Kirstie Alley

I seriously thought Kirstie Alley was older than that.  Hollywood tends to cast younger women with men ten years older than them to twist our sense of physical beauty, which entirely worked in her case.  Had I known she was only ten years older than me, I would have made a pretty serious attempt to woo her, or her sister, or her cousin or some chick she was in high school with.  She's seriously smoking hot, or was I supposed to not notice?  

She supposedly was notoriously difficult to work with, but, ya know, actors! am-I-rite?  Seriously I don't really care much about that stuff.  I'm pretty difficult to work with, too, albeit for different reasons.  Did I mention that she was seriously good-looking?  On my list of beautiful women I've never actually met, she's like number twenty-eight.  Lauren Bacall was, is, and always will be number one.  Even when she was seventy, she was still baby.  

Do you know who's not on that list?  Carolyn Munro, Angela Cartwright, and Fay Wray because I met them. Meeting and talking on the phone with Fay Wray is some of my most treasured memories.  We never once mentioned King Kong but talked at length about Lauren Bacall and Eudora Welty.   Several pretty remarkable writers were in love with Fay at one point or another in her life, and she made several attempts as a writer herself, publishing her own memoir and a really lovely play about her mother's journey from Canada.  

Finding out that Miss Eudora was one of Fay's idols was thrilling to me, it felt like a vine or green branch reached out through the decades from her life to mine, and we had a kind of connection.  Finding this out, of course, I made a trip to Choctaw Books which had a really nice signed copy of Golden Apples, which I bought and mailed to Fay, which brought on another lovely phone call.  

About Kirstie Alley though, I suppose it's wrong of me to judge someone based on their eyes and cheekbones and upper lip, but I do that a lot.  I'm a very visual person, even in a non-lascivious way, if there is a non-lascivious way.  I guess I'm trying to make or drive home the point that a seventy-year-old woman can be and is very much a beautiful woman, which is a point we don't make very often.  

I was watching the Dolly Parton Christmas special on television.  Well, I wasn't really paying much attention, but I did watch closely enough to realize that there were some fundamentally beautiful women on that show, all of which had done so much surgery to their faces that it wasn't really their face anymore.  I really wish they'd let the years come through.  There's no shame in it.  I remember what Dolly Parton looked like when she was twenty, if that's an issue.  It would be weird to me if she still looked like that.  

Anyway, the world lost a great beauty this week.  Ya'll are gonna have to go out and find another.  We don't want to run out.  I prefer dark eyes, or green eyes, so put that on the list.

Red Christmas Truck

 People are starting to put their Christmas decorations out.  It's that time of year.  I haven't participated in a while, so I was curious to see what it's like.  Over and over again, I saw these old red pickup trucks with a Christmas tree in the back.  I know the Christmas story backward and forwards from both the Christian and the pagan traditions, and I never heard of this red pickup truck business.

So, I looked it up.  It's easy to do these days.  You don't need a library.  The Red Christmas Truck motif is entirely a product of and a meme in numerous Hallmark Christmas Specials.  Because nobody is better at marketing the holidays than Hallmark, even before they had their own cable channel, Hallmark's red pickup trucks were adorned on thousands of commercially available Christmas products, and since people saw them in the stores, they assumed they were a legitimate part of Christmas even if they never saw any of the movies.

While there are many men who make Hallmark movies, there are very, very few men who watch them unless they're trying to appease or attract some woman who watches them.  I've seen enough of them to know that they have basically a single plot that's redressed a thousand different ways.

A girl.  A pretty girl.  A successful pretty girl has to move back to her hometown because she got fired or has to take care of her sick mother or she got sick of her job, or her relationship with her very successful boyfriend, who also happens to be her boss soured, so, she went home.

Fully ninety percent of these movies star Lacy Chabert, so home town for Lacy is Purvis, Mississippi, which she hasn't seen since Cliff Finch was governor, but this is fiction right.  So the pretty girl moves home and at the hardware store, or the grocery store, or she gets a flat tire, or her mom's dog jumps over the fence, and she meets this guy she slept with once in high school but rejected because he wasn't ambitious enough before the moved to the big city and started dating Mister Ambitious.  Mister Ambitious is usually an asshole.  Not a real asshole who beats her or takes her money, but a TV asshole who "doesn't understand her."

So that's the plot.  The rest of the movie is trying to get Lacy Chabert to realize she loves the high school guy, who somehow made a billion dollars even though he wasn't ambitious, and gives Mister Ambitious, who's been putting up with her shit this whole time, the air.  Not the finger, just the air and maybe a note that says, "thanks for the years you were devoted to me; I'm gonna run away with this guy I haven't seen in twenty years now.  Oh, thanks for paying for my nose job.  Love, Lacy."  All of this happens after Mister No Ambition shows up at her mom's house with a live Christmas tree in the back of the Red Pickup Truck he had in high school (the one they had sex in that one time).  The end.

I'm not sure I'm all too interested in that complicated hoo-ha becoming part of the Christmas story.  Who am I to judge, though?  We already put mistletoe over the doors, which carries some of the most potent pagan fertility magic despite being poison.  I'm not sure why women want some dude who's been faithful to get the shaft in their romantic fiction, but you don't even wanna know what happens to women in men's fiction.

Either way, I'll learn to accept it like I do elves and reindeer and mistletoe and snowflakes and some guy named Santa and a million other things that aren't part of the Christmas story at all.  Might as well.  Early Christians never really gave a second thought to Christmas until they decided to try and convert a bunch of pagans who celebrated winter solstice with yule logs and the occasional human sacrifice.

 

Water Color

 First time touching watercolor in 25 years, first art lesson in considerably longer than that. Thanks Hope Carr Art for a great day!

Pencil Sketch

Yesterday, they brought in a lady to lead us in Christmas carols. I don't sing, so I sat in the back an drew this instead. Millsaps people will recognize the scene. It's important that I'm able to correctly use trees in my work. Trees are important to me, and they can be difficult to do, so this is practice. Lucy taught us that you don't really draw leaves. There are thousands of them, and it would take your life to complete them. Instead, learn a way to suggest leaves that both you and your audience understand. I'm still working on that. The people around didn't seem to mind that I wasn't singing. I was celebrating in my own way

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