Christmas 2012

Christmas 2012. I'm smack dab in the middle of it right now, and I have to say it's a nice combination of festive and relaxing. Yesterday was the big family celebration. My two sisters and one of my brothers and their families were here. We ate a massive amount of food, drank too much, exchanged gifts, and topped it all off with midnight Mass. As always, my sister dressed up my 50 year old Chatty Cathy doll in some crazy holiday outfit. I guess every family has some kind of nutty holiday tradition, and this is ours. This year, Chatty looked more civilized than she has on previous holidays. Still, she looks like a zombie caroler or something. Festive!



Today, we had a wonderful Christmas brunch at my sister's, lazed around for a while, took a long walk, then gathered the fireplace to eat snacks and relax. It's a white Christmas here in Erieland, by the way!



Right now, I'm watching the Weather Channel. There's a real, live Blizzard Warning in effect. I could be here for days, it seems. Good thing there are 5 million dozen cookies here!

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Hellfire and Gin

Exam week is the fiery pit of grading hell. All of my professor friends are in one stage or another of clawing their way out of the pit, and most of them are also looking hard for diversionary tactics to make the hell a little less brutal. I'm doing the same. I grade and then I shop. Or I grade and then wrap Christmas gifts. I reached a low point an hour ago. I got so tired of grading that it literally seemed more entertaining to go out in the cold drizzle and pick up stray nails on my driveway left by the roofers. That's just sad. Of course, some of my diversionary tactics are pretty entertaining.

On Thursday night, for instance, my friend, Wanda, and I went to the Zoo's Festival of Lights. I'd never been to anything like this, and it was a nice break from the usual exam week work. The Cincinnati Zoo is pretty big, and it turns out they put on a nice, big Christmas show. There were thousands of lights twinkling, dozens of decorated trees, and the pervasive smell of spiced nuts roasting. Of course, it is the zoo, so that smell was sometimes competing with the odors of animal mustiness and crap. Still, the lights were nice. My favorite part of the whole display was this lake with lights on trees and piers and on a big Christmas tree on an island. There were loud carols playing, and the lights flashed to the best of the music. Mesmerizing! Afterwards, we had a drink at a bar that always makes me feel like I'm in Chicago or New York--someplace where there are no students or student papers to grade. It was a nice night. I highly recommend it to any of you in grading hell.

Yesterday, the Learning and Teaching Center at school hosted a holiday gathering with wine and cookies and cheese and crackers, and I went wild. Well, by that I mean that I had some wine and spent a couple of hours laughing until I cried. Just blowing off some steam, basically. It felt great.

Today, I graded from 10-4. After the exciting nail search on the wet driveway, I'm sitting here with a gin and tonic, looking over the movie schedule at local cinemas. Those of you who know me will know how desperate I am for a diversion: I'm no moviegoer, I'm afraid. Still, a good movie is way better than a bad student paper. The pervasive theme to exam week (in this blog, at least) seems to be the occasional alcoholic beverage. Honestly, everything is better with a little gin.

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GNO 2012

Three times a year, my friends Karen, Wanda and I have a girls' night out, or GNO, to celebrate our birthdays. We've been doing this for over a decade, and it's one of my favorite traditions. Each birthday, the birthday girl picks the event: we've learned how to make beaded jewelry, we've taken Lebanese and Chinese cooking classes, we went to a Christmas wreath making workshop, we've had more meals in more new restaurants than I can count, and we've even taken a few road trips to destinations like Columbus, Indiana and Indian Mounds National Historic Site. When I started this New Thing Campaign, I tried to make my GNO something that would be campaign worthy. This year's was.

The three of us went to the Taft Museum of Art to see an exhibit of Edward Steichen's photography called "Star Power." In the 20s and 30s, Steichen was the chief photographer for Vogue and Vanity Fair, and he photographed the reigning stars of the day: Gloria Swanson, Clara Bow, Gary Cooper, Greta Garbo, and others. The photographs are stunning, but they are nothing like the image that first drew me to Steichen's work. Back in the late 70s and early 80s, I was the photography coordinator for my college newspaper. I took all the photos and I did all of the darkroom work myself. I had a darkroom at home, too, and I'd spend lots of time in the amber-lit basement sloshing photographic paper around in a variety of chemicals, waiting for the magic to happen. Honestly, I was not very good behind the camera, but I loved being in the darkroom, playing around with exposures on the enlarger, waiting for pictures to emerge and then stopping them before they got too dark. When I wasn't in the darkroom, I'd spend my time looking through the old Time Life Photography books I'd picked up someplace, and it was there that I first saw this photograph by Steichen:



It's called The Flatiron, named for the NYC building it depicts, and I've always loved it.

The photos at the Taft were different, but they were still beautiful. So many of them were of gorgeous women with enormous eyes. Here's one of Gloria Swanson.



I loved the exhibit, and one of my favorite parts was tucked away in a corner of the gallery: a black couch with a white wall behind it, and a sign telling patrons to "Steichenize" themselves. Luckily, I had my trusty camera with me, so we all hammed it up. As you can clearly see, I'm no Steichen, nor am I a Gloria Swanson. First, though, here's Steichenized Wanda:



Here's Steichenized Sue, looking especially goofy. As you can see, I was going for the big eyed look:



Here's my personal favorite: Steichenized Karen, striking a pose right out of the famous photo of Greta Garbo:



Here's Steichen's Garbo:


My GNO was a lot of fun. The exhibit was a new thing, but I have to say that it took me back to my old black and white days.

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Parade Day on the Hill

Today, I went to my very first neighborhood parade. There are lots of these in Cincinnati on the 4th of July or other national holidays, but I've never seen a one of them. Today, though, I thought I'd head up to "The Avenue"--that's Hamilton Avenue for you non-Cincinnatians and non-College Hillians. College Hill is my neighborhood, and it has a three or four block strip of shops that from year to year are alternately run down or on an upswing. Right now, there is a big upswing going on, and I wanted to do my part by doing a little Christmas shopping in the Hill. And what a day to do it. My eye witness account tells me that the whole neighborhood turned out for the College Hill Christmas Parade.

I visited the coffee shop and bought some cool crafty items for my nieces, ran into the jewelry store to have my ring cleaned and to pick up a little something for my sister, wandered over to the brand new fabric/yarn store to browse at the gorgeous batiks and silks they have for sale, and ended at the wine shop where the sommelier helped me choose a couple of nice but inexpensive bottles. Each time I'd step out of a shop, there'd be more people on the street, lining up for the holiday parade. I think it's safe to say that except for me, every single person had either a dog or a kid with them. The parade headed north on the avenue, and it was led by the sternest, meanest looking cop I've ever seen (in his squad car with lights and sirens blaring). He was followed by some smiling firefighters, and next came the neighborhood folks. There were scraggly bands of drummers and cheerleaders, lots of dogs dressed in their holiday finest, a couple of scary looking clowns, big groups of Christmas carolers, and a pretty mangey looking Santa. It was wonderful.

There was a little girl with her dad standing near me, and she was so over-the-top excited about the parade that I feared she might inadvertently hurl herself into the street. She jumped up and down for five or ten minutes as it went by, yelling out the paraders identities as loud as she could, as in, "DADDY!!!! THERE'S A FIREMAN!!! DADDY! I SEE A DOG!!!" She was truly pee-your-pants excited. I have to say, she made the whole parade for me.

It's nice to have the feeling that my neighborhood is beginning to thrive. The economy has been tough on College Hill, but little by little, it's coming back to life. Nothing like a goofy parade to announce its resuscitation.

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