Tricks and Manners

Here is the box of birthday surprises that just arrived from my daughter Emily...

See, the wonderful thing about having preferences is that people can indulge them for you.

If I hadn't finally figured out that deep down, all these many years, I have secretly loved the color pink best of all but never admitted it even to myself because I thought something must be wrong with liking pink, that it wasn't vigorous enough, and that I ought to prefer a more strenuous color, if I hadn't finally got past all that, I say--then this marvelous box of surprises could never have been assembled with such ingenuity to strike me pink.

My daughter knows me very well. She knows I love my bath products--see the Pink Paradise Bath Fizzies? Notice the Lavender and Chamomile Johnson's? (Originally that product was called "Fussy Baby Bath" and we got it when Ben was little. Then we got it for me and called it "Fussy Mommy Bath." I haven't had any for a long time.)

She knows that I love both New York and the New Yorker magazine, and here is a subscription to it. And I collect bookmarks, and though  you can't see it here, there's a bookmark in the box and it's pretty and pink. And there's even a little pink chapstick tube, because I must have one in my pocket at all times, and a little baby lotion bottle, which I always travel with.

She knows I love fancy socks, and pretty make-up bags, and chocolates, and yes--even that toothpaste is a treat, because it's my absolute favorite but I usually cop out and buy a cheaper kind. And she knows I love hand-made things, so she cut out flowers and laid them on top of the tissue paper, where I saw them first of all.

Emily was always a very generous child who loved giving gifts. At Christmas time, she'd want me to have more presents under the tree, so she'd go around the house finding little doodads and wrapping them up for me. On Christmas morning I'd open her presents and find my own pincushion or some little framed pictures that had been around the house for years and say "Oh, this is so nice, Emily! It's just what I wanted!" She'd be smiling with her whole little body, she was so pleased with it all. And the little doodads she "gave" me became new and special to me after that.

At 23, Emily has a much more profound understanding of shopping than she did at age 5, but her joy and affection in gift-giving are as charming and sound as ever. It still moves her mother to exclaim, "Oh this is so nice, Emily! It's just what I wanted!"

Today is my birthday. I like my birthday, both the specific day it falls on and the privilege of growing older. I am 51 and happy about it.

This particular birthday is sad too: it's the first one of my whole life that my Mom hasn't been in the world. She died last October, late at night in the nursing home... She would have been 84 in the morning.  She wouldn't have known it--she didn't know who she was, she didn't know who any of us were, she wanted to go home but she didn't know where home was. So it wasn't sad that by leaving us she didn't have to be confused and frightened anymore.

What's sad is that the whole, complete person she was is gone. Today there would have been a card from her--always a sweet, pretty, flowery one with the nicest message. Some years I was able to drive up north and spend May 7 with her and my sister; if I couldn't I called her on the phone and always said the same thing, "Thank you for having me!" because it made her laugh. And she always answered, "Well, it was my pleasure."

She taught me how to embroider when I was 6 years old, to crochet when I was 9, and to sew my own clothes when I was 14. She could draw pictures of pretty ladies in ruffled gowns, she sang in a beautiful soprano voice, she planted lilac bushes at each new home she lived in. She loved Glenn Miller, Tennessee Ernie Ford, and all movies with Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. Toward the end of her life she'd forgotten many things, but she could still play poker.  

Today I am going to spend a little part of the morning at an antique store and see if there's some relic from my childhood I can add to my collection. Then I'll cut out the pieces for a cloth doll, and make a treat to take to work with me. I'll work my reference desk shift, and when I come home from work, my husband and son will take me to dinner anywhere I want to go, and I'll pick Cracker Barrel. And maybe I can work on the doll some more before bedtime. It will be a wonderful day, it just won't include my Mom, and I have to get used to it.

Even so, I know that I am one of the lucky ones. Other people didn't get to have a kind and loving mother like mine was, and that is far sadder than to have had one and lost her. I hope life is finding other ways to bless them.

Penelope doll has lived in my house without underwear or shoes for 13 years.  It's something of a joke with my other dollmaking friends. But even without underclothes and footwear, she is still a charming doll, and my daughter played happily with her and her sister-Penelope doll. Because one Penny had short curly red hair and the other had long brown braids, Emily played that they were Betsy and her best friend from Carolyn Heywood's Betsy books.

But now Penelope hardly knows how to act. In the last week, she has acquired two pairs of underpants, two pairs of shoes, four dresses, and a flannel nightgown. Moreover, during the day when she has to stay for hours in the sewing room with the other dolls, she sits atop of stack of fabric lengths chosen and purchased with her in mind.

Here she is in her hostess dress, a pattern I designed based on her Norwegian blouse pattern. The grosgrain ribbons are stitched into the side seams, then criss-cross in back to tie in front. Does she need a hostess dress? Well, I don't know that she does. But I know that at 13 years old, she likes to dress up in sophisticated young-lady clothes sometimes, so long as she can jump back into her jeans and camp shirts and go back to being a kid. This Penelope is going to stay 13. Her brown-braided sister is only 10. I'm really going to have to do something different with their names--two sisters called Penelope are kind of confusing.

