Amanda works hard, and appreciates it when support staff like me work hard, too. The other day she yet again tried to “tip me out” and lay a fiver on me, so instead I asked her to take a selfie with my camera so I could do her portrait. This is it!
Our server Chelsea warmed my old man’s heart not long after she started working with us. It was a particularly busy day, and we were up to our patooties in alligators trying to keep up, and as always, everyone had a plane to catch and needed to be sat to eat NOW. So I was in overdrive, doing dignity-free bussing, bobbing and weaving, seating, wiping tables, saying Hello to the invading hordes and Thank You to the satisfied pussycats on their way out. Toward the end of the day Chelsea said three words to me that everyone I can think of loves to hear, as long as their name and not mine is the first word: “Gary, you’re amazing.” Well, so are you, my friend.
Here are the words to the double acrostic. As I indicate in the image, I’m grateful to Joni Mitchell, who wrote “Chelsea Morning” more than four decades ago. I have it playing in my head this very minute. And I am grateful that titles of creative work are not subject to copyright. “Chelsea” is seven letters long, and so is “Morning,” and “Morning” has an O in it, which enables me to rhyme-cheat a little.
clock in at dawn a. m
how Diners haw & hem–O
extracting wishes for
lean lusciousness this morn
see someone fine as Princess Di
ethereal as she’s benign
and Time is worth the whiling/when teaming brings the smiling
My old man’s paternalistic, patronizing, mansplaining awfulself comes up with this additional description, which is patently unfair: “She’s a good kid.” No. She’s a fine person, appreciative and kind.
My vacation, which started a week ago and ends at 6AM Thursday morning, has seen some really hard work and really fun play. Yesterday was hard work: I helped my brother Brian set up his yard sale, and that involved heavy lifting and moving of dozens of items, including one of the biggest pre-flat-screen TVs ever made. About nine hours later all unsold items, including that honker of a TV, and display apparatus, including a long, heavy, falling-apart table about as heavy as the TV, had to be re-stashed. Wisely, Brian had me put the table where it could be conveniently taken to the alley for bulk trash pickup.
So today my back and legs are sore but my brain is fresh as a daisy, thanks to a long and heavy series of sleeps, commencing at 7:30 PM and continuing through the night. And for the first time in quite a while I felt like doing some hard brainwork/artwork/ acrostification in the service of portraiture. I’d just watched THE FOUNDER, the story of Ray Kroc’s discovery and gradual appropriation of the McDonald brothers’ revolutionary fast food method. It is more fascinating and horrifying to watch than a train wreck. And yet again I was left with an admiration of Michael Keaton’s skill and versatility.
I went a day overdue returning THE FOUNDER to Redbox, and it may take yet another day, and another $1.62 down the drain. I’ve been sketching, not only Keaton, but others involved in this incredible movie, and I’ve yet to do Jeremy Renner, actor turned producer, and Laura Dern, whom I also admire, who plays Kroc’s first wife, and gives an outstanding performance as a strong, supportive woman who was exploited, neglected, taken for granted, and ultimately cast aside. She will go next to Michael, smaller but with more time taken to get her right.
And then there is the acrostic. I’ve met the challenge of making MICHAEL the same length as KEATON, by conjoining the A and E in a way we don’t often see any more. I think the poem will be iambic, because I’ve had much more experience with iambic versifying than any other meter, and I will need all the help I can get with this one, since I intend to make each line of exactly equal character length, as befits a “true” acrostic, unlike the cheats I usually do. That is why the area between MICHAEL and KEATON is gridded. (Hint to aspiring acrostifiers: Microsoft Excel is a good place to do double-or-more acrostic construction. Format the cells to be of equal length and width, put your acrostics in the first and last columns, give yourself plenty of in-between columns, and hack away. NOTE: An easy way to add columns is hot-keying Control-Plus; subtracting, Control-Minus.)
But “Aesop,” the most familiar and least confusing of the AE possibilities, is trochaic, not iambic. But “Aesopian” IS iambic, and so one minor hurdle is jumped. There will be many others, especially since I stuck “batman” in there, in lower-case incognity.
Is this hard work or hard play? It is both. Please stay tuned!
I have just finished watching the DVD of the movie LOVING. For me the story was both deeply moving and relatable. I had an interracial relationship in the 70s, and another in the 80s. Of course, I and the two women who blessed my life with their companionship did not endure nearly the hardship that Mildred and Richard Loving did. But there is some resonance.
I hope more people learn this important story. It underscores a sentiment found in every important belief-system that Humanity has ever conceived. In the Bible it is distilled by “. . . the greatest of these is Love.”
It started at a Redbox. The DVD of THE ACCOUNTANT had just come out, and I was eager to see it. Ben Affleck as the autistic, arsenel-stashing CPA for drug cartel bosses and other criminal bigshots. Also starring Oscar-winning J. K. Simmons. Action, pathos, forensic accounting–yum yum yum!
While I watched the movie I sketched Affleck and co-star Cynthia Addai-Robinson. After I finished watching the movie I posted the sketches on Facebook. To my astonishment, the sketch of Ms. Addai-Robinson was Liked by one Seth Lee. Hey, that’s the name of the young actor who plays Affleck’s younger self . . .
