Sargent Paints Disney Princesses

Saw a really wonderful exhibition on John Singer Sargent today. One sketch was of a very tall woman, in urban dress energeitcally holding a cigarette. The dress she was wearing made the subject look exotic to me, but when I think about depictions of other women from that time period I've see depictions of others in similar exotic, mod clothing. (Sigh - It looks like you could only wear those dresses if you were tall!) Her eyes were squinty as if she were peering into the future. Maybe she saw Smoky Hill High School prom 1990: she was wearing a prom dress. The woman had a stiff huffy posture and maybe had a stiff huffy voice which she could possibly use to yell at anyone who mae a comment that she didn't like or took the wrong pastry from the dessert tray. Next to her was another painting. This painting was full of movement: for example the grass at the feet of the model waving, mixing with the ocean waving, and a fishing net that the model held out floated over the water. Unlike the woman in the prom dress, you couldn't see her face. Maybe she had a sunburn or glasses, or freckles, but it looked like when the artist painted her he snuck up on her from behind and BAM: woman caught in paint! Both of the woman were very Disney Princessish in the way that they looked soooooooooooooooo devilish and sooooooooooooooo sugary. When they were all sitting around in their sewing circles did they choose what dress they would sew? Did the smoking and energetic posture of one woman and the naturalization of the other tell you about anything important, or just give a glimpse?

A hum like my grandma's

Winding my way through the little corrals at Barnes and Nobels, I finally found what I was looking for. A cookbook for kids, that I will send to my nephew for Christmas, that didn't have too many sweet things. (This was because the gift is meant for my sis as well as for my nephew.) Because it's the Christmas season, B&N was offering free gift wrap, or if you wanted you could give a donation. An elderly man in a cap and an elderly woman sat at a table. There were some brown skinned space creaters who were splashed across the paper I chose. As the man adjusted the cookbook between the edges of the paper and measured and creased with great precision, he began to hum. It was a hum like my grandma hummed when she was around me. My grandma would sometimes preface her humming this way by saying she didn't know the words to the songs. This made me curious and as I listened to her, I wondered what the songs were. It was a busy hum that she made while she did things, and it wasn't a ho hum hum. It was a hum that moved high and low and would seemed to say that she knew enough about music to want to teach me. I never would have remembered her hum, because I had never heard anyone else make that kind of music. What a wonderful gift to find for myself in Barnes and Nobels. What are the words? Where is the music?