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The Emma Thompson Project (2 of 6)

April 4, 2015
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My sincere apologies go out to Emma Thompson. In trying to learn her face I’ve brutalized it, taking Kimon Nicolaides’s advice to not be afraid to overwork a drawing in order to learn. Then I did another face study which was UNDERworked. Meanwhile the acrostic poem I cobbled up is full of vagueness, that nonspecificity that may not apply to Emma Thompson much but does not not apply to her. In my defense, Ms. Thompson, the final image and poetry will benefit from these early egregiousnesses.

That said, I did find a cracking good quotation from Meryl Streep that says a lot about the real Emma Thompson as reported by the real Meryl Streep. Therefore, along with what I’ve learned by falling on my face with my versions of her face, plus the inclusion of the all-important word Wit in the acrostic, I’m compelled to declare victory in the execution of stage 2 of 6 of The Emma Thompson Project.

001-5Quoth Meryl Streep regarding Emma Thompson: “She works like a stevedore, she drinks like a bloke, and she’s smart and crack and she can be withering in a smack-down of wits, but she leads with her heart.”

Words to the THOMPSON EMMA double acrostic:

The screen & stage enjoy her vital flame
Her honesty–an ethical gendarme
Harmonics with some dissidence the theme
Outstanding nuanced capturing the aim
Might find her as a widow on a farm
Morose and grappling with her self-esteem
Perhaps a crisis or a death may loom
Perhaps a challenge to her wit & charm
Swept by the wind or by a careless broom
Old–young–carefree, or full of belladonna
No telling what the consequence of karma
Nor even what variety of fauna

Limbo, with Public Service Announcement

May 1, 2014
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National Poetry Month ended last midnight. Tomorrow at 11:00 AM I check in to Verde Valley Medical Center for a screening colonoscopy. So today I’ve been in limbo, albeit an eventful one, the event being the spring-cleaning of my lower GI tract.

They give you this powder in a jug with the fill line at one gallon. You have the option of adding a flavorant they provide, and suggest you may wish to augment it with Kool-Aid or Crystal Lite. Additives mask, but do not hide, the true flavor of this stuff, which I’ve come to think of as Beyond the Grave Potpourri. (I am going to encourage people of my graduating class to do what I’m doing now if they haven’t already, but I’m not going to sugar-coat it.)

You drink eight ounces or more every fifteen minutes or less till it is gone. Around about the third round, the magic begins to happen, the substance ingested acting much like the Liquid Plumr product they call Foaming Pipe Snake. You make the first of many trips to the bathroom. What you do in there is your own business, but I defy you not to think of a seltzer water dispenser, dispensing. You come out of the bathroom a bit shaken, sit down gingerly, and two to eighteen seconds later stand right back up again for another ride on the bucking bronco. Meanwhile, you’re drinking more of the miracle potion, which far before it is gone seems to have taken on the volume of the Atlantic Ocean.

Eventually, though, it is gone; eventually, the last of it goes through you and out the back. You stabilize. There are a few after-tremors, but a mere five hours after you started, you’re mostly fine, and what’s to come is all good: they’ll make you happy-sleepy and before you know it, “I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille.”

Katie Couric, Robert Kline, Meryl Streep, and Billy Connolly have all done this, Friends, and if you’re pushing or over 50 and haven’t done it yet, or, like me, HAVE done it but not for a long time–I hope you will do it as well. Colorectal cancer death is preventable via excision of precancerous polyps and biopsy of found growths–yet colorectal cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death. It killed my grandfather on my mother’s side; and the last four months of his life were hellish indeed.

So, please: join me; go on the Five-Hour Quick-Weightloss Diet. Have some fun with it, as Billy Connolly did. (Do an internet search on Billy Connolly Colonoscopy and watch the video; you’ll laugh like a hyena, I guarantee it.) But do it; for yourself, and your loved ones.