a little red hen

HEADLESS MANNEQUIN Flees NYC Apartment

She had her time here since we met outside Baltimore--huge vintage store in Ellicott City--um, 20 years ago.  Never dignified with her own name, she appeared at a couple of my shows, but had less respect as time went on and she was a neck to hang stuff--compost and other neckpieces.  Nothing really glamorous like the old days.

"Can I borrow her?  I'm doing a graduation dress for my niece,"  my neighbor Annette explained.  An opportunity to downsize gave the answer, "Take her!  Keep her!"

Sally Stitch, Push Button Dress Form, could morph through a range of sizes.   The idea of her actually being used thrills me; she has moved on, just across the street, into a better place, one of industry and value.  She joins another taking-up-space memory, one with no function at all.

Woven stainless steel wire cloth.  Purchased around the same time as Sally Stitch when I was entranced by everything woven and not cloth. Copper wirecloth, blue plastic from Mexico, green, black windown screen (made Condom Amulet from this)--all had their moment.  But the stainless steel was this artist's conceit.  A curved piece, 2 by 4 feet, should have been included in my house sale in Baltimore.  But no, all 20 pounds came to Harlem. 

Thanks to a visiting crochet artist, Laurie Anne Sims, it too has now fled to another life. Laurie came and stayed overnight--she was helping Nan Kennedy who'd brought her Sea Colors Yarn to Knitty City a few weeks ago.  Because Laurie too is drawn to stuff like wirecloth, I asked if she'd take the piece home to Brunswick, Maine.  "Oh, sure!"  She got it-- with the tag attached.  Fortunately there was room in their very full-of-yarn van.  And now it's lighter here.

Lisa Daehlin Sings Saturday, NYC...

Join us May 17 if you're in the City.(Enlarge invitation for details.)

Singing brought Lisa here from Minneapolis a few years ago.  Along the way she discovered her "inner-knitter," now creates designs for publications like this "Lace Dolly Purse" in the Bag Style book, Interweave Press.

Knitting brought us together at the original UWS (upper west side) Knitting Circle when she amazed us with her riffs on lacy scarves.  In 2007, a supporter of the Knit a Condom Amulet Project, she created three unusual patterns that are among the most-viewed on the site.  To answer those who have asked how to use the Breast Pouch and Bra, a friend modeled for the photo at the left. It's on Lisa's own new website, DeLisa.us.

Two years ago, she developed knitting and crochet classes for the Continuing Ed roster at Cooper Union--famous for architecture and engineering programs.  And there's her day job! 

Someday there's going to be an opera about knitting and singing and the days and nights of a creative woman in this city.  Word is that there's someone ready to do the libretto, another who'd write the music to encompass her many paths-- 

Crochet class flyer

Teaching at Harlem Knitting Circle...

With Eunny Jang, Interweave Knits Editor, at Knitty City... demos use of Breast Pouch for business cards, an action view.

By the way, if you're here for the weekend, Sunday, May 18, is AIDS WALK New York, more information at www.aidswalk.net or call (212) 807 9255.

 

DOING FEMINISM: Not so hard*

Many times I'ive tried to do this again-- adapt the little 1977 booklet from my days in Baltimore's NOW (National Organization for Women) to lives of older women.

Several tries--Gray Panthers, The Transition Network-- had not sparked enthusiasm.    Then I saw a notice in the New York City NOW newsletter earlier this year about a group starting with a focus on "senior women."

At the first meeting we talked about why we were there--support mostly.  A couple of us were interested in action/advocacy projects.  Not one to miss an opportunity, I'd brought along the 1977 booklet, suggested we update it.  We have done that.  Questions Women Over 55 Should Ask Their Doctors is a one-page flyer and was featured in the Spring 2008 issue of "WhatNOW," the chapter's hard copy quarterly publication.

The most challenging part?  Locating photos of older women doctors/healthcare providers (not blonde)  to use in the flyer.

We briefly addressed three areas:

-- Preparing for a visit to the doctor;

--Questions to ask during the visit;

--Getting the information you need before you leave.

Finally, we invite women to join our renamed "Boomer and Senior Women's Network," which has a place on the chapter website.  Each of us took copies of the new flyer to distribute--laundry rooms in our buildings, senior centers.  At the meeting this week, a 79 year old actress who described herself as a radical feminist was among four new members. 

