Tag: photos

Other people get dolls, too

You may recall that last Christmas I received the Kirk, Spock, and Uhura dolls from the most recent Star Trek movie. This year, along with his annual Hallmark Star Trek ornament from Lynne, Tom received this doll that she found somewhere:

Note that Old Spock is giving the Vulcan Salute. However, just in case you need him to be doing real work around the Enterprise–or the Universe–he comes with an extra hand:

<
small>Note: Could also come in handy–see what I did there?–if you’d like to reenact “the hand of Count Petofi” scenes from the original Dark Shadows.

You don’t know what a challenge it’s been for me to wait THIS LONG SINCE CHRISTMAS to shoot this:

Live long and prosper.

Legacy Writing 365:10

Tom and I have done a lot of traveling by car, and he’d tell you that wherever we go–or any time I come home from a solo trip–at some point, I’ll say, “I could live there.” I’m always delighted by something in every city, state, or small town I visit. It may be the people who charm me, the landscape that dazzles me, or the climate that tricks me (because unless you visit a place frequently, the vagaries of its weather are a mystery). Only one time did a particularly unpleasant incident put me off a state (which I won’t name, because you can’t condemn an entire state based on the behavior of one wanker, right?). And I know Manhattan would eat me alive, so it’s better left as a place I love to visit. All in all, though, I’ve found that most places have something good to offer so I try not to judge them, particularly if I’ve never visited there. That would be like hating a book I haven’t read or a movie I haven’t seen or a musical artist I’ve never heard, and who does that?

Hmmm. Let’s shelve that question.

Anyway, as soon as I read that The Advocate magazine had named Salt Lake City the gayest city in America, I knew there’d be hue and cry. I won’t debate the merits of the judging criteria or what “gayest” can really mean. There’ll never be a more diverse and outspoken group than those individuals who get grouped in the LGBTQIA acronym; I’m pretty sure my voice won’t be needed on this one.

All I’m going to say is that these photos, taken at Salt Lake City’s Gay Pride parade in 2001, tell a wonderful story of my mother and the community who welcomed one “straight old lady named Dorothy” with love, and shared with her many, many times of laughter and a few tears. I can’t give a photo credit, because I don’t know who took the photos. My copies are not high quality because no telling how many emails and computers they went through before they made it to me.


Dorothy has been spotted along the parade route.


She gets swept off her feet.


She’s been put on the float.


If only she weren’t so shy…


That year, then-SLC Mayor Ross C. “Rocky” Anderson was the parade’s Grand Marshal. No surprise that she’d find and be photographed with the local politico–or that she’d be wearing her Alabama Crimson Tide shirt.

To that bigoted person with whom I once worked who admonished me for my passionate belief in legal and civil equality for EVERYONE by saying, “I know how you were raised. What would your parents say about this,” I answer:

My parents would say I’m the daughter they taught me to be, and they’re proud of me for speaking out about my beliefs on fairness and justice. And also, they think I should laugh more.

A literary outing

This Saturday past I had the pleasure of going to a triple booksigning at Murder By The Book.


Check out these links for new works from Jaye Wells, Kimberly Frost, and Martha Wells. They are a smart, funny group of authors, and I particularly appreciated their comments about a writer’s prerogative in world-building within the realms of fantasy, supernatural, and paranormal.

Authors: your characters, your stories, your rules.

I bought Kimberly’s new novel there, then came home and figured out how to buy Google books through Murder By The Book’s web site and load them onto my Nook. That enabled me to buy the first of Jaye Wells’s series. Then Tom bought two by Martha Wells; there just seems to be some difficulty loading them to his Nook. Hopefully we’ll get it all figured out soon. Being able to buy through an indie store removes my last anxiety about using an eReader for some of the books I buy. The authors get royalties, and I’m supporting a locally-owned store. (This doesn’t work with Amazon’s Kindle, however.)

By the way, if you’re curious, the two Wellses aren’t related except by profession.

Legacy Writing 365:9

I think anyone who follows college football in the US will indulge me with a celebratory moment. My alma mater won the National Championship game tonight. Roll Tide!

I was just looking for a reason to use this photo I found of Denny Chimes in my mother’s photos. I assume one of my parents took it when they were living in Tuscaloosa while my father attended the University of Alabama after they married. I had several colleges/universities to select from when I left high school, but my choice was probably made the first time I listened to my parents talk about their times there. I drank the red Kool-Aid! My brother (Auburn University) and sister (University of Kentucky) did not.

There’s no city on the planet that’s home to me like Tuscaloosa. No place I feel as comfortable as the Quad on the UA campus, where I spent many hours walking, lounging, partying, reading, biking, people-watching, tossing a Frisbee or football with friends, and maybe even a little studying. Denny Chimes is on the Quad, but its music reaches the farthest corners of campus and beyond. Visitors can walk the sidewalks around its base and see the handprints and footprints of all the football team captains since 1948. My very first time there, I put my hands inside the prints of quarterback great Joe Namath.