And she is definitely getting a new wig, probably a chestnut brown short and curly one. Her auburn hair is too limiting, as I want to dress her in my favorite color, pink, and as Anne of Green Gables knew very well, pink and auburn are incompatible.

My son requests me to share with the world this picture of his mascots: Racky Raccoon, Foxy Fox, Mounty Mountain Lion, Squirrely Squirrel, and Froggy Frog. They are finger puppets, very realistically and beautifully made by Folkmanis .  He started collecting them when Floyd Raccoon traveled to New York City with us. Floyd and my son got along so well, Floyd sent one of his cousins over to live with us, and the family of mascots has grown since then.

When I was a girl, I loved ballet very much. I rarely saw anyone actually dance; I just looked at the pictures of dancers in library books. So ballet to me was a series of beautiful but motionless poses, and I thought that ballerinas could stay on their toes forever.

I was thrilled when my parents brought home from the store for me (around 1965) a lovely bedspread with sketches of four different graceful ballerinas. I have a particular reason for showing them to you. Here they are:

The pink kneeling girl was the only one I named: she was Daphne.

I loved the girl tying the ribbons on her slippers: I had a great fascination for toe shoes. (And one day I owned pairs of my own, but that's another story.)

A third girl was the one below, caught in a jump whose name I do not know--maybe it is made-up, as it looks fine in the air but seems like it would be tough to land gracefully. Well anyway, there she is. For our purposes today, we don't need a picture of the fourth ballerina. Though some day I may come back and add her, just for archival purposes.

So now you've seen them all.

A few weeks ago at the library, I was working with a book truck full of old Vogue magazines from the 50s and 60s. They had been bound only in cheap cardboard covers, and we were about to send them off to the bindery to have them re-bound in sturdy, gorgeous red covers that would support and protect them better.

And of course, no person could resist looking old Vogues, can she? I couldn't. I opened up an issue from 1958 and idly turned the first pages...Now this is the part where fate steps in, where worlds collide, where, to be less drama-queen about it, a coincidence occurred. Because, over an ad for tampons, this is the picture I saw:

Now I have noticed that for some reason, other people are not as bonkers about coincidences as I am. So we will gloss over my likely being the only person in the building  (city, country, world) who knows about the 1965 ballerina bedspread and has seen the 1958 tampon ad. Instead, I'll just say, if I could draw as beautifully as this artist could, and I saw those ballerinas in a tampon ad, I would have wanted to immortalize them too, or at least improve their venue. And I would have been glad to know they made a little girl happy.

Thanks to Auntie Bunny for choosing my blog for the "Arte y Pico" award! An award for doing a blog that she finds inspiring--what an encouragement to bloggers to be acknowledged in such an exciting way!  Auntie Bunny's blog happens to be one that I find very inspiring as well.

Now I have the happy task of choosing five other bloggers who inspire me, and presenting the award to them. I can easily find that many just on Vox. Of course we DO have all the best bloggers on Vox, so that's no surprise!

And thanks to the Arte y pico people (http://www.arteypico.blogspot.com/) for inventing the award. Their blog is in Spanish, but they have some very cool pictures happening!

Check out AuntieBunny's posting on her vox blog about the book "How to Make Foreign Dolls and Their Costumes" by Julienne Hallen. (Posting headline is "What to Do, What to Do.") http://auntiebunny.vox.com/

It's a 40s-vintage book whose main doll pattern is cute, fun, quaint, and easy--in short, a lovely, low-stress design to have fun with for a challenge. And the book is available in libraries, inter-library loan, ebay, second-hand. etc.

Everyone who makes the doll can post pictures on our Vox blogs and share them with the group. Take a look, and see which of the costumes gets you itching to stitch!

At first I was not very happy with this "Material Girl" pattern, the one I have named "Marisol." But now that she's been lounging around the sewing room for a few weeks (hard for her to do anything but lounge, since she has no head or lower legs), I'm getting used to her shape. The wide hips bothered me at first, since the illustrations lead you to expect a less extreme curve there.

But then I had another look at my Veronica doll, and noticed that her hourglass figure is just a smidge more bottom-heavy than I would have designed it. But that isn't a fault in her--wide hips hold out her skirts (or will hold them

out if I ever make any skirts) And so it is not a fault in Marisol either.

I think the doll must have been intended to have hips like this, despite the drawings (which aren't to scale elsewhere, either). Because, as you see, the upper thigh pieces fit along the bottom edge just right--only about a quarter inch could be reduced.

So I'll just keep reminding myself that Marisol will look good in her clothes. Unless I mess up her face. Then she isn't going to get any clothes. I still haven't bought one of her $12 costume patterns yet anyway.

One thing I do not like is having to stuff that whole upper body through the neck. That's a tricky, four-piece neck with bias edges she has there, not easily replaced if it gets ruined during the stuffing process. If I make her again I will leave an opening in the upper back to stuff her.

The arms are set-in like sleeves; there is no separation or hinge to give them movement. The answer, according to the instructions, is to stuff them "softly," which is hard for me to do, with my "hard stuffing" habit, but is good for me to learn. In the picture, one is "softly" stuffed and the other is not stuffed at all.