Who are we?  Besides the actress and myself, there may be one or two others who'd use the f-word to self-describe.  In many ways we are as varied as women in 1966 when NOW, this very chapter, was founded.  "This is my first time at anything like this," was a comment that surprised me.  Only the actress and I have longtime histories with NOW.  Among the twelve of us we're different colors, transplants to the U.S., former teachers-- of course.  "We need to do consciousness-raising around aging," was a suggestion you would not have heard in the sixities!

*This post is dedicated to Katha Pollitt who this week in The Nation magazine ended her column, with a plea, "Feminism, please call home!"  So glad that I'd had this woman-affirming experience before I read "Backlash Spectacular" on the source of her distress.

Washington University (St. Louis) is about to give Phyllis Schlafly, the anti-feminist, an honorary degree.  Good grief, that awful conservative. Only other place I've seen about it is WomensEnews as one of their Jeers of the week.  WashU was a politically regressive institution in the 1940s and 50s when I lived there; old habits die hard.  Cheers to graduating students and faculty who plan to protest.

   

"STRETCH (a fantasia)," must-see play, hurry...

Next week we re-visit playwright Susan Bernfield's wondrous evocation of all things Nixonian--and its dependence on dependent women-- STRETCH (a fantasia).  Runs through May 26.  You need to decide as you read this to buy one of its cheap tickets (under $25), because it has just received an over-the-top review in The New York Times.

Last July, I wrote here about my amazement at how far the piece had come since its first, fledging outing.  Now, in it's third re-working, it's having a longer run.  Not long enough in my book.  We have much to learn from the aging Rose Mary Woods, loyal secretary to Nixon, as she remembers the past from her wheelchair in an Ohio nursing home.

This richly detailed image (click to enlarge) of objects creating a Nixon portrait was designed for the show's  advertising by Another Limited Rebellion who see their work as "design therapy." It's a veritable kitchen sink of elements from the play--contemporary campaign stickers, reel-to-reel audio tapes, cocktail glasses.  And typewriters, so central to this political tale.  All supports Susan Bernfield's view that connects yesterday and today in America's ongoing dysfunctional political landscape.   The vintage click-clack of an IBM Selectric is one of several instruments in the Rachel Peters' music for the play.

Kristin Griffith plays Woods, young and old, and is terrific.  "Commanding performance," the Times noted up front in its review.  Another actress over 50, I'd add--and it's about time. 

My wish in last year's post was that STRETCH would return for  longer  than a four day run.  Okay, its one month this time.  More, more, please!

 

Women with Wrinkles--Acting!

Carol Rosegg's photo appeared in the New York Times review of "Vita & Virginia," one of two plays I enjoyed last month in their final perfomances. The pose was not replicated by Kathleen Chalfant, left, as Virginia Woolf and Patricia Elliott as Vita Sackville-West.  They were always at a distance of several feet apart. 

Each stood behind a music stand with the script before her.  Often one or the other would turn to direct her words to her partner, but they were never close.  This seemed right since the text was letters.  And pointed up the geographic and emotional distance in their relationship.  Some of that had to do with their class difference, some with Woolf's reluctance to be intimate.    "I was always sexually cowardly," Woolf writes in one early letter.

Eileen Atkins has adapted a correspondence that spanned rom the 1920s through early World War II. Atkins, a woman of many theatrical parts--actor, writer was the co-creator of the British TV series, "Upstairs, Downstairs." (From the halcyon days of the early 1970s when parents and children sat together to watch television.)  As skillfully as she's assembled the letters, Atkins' adaptation is enhanced by the two women who performed.  (Atkins herself appeared as Woolf in the first production of "Vita & Virginia.")

You will not be surprised that the audience was older women like me.  Two younger women sat next to me and I would have liked to know  if they had many friends who'd come to see it.  There's a picture HERE of Chalfant who looked just right--wrinkles not hidden and reading glasses with extended earpieces perched at the end of her nose--to be playing Virginia Woolf.   She and Elliott made me feel I was walking in an English garden and overhearing an intimate conversation between two very verbal women struggling with their times and complex choices--married to men and somewhat closeted lesbians.

[I now long for a pair of these "funky" glasses which seem more to the point and more glamourous than my ordinary bi-focals .]

Two days later, we went to an itty-bitty space on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village for "Kitty and Lina" --unknown to us except through a review in the Times.  Once again the publicity photo gives a skewed idea of what's ahead.  Sitting in the audience before the play began, we wondered why there was only one chair next to a small round table.  Would one of the actors stand throughout the performance?