Apparently when I took this photo my junior year, I was more dazzled by a rare snowfall than getting the top of poor Denny Chimes in the photo.

And here I am at the limestone base of the Chimes the day I graduated. I’m the short one on the right, who didn’t have a blue magna cum laude stole. At least I always dated smart boys.

Runway Monday All Stars: Unconventional Challenge

Lifetime’s Project Runway All Stars season kicked off last week with the unconventional materials challenge. Almost-winning and/or talented designers from previous seasons were sent to find materials from a 99 Cent store to be used in a look that played off a design from one of their (non-show) collections.

By popular demand–or at least Marika’s–I’ve agreed to play along once more, but this time with a twist.

To begin with, the look at left is one I created for Summer in February 2009: her red carpet Oscar gown. This remains one of my favorite looks for her. The silhouette is sleek, and the lace with its flesh-colored lining is sexy without being too revealing.

I wanted to use the color palette of metallic blues and grays and the floral motif in a younger look–perhaps something for a teen celebrity walking the red carpet at the premiere of an exciting movie. When I went discount store shopping, I found a hair accessory and some accent beads that I thought could provide a translation of Summer’s look.

To model my design: Monster High’s own Draculaura. How does she look?


Waving to the crowd like a red carpet champ.


I used the beads to embellish her hair accessory and as her earrings.


A newborn super model emerges from the petals of her dress.


Draculaura loves her rhinestone belt.


The entire outfit makes her want to jump with joy!


Or she can stride confidently in her Mattel Stardoll multi-buckled strap sandals.


Forget sparkly vampires and Gaga’s millions of little monsters. We look forward to seeing Draculaura again on the runway soon!

Thanks to Michael, Katie, and a young lady in Florida for making fashion fun for me again. And Lindsey and Rhonda for the Stardoll shoes.

Legacy Writing 365:8


“Knock the L out of Hitler”

There are so many reasons I have strong emotional reactions to this photo.

On the back, my mother has written, “WW2. Bill with his half track in Louisiana on his way to the big war.” I wish all the family photos came with such precise descriptions to help me fix them in time and circumstance. This picture was taken long before she met my father, and one thing she probably liked about it was that he actually looks like a man in his early twenties. In fact, when Tom saw this photo, he said, “He looks so young!” because usually he says, “Your father always looked old, no matter what age he was.” When I think of all the things Daddy saw and lost in that “big war” he was headed for, I understand why he aged. And why his sleep remained troubled the rest of his life. He loved the Army, just as he loved all the careers he had, but it wasn’t love without a price.

In the coming year, I’ll probably share several photos showing signs my father painted. He learned that trade even before he went into the CCC, because there he learned the skills that would later be part of his time in the Army’s Signal Corps. But when he left the CCC, he bought an A Model Ford off a friend and refashioned it to become his mobile sign painting shop.

The year was 1938 and I felt completely free and footloose. The depression was beginning to grind down to an end, and although there was rumbling in the Far East and in Germany that hinted of a possible war to come one day, I refused to be concerned.

One of his stories, about which he says “a small part…is true but most…is fiction,” allows me to see his world through eyes that have not yet looked on war.

So here he is, young, and with the brash personality troops would need to do the job that would land them in Normandy and send them throughout Europe. He has put his sign-painting skills to use, adorning the half-track with his promise to Hitler. So many vintage war photos show shapely women painted on the machines of war, much the way pin-up photos of beauties like Betty Grable, Rita Hayworth, and Jean Harlow were pasted inside footlockers and lockers to boost morale and symbolize the life troops were fighting to return to.

I could write reams on the way the framing of one war as heroic and the viewing of another war as horrific created the conflicted baby boom generation that I was born into. I don’t know if all the men and women who go into war have the young eyes and bold heart of this one, but I do believe when they come home, they should have all the opportunities, respect, and assistance they need to find their place in the world again. Some are stronger for the testing; some are broken. They’re all our fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, sons, and daughters.

Legacy Writing 365:7

The best times can be the ones that happen without planning. The last winter before Tom and I were married, I lived in a rural area outside his family’s city. He was visiting them from Tuscaloosa for a weekend, and–a very rare thing–none of his siblings were home. A snow storm had been forecast. Since the South doesn’t have road equipment to deal with heavy snow, it’s best for people to load up on supplies and stay home. It was decided before the snow began that it might be better if I came into town to stay with Tom and his parents.

It turned out to be the most wonderful opportunity for the four of us to get to know each other better. To enjoy a world quieted by that blanket of snow. We talked a lot, didn’t really watch TV, read, probably played a game or two, worked together to cook the meals we shared and cleaned up after. Every woman should have such a low-key few days to relax with her future family without a lot of activity and distractions.