Well, I am waiting on snail-mail delivery of the 45 mm doll joint I need for the neck (though after stuffing through it I may need a 65 mm one)  so I will finish up the lower legs and start thinking about the head before they arrive.

After getting this far on Marisol, I took a break and made Penelope a cozy new flannel nightgown! She still owns no underwear...But the weekend is only half gone!  More Penelope pictures to come...

After cupcake appetizers from Magnolia Bakery, we ate lunch at Pommes Frites, which of course is French for french fries. And that's all they serve, french fries, with 50 different sauces to dip them in. Pomme Frites is another tiny little store front with a line of people out the door and down the street, waiting to order at the little counter just inside. You get your french fries in a twisted cone of white paper; the tiny tables in the back of the store--where maybe eight people, total, can sit to eat inside--have tapering holes drilled in the top, long worn smooth from holding the fry cones upright. They are delicious fries, wonderfully seasoned and salty and crispy on the outside. I dipped mine in garlic-flavored mayo; Emily had melted cheese.

We blew through three or four bookstores too--small ones, whose owners must necessarily be experts at title selection. Biography Bookstore was one, and Three Lives Bookstore. I bought a few things, of course--could not resist a postcard of the Tic Toc Diner from earlier in the week, and since I had my debit card out it seemed silly not to buy Lopato's nice chunky collection of New York writings.

The few pictures I took of the Village don't do it justice, but they captured the beautiful day for me in part, anyway.

This is the park where we ate our Magnolia cupcakes (which I seem to remember promising someone, possibly my boss, that I would bake this weekend. Oops. Bringing home a Boonzaaijer "Extreme Chocolate Torte" for my husband kind of made me forget about baking)

Update from Sunday: I did bake the Magnolia cupcakes, and they are delicious but I am exhausted. I SO respect people who work in bakeries.  I still haven't made poor Veronica her underpants, but they are cut out--nice pale clue batiste from the Bernina store, so fine I may have to sew them by hand.

Here's what Dennis John, my ol' coot of a cousin, has to say about my trip. I've stolen his postings, completely without his permission, from our family's google group boards. (He'll try to tell you he's six months younger than me--don't listen to him.) See how good he writes without half tryin'?

He may be an old coot but he's an entertainin' one.

	You can't keep her down on the farm. « Reply #20 on Apr 7, 2008, 12:40pm »
Well, we need to offer our condolences to Emily in New York. Ma Kettle is in town. I am sure she showed up at the airport in a straw hat & bibbed overalls, probably with bare feet. I just hope she didn’t take along any farm animals or livestock with her. Well, are we going to get a full report on the movies seen, plays attended, bookstores visited and Male Chippendale shows watched? This was no spoonful of sugar! « Reply #8 on Apr 7, 2008, 12:38pm » Oh, I have just been reading a new biography by a well known actress and it is scandalous. I won’t say her name, but the name of her most famous role rhymes with the name “Barry Stoppins”. In it she details a lifetime of willful drug abuse, including heroin, cocaine, reefer, pills, mushrooms, crack, cough syrup, opium, absinth and Flintstones chewable vitamins. It turns out she is an avowed communist, and was once the lover of Stalin, Chairman Mao and Fidel Castro. She is a Satan worshipper who has made animal and child sacrifices to the dark lord. She admits that she “can’t sing a lick”, and that every time you see her singing in movies, it is actually the same singer who provided Natalie Woods vocals in “West Side Story”, Marni Nixon, who also does the vocal duties for our author. She states that her favorite form of relaxation is kicking puppies & kittens across the room. I understand that this terrible woman is in New York right now promoting her book. I hope that Ruth & Emily don’t stumble onto her by accident while prowling around the bookstores of the city.

	That medicine did not go down well. « Reply #9 on Apr 7, 2008, 3:13pm »
It's worse than I thought. This terrible woman never even left her house for her "book tour". Whenever her poor deluded fans showed up to see her they were told they needed "wristbands" to get in, and that they were all out of these "supposed" wristbands. Of course, there never were any in the first place. It was all just a scam put on by this shameless woman.

Floyd had a few more adventures before coming home to the Midwest to await his next trip.

Here you see him literally on the edge of his seat at the New Amsterdam Theater on Broadway for a rousing performance of "Mary Poppins," where he fell in love with the star, Ashley Brown.

The next day, Floyd toured the beautiful city of Hoboken, the hometown of Frank Sinatra. Here he is at the Hoboken Public Library, checking out the "Old Blue Eyes" section of their CD collection.

Finally, here we see Floyd enjoying a crisp spring morning with the ice skaters at Rockefeller Center. Just after this photograph was taken, Floyd nimbly made his way down to the rink, rented a pair of blades, and confidently took the ice. To the astonishment of onlookers, our diminutive mascot performed dazzling salchow spins, triple toe loops, and flying jumps that would have brought credit to an Olympic athlete. After modestly acknowledging the crowd's applause with a twitch of his striped tail, Floyd left the ice claiming his hamstrings were tightening up. So left the rink and the gold fountain behind us and moved along up the block to F A O Schwarz, where he bought my son a stuffed Husky.