. . . And, Hokey Smokes, it IS the actor, and martial artist, who plays Affleck’s younger self!! He did a fantastic job, too. He is a Natural. Step aside, Bruce, Brandon, Stan and Ang! There’s a new Lee in town, and he does back flips with the greatest of ease.
Here are the words to the double acrostic:
Some who act get early starts
Some are fans of martial arts
Expertise in swim or sync
Elevates to gold from zinc
Triumph teaches–slumps do too
Hack a comeback score a coup
& each fall presages RISE
& another winner’s prize
Friends, keep an eye on this young man. He has definitely got the chops for an outstanding career.
Last night I watched the DVD of GUERNICA. It was about the village of that name that was used by the Condor Squad of Hitler’s Luftwaffe to test the effectiveness of Blitzkrieg, “lightning warfare.” The bombing was conducted by a cousin of WWI’s Baron von Richtofen. It was April 26, 1937, and the bombing was called by him “a birthday present for Hitler.”
It was a good movie, with personal stories of love, heartbreak, betrayal and loss. I kept getting distracted by the costumes, hairstyles, and vintage automobiles, though, and soon froze the frame for a sketch, and kept freezing it for an interesting expression, explosion, or other eye candy. Consequently it took the better part of five hours to see a two-hour movie.
The sad news that Mary Tyler Moore has died just hit the Internet. I didn’t know how much I cared about her until now. I did know that she was one of the first women I was “turned on” by, WAY back in the mid-60s; that she was a wonderful comedy actor but also skilled at drama, as with “First, You Cry,” a landmark movie that helped raise breast cancer awareness; that there was a playfulness she either had or inspired that manifested itself in her mogul husband Grant Tinker’s parodying the MGM Lion with the Cat’s Meow of “MTM Productions.” Still, this news hit me hard, and my instant reaction was to do the above image, in such haste that I grabbed an envelope blank on the back and had at it.
Here are the words:
The World you turned on with your smile
Will miss your grace and lack of guile.
From Dick Van Dyke to Lou & Ted
Your Mary-ment dispelled our dread.
Some day ALL wonders have to cease.
Thanks for the Lift, dear-rest in Peace.
The above image was done during my viewing of Barack Obama’s farewell address. The text blocks are all derived from the speech he made.
As always, the President was poised and both plain-spoken and articulate. His speech made a fitting bookend to his inaugural speech eight years ago. In both, he emphasized inclusion and rejected exclusion, stressing positivity and involvement of the citizenry.
I would like to thank him for his service to our country. In particular, I want to express admiration for his unbelievable grace under pressure. He remained collected and thoughtful in the midst of incredible, stressful times. We will never know how another would have fared in his place, but my guess is that history will regard him as exceptional.
I found Michelle at Sweet Republic. She was filling in as the ice-cream lady so that Jennifer could have a break. While she was ringing up one customer, another was waiting, so I said, “Want me to . . .?” and Michelle said, “Sure.” So I fixed a single-scoop salted caramel on waffle cone for the gentleman and Michelle rang him up. All customers satisfied and gone, Michelle looked me in the eye and said, “So, you came to see if I would let you go early.”
WOW, what a Mom of a Manager she is, and I mean that as the highest of compliments. She can do every job, and does. She knows more about what’s going on here, there and everywhere than just about anyone else. She will cut you a little slack if the situation warrants it, but Heaven help you if you do something unprofessional–I saw her appropriately dress down a server for rudeness to a diner some months ago. That the server learned the lesson and is still working for us is testament to Michelle’s effectiveness.
Once upon a time in the 80s there was a great multi-location restaurant here in the Valley, Bill Johnson’s Big Apple. Michelle was one of the waitresses (they didn’t call wait staff ‘servers’ back then) and was therefore required to take orders in cowgirl boots, blue jeans, and a pair of six-shooters strapped to her hips, walking on a sawdust floor. She tells me the guns were heavy and clunky and could leave bruises. She also has the inside scoop on the last days of the Big Apple, what went wrong and what happened when they tried to set it right. We share the feeling that the passing of the Big Apple was a crying shame.
Her restaurant-management education also included a stint at Coco’s, one of the few chains that passes muster with my sweet-but-demanding mother. Michelle’s decades of dealing with every imaginable food service scenario, including my unknowingly laying down a trail of maple syrup from a front table all the way back to the dish pit not noticing the little chalice was tipped over after sloppily bussing the table, plus her keen native intelligence and empathy, makes her a superb leader-by-example. Add a mischievous sense of humor and you have one hell of a force to reckon with.
I fear Michelle will not like this portrait. She does not like the way her eyes look, and I have tried to accurately report them here. I cannot do otherwise, because her eyes ARE her, with her lifetime of laughter and working unbelievable hours and having and tough-loving kids, biological and otherwise. So please forgive me, Michelle: I drew you as I see you, more real and more appealing than any supermodel could ever hope to be.
Here are two ladies who demonstrate that a loving heart receives more beauty each passing day; and the owner of the heart becomes more beautiful.
Maggie looks vulnerable in my drawing. She is anything but. Her schedule at the Devonshire Senior Center includes Tai Chi, painting, Bible study, and Thursday walking with the FIT PHX program. And it was she who suggested the deal wherein we trade Spanish lessons for drawing lessons. What a Dynamo!
