleaser. Oh and in case I might have left the impression that we get along like oil and water, that isn't true. She's got a sense of humor and we "get" each other. ©