No.  First Jennifer Boutell appeared as Kitty and told a story of coming eagerly to New York from a Baptist family in Texas.  We listened as her dream of joining the Actors' Studio and stardom elluded her. Life became drearier as she struggled to make ends meet.  She exited.

Lina, played by Marilyn Bernard, pranced into view and immediately engaged us. As a starter, she advised she was a pretty snappy woman who would go home with one of the men in the audience.  Gliding to the chair, she pulled a cigarette out of her purse, put it into a holder, then was briefly indignant with the stage manager when told she could not smoke in the theatre. 

In her life story of a single woman in 1950 and 60s New York, I was reminded of women I'd known who had a great deal of charm and few skills.  Often their road to survival was pleasing men.  That's Lina.   We meet her after many years of an affair with an older married man, who has left her for a woman the age she was when she arrived in the City.  Now alone in a youthful New York, she is, in the words of the Times' reviewer, "saucy and poignant." Another terrific older woman in theatre...three in one week! 

With Yarn from Her Sheep: Nan Kennedy Comes to Knitty City

"Baby You Look Beautiful in Wool" by Paddy Mills is the background music for this post.  I just learned about the song, on my way to talk about the imminent arrival in New York City of Nanney Kennedy, Maine shepherd, yarn producer, designer. 

The last time I saw Nan was at Rhinebeck, the New York Sheep and Wool Festival.  She was surrounded as always by her beautiful yarn--what you'll see when you click on the song link.  My photo here is my own small collection of her Seacolor yarns from the past three years.  For some reason I keep looking at them, changing ideas.  This fall I think it will become a vest--designed in Nanney's kind of style--dark purple will be one side of a front, green the other and the blue green at the left, the back.  Maybe pink for trim and pockets.

For beautiful pictures of her yarn and her farm, Meadowcroft, her farm there is a brand new book, SHEAR SPIRIT. It marks a departure in yarn books with its focus on farms and the people who live the rural life--raise sheep-- from Maine to Oregon. The photos are by Gale Zucker, text, Joan Tapper.  Yes, it does have patterns.

It is not quite the same as being with Nanney who comes to my local and favorite yarn store, Knitty City next Monday, May 5, direct from showing her wares at America's biggest yarn event,  Maryland Sheep and Wool.  There, wandering around while Ron was taking a spinning class, is where I first encountered Nanney.   She was unlike many of the vendors.  Her yarns were arranged more artfullyand her signature "sea and sun-washed yarns" drew me in.   And there was her extra-large personality and sense of humor.   She thought the Condom Amulets would benefit from photos of women wearing them in unexpected settings.  The result:  Nanney modeling Lisa Daehlin's Knit Wire Bracelet surrounded by her beautiful fibers.

She is also the person connected to Ron's hat-knitting.  In 2006, Nan introduced us to Medomak Camp in Washington, Maine where Ron fell under the design spell of Bill Huntington who teaches there again this year.  While at the Knit Retreat, we visited Nan's farm and sheep--did some natural dyeing with her.

If you're in the City next week, please join Nan and her yarn at Knitty City, 208 West 79th Street, from 5 to 7 p.m. Gale Zucker's coming too to tell about how she selected those 20 fiber farms in the book.   Ron and I will be there, Lisa Daehlin, and Kay Gardiner of Mason-Dixon Knitting--among others.  More to come...

Sex Ed in the Big City...just in case

An urgent letter from a Health Educator with New York City's Planned Parenthood: 

Did you know that NYC public schools do not require
sex education at all? And when we don't tell kids the facts, this is what they tell each other.

You can stop yourself from getting pregnant if you:

- Jump up and down after sex
- Take a bath in Epsom salts
- Drink a Tropical Fantasy (a Brooklyn-based soda) or hot Malta
(a carbonated malt beverage)

If you are as appalled as I am that these kinds of misconceptions are alive and well among middle and high school students, please remind our Chancellor of Education that our students need comprehensive sex education.  We have the distinction of one of the highest teenage pregnancy and STD rates in the U.S.

If you live in New York City, add your voice to mine.  Knitting Condom Amulets is helpful but not enough.  The goal is 20,000 letters to be hand-delivered by May 1st.   Here's the link to a letter prepared by NYC Planned Parenthood.

["MAW, Most Arresting Woman and Hen Pink Conspire" illustration contributed by blogger M.E. Carew of  Xtreme English]

UPDATE 4/25/08:  Rachel at Women's Health News has a good summary of the goings-on at this week's hearing in Congres--House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform-- on the subject that is none of their business, "Abstinence-Only and Sex Education." 