It had been kind of a running joke that I occasionally asked Tom’s father to do stuff for me–things I could have done for myself, but I’d get all Southern belle and ask him, and he’d say, “Yes, Miss Becky, I will come check your apartment for a snake,” Or, “Yes, Miss Becky, I’ll go car shopping with you.” My father had died only a couple of years before, and though no one could ever replace him, it was nice to know that a future father-in-law would spoil me a little.

That weekend, instead of making a snow man, Tom and his parents built a Snow Belle in my honor.


Tom and his mother with their version of Miss Scarlett.

Legacy Writing 365:6

A while back, my scanner stopped getting along with my iMac, so it hooked up with its old friend the PC again. Earlier, I went into the room where the PC resides to find and scan a photo for today’s entry. But as I was looking through a stack of pictures, I glanced toward the computer table and saw this:


Sun on scarlet ribbons.

It made me think about my mother’s old Harry Belafonte album. I loved to hear her and Debby sing along to it, and my favorite from that album was “Scarlet Ribbons.”

Sound technology is a wonderful thing, but some of us of a certain age can be transported to another time just hearing the snap, crackle, and pop of a needle on vinyl.

Today you’re welcome to time travel with me to imagine my sister’s pure soprano and my mother’s deeper tones accompanying the beautiful voice of Mr. Belafonte.

P.S. to my writing partners: You see how this kind of influence in my youth led to those “saccharine” endings? And who was it who said that, anyway?

Legacy Writing 365:5

Winnie and Robert–so young here, but when I knew them, they were old. They were tall and lean, both of them, and he was only a little stooped. They both had beautiful white hair. Although they were quiet, they were favorites of mine because they both always had a smile in their eyes. Truly, though, what endeared them to me was how they were with each other. She never needed a sweater that he wasn’t there to gently drop one on her shoulders. He never wanted for something cool to drink, because she put a glass next to him before he could ask. Whenever our large extended family was together, they would laugh at all the stories with the rest of us, but sooner or later they’d go for a little walk, hand in hand, quietly continuing a conversation that had begun more than fifty years earlier.

Winnie–Winifred–was the oldest of twelve children. Fourteen, really, but one was born dead and another died in infancy. My mother was the youngest of those fourteen. When Mother saw how I watched her oldest sister and Robert, she told me their story. They fell in love, and when Winnie was eighteen, Robert asked my grandparents for her hand in marriage. But my grandmother was pregnant with Uncle John. She said Winnie couldn’t be spared; she had to take her mother’s place supervising the house and the other children until after the baby was born. Robert promised that if they were allowed to marry, he would wait as long as necessary before setting up household with her. My grandparents finally agreed; Winnie and Robert were married in June of 1921. Uncle John was born in August. I don’t know when Winnie was finally able to go home to her husband, but as promised, he waited until then for a wedding night with his bride.

When Winnie died in Tupelo on an August day at age seventy-four, we could all see that Robert had lost half of his soul. The smile was gone from his eyes. No one was surprised when he died, too, before the year was over. My mother said Robert simply had no interest in living in a world without his Winnie.

Legacy Writing 365:4

There’s no reason I should have this photo or the other four that were obviously taken the same day. I didn’t shoot them; I wasn’t there. That I do have them means I badgered someone into giving them to me: either Tim, who’s front and center in the water, or Riley, the boy closest to him, next level up. I’d be willing to bet it was Riley who reluctantly handed them over.

Even though I wasn’t friends with the other three boys in the photos (one of whom isn’t pictured here because he was obviously manning the camera), and though I haven’t seen them in more years than I wish to divulge, I can name them all immediately. Maybe it’s because I haven’t seen them in all those years; they are fixed in time, always young, always long-haired, bell-bottomed, wearing illegal expressions on their achingly young faces.

I also don’t know where in North Alabama these photos were taken. I hope there are still as many remote places of natural beauty as there were then, where even a short hike would take you far from whatever troubled your spirit.

And when you’re a teenager, something is always troubling your spirit. It’s your job. You’re new on the planet, and it’s not perfect, and neither are the people trying to teach you how to be here. Everybody’s got advice and wisdom, and what they’ve forgotten is that no one older and with more experience could keep their lives perfectly on course, either, when they were young. They–we–you–everybody has to stumble over their own rocky terrain, take their own falls into cold, rushing water, get up, keep going.

It’s because of Tim and Riley, and everything we learned together and taught each other, and all the ways we betrayed each other and found our ways back those first decades of our lives, that I so easily slip into the world Stephenie Meyer created. I don’t care about the writing flaws. I can strip away the supernatural elements. What I see is three teenagers who are dealing with emotions and choices, desires and missteps, confusion and clarity, with fresh minds and untried hearts.

And this photo… One boy long out of touch; the other one dead. But here forever, in this blurry photo, are the boys who gave me music, art, poetry, laughter and tears, and my first lessons in the crazy beauty of romantic love.

Here forever in my heart, too.