Today I planned my activities to be sewing and writing. I’m making a three-piece outfit for a character doll with which I hope to surprise a friend. She gets neither the doll nor the fashion! But she gets to see my doll version of a character she likes.
The sewing took longer than I intended because SEWING IS HARD. Also, it’s not perfect. Nothing I do can be, I think, because I’m not. Never said I was, never thought I was, never wanted to be. “Perfection” in my world is a highly overrated concept. Like one of my characters would say, “I’m not looking for perfect. I’m looking for real.”
Real is hard, too, because it can require tough decisions. About what we want to show and who to show it to. About the things we’re able to see and hear, and the things we can’t. Or won’t. Sometimes that’s self-preservation. Sometimes it’s a choice. I have a character (in the current chapter I’m working on) who’s spent her life grappling with it. I understand her well.
Whether or not I’ve had past lives or will have future lives, in this time, I have one life. We all do.
All that was part of what I was thinking about as I sewed, and I was accompanied by a most persistent ear worm: The Doors’s “Break On Through (To the Other Side).” Oh, that charismatic Jim Morrison. There is a Doors reference in the Neverending Saga because I always love a musical bad boy.
Mr. Mojo Rising, or whoever is tapping on my psyche, from this world or another, I think I’ve been dealing with over a year of breakthroughs, some good, some not so good. It all finds its way into all I do.
Here’s another of the posters I unrolled back in March. I was an assistant manager in a bookstore in 1991 when Oliver Stone’s film The Doors was released. An associate on the staff, Dorrie, also worked in the theater in our same complex. I put together a music display (I BEGGED to do it, and my manager knew my band-loving ways and okayed it) to help promote the movie, and Dorrie gave the store a theater poster to hang above it. When the display came down, the poster came home with me.
It was two-sided, which made it that much cooler.
Here are some photos of the display.
The tie-dyed fabric covering the cubes behind the books in some of the photos was a joint effort by Tom, Lynne, and me. I don’t think I still have it.
And here’s the song if you need a breakthrough, too.
Thanks, Tom, for being tall enough and also willing to climb a ladder to get photos of the movie poster back when the house was a wreck and we were still recovering from February’s snowy, icy storm.
ETA: Added as No. 8 in my Numbers Photo Series (because of the number ten over one of the displays).