A Little Red Hen to Obama and Clinton #1

Somebody had to do it...why not US? 

I was pleased with an email from Women'sEnews  that the my question of Clinton and Obama had been added to this list for their upcoming forum in Pennsylvania.  Rita Jensen, Editor-in-Chief of this online service, will be asking representatives of the Democratic candidates this list of questions their readers have submitted.

You will not be surprised that mine was about Aging.  Why, I asked, are older women not visible on either of the candidates' websites.  I point out that John Edwards' campaign site listed an 11-point, "Declaration of Independence for Older Americans" with specific concerns addressed-- affordable prescription drugs and Social Security among them.

Check out the entire list.  Is there another you'd like to ask?

Wednesday's dreadful ABC-TV "debate" with Obama and Clinton has had some encouraging fallout.  GoozNews.com alerted me to a letter by angry journalists (Merrill Goozner among them) on The Nation's website.  They let the network know what a travesty the program was.  You can send a letter to The Nation on your ideas about a "meaningful presidential debate."

All of us need to be shaping the questions and complaining to the media about what we are not hearing.  I believe it's called substantive issues.  In "Road Map to Defeat," Bob Herbert's column in today's New York Times --

"The issues still favor the Democrats....Instead of capitalizing on the political advantages...the Democrats, with their increasingly small-minded approach are squandering them...It's not too late [but] The GOP's fondest wish is tht the Democrats keep doing what they're doing."

 

   

Miscellany from the Slower Lane

And then, the next message from my body:  a tooth had to be removed.  No pain, only new space and the promise of a "cantilevered" replacement by my excellent dentist.  Now that was a word that brought back memories of places I'd seen in the 1960s.

Influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright, architects favored this in homes I saw in New Mexico when I lived there.  Los Alamos had a number of cantilevered balconies over living rooms.

I try to imagine the interior of my mouth with a connection to Wright's famous Fallingwater in Pennsylvania.  There's a misty memory of a visit to it shortly after it was built.  Though I wonder if this is actual memory or the result of seeing many photos, reading descriptions.   

Anyway, those blue-green eggs seem cantilevered here.  There are 12 of them in a bowl in my dentist's kitchen.  Laid by his very own chickens.  How come? In response to my question about what was okay to eat that night, he said something soft.  "Eggs," Ron added, "We have one or two." 

Neil our dentist is also Ron's nephew, lives near his office in Princeton, New Jersey.  "Eggs...I'll give you some."  And that is how I carefully carried back to Manhattan, one dozen freshly laid eggs, scrambled three.  Neil felt more accomplished, I sensed, for moving along the produce than removing my tooth.

Two days later, the cast came off my hand.  I could knit again with two fingers on left hand; the black band is a Velcro tape.  There was great temptation to remove it to knit and type more easily.  A mistake, the hand therapist told me.  She also made a splint to use when I went outside to protect myself in public.  Subway and bus travel, take-out delivery bikes, pedestrian life is pretty dicey these days as reported in this this Sunday's New York Times.

I find myself not wanting to go much of anywhere.  But I had been looking forward to the Take Back the Night March tonight at Barnard College, know how important it is for the wider community of women to join in--my community.  The synchronicity of Ron--who walks more easily daily--also experiencing new limits has an impact too.  Being in our seventies is a change from our sixties.

I needed to develop better balance and lose a little weight, I've started working with a trainer who is a neighbor.  The gym is just one building away from mine but it's hard to get motivated to do the work in between our weekly sessions.  Before my accident, I'd begun visiting the treadmill, got over some of my reluctance to engage with it.  Even though my infirmity is very minor, I feel a shift in self-perception.  Who am I as my body ages?

She Turns 40...

Rachel, Oberlin, Ohio, 1968... today's her 40th birthday.

Ron and I send a long distance toast to her in Portland, Oregon. We are very proud of our first child who survived many family adventures in her early years including the arrival of a little brother before she was two.

Energetic, athletic, competitive, and loving, she has put it all together.  Rachel continues the family traditions.  She asks hard questions.  Her commitment to social justice flows through her personal and business life.

For a special present, besides a contribution to a cause she supports, we thought to send her and husband to a fancy hotel for a weekend alone.  Turned out, we learned from her spouse, she'd rather go camping-- and take the two kids.

Here's to you, Rachel, our feminist daughter, always true to yourself.