SPARE TIME

What do I do in my spare time? I donate my creative energies to SCRATCHbread. I Paint giant arrows and I look for signs where there are none.

SKOWHEGAN AWARDS DINNER

 Skowhagan awards dinner and gala where Mary Heilmann was honored. Yeah Mary!

MY FEAR OF SWEET THINGS THAT BRING JOY: ECONOMY CANDY

I remember Halloween growing-up for two distinct dramatic events: one was the year my friends came hours late to pick me up for Trick or Treat and I sat on the front stoop waiting in my little princess costume feeling terribly sad (Ok, maybe I was dressed as a hobo - but I had the heart of a princess damn it! And I was distraught!) And the second Halloween drama would happen each year after Trick or Treat when we would gather up all of our treats and bring them to the hospital to have them x-rayed for fear that pins of razor blades had been surreptitiously placed inside a Snickers or a Mars bar. I am sorry...did ANYONE else do this?!

I think partially because of this I am not a a big fan of sweet things in general but I am a big fan of bright and bountiful nostalgia with cool graphics! Well, and I Do eat sweets sometimes and then I seek the perfect sweet, in the perfect place. Economy Candy on the Lower East Side has been serving the dental community since 1937.

Gum balls in lock-down at Economy Candy on Rivington St.

SNAILS IN WAITING

Zimtschnecken waiting to proof. In English: cinnamon snails. How lovely and true! Call it what it is: we are a sticky semi-sweet cinnamon snail that will sneak up on you. Yeah! There is a hot kick. Welcome small shelled creatures!! 

What did you do this time Micky?

I was struck (no pun intended, but hell, yes!) by the image on the Band-Aid container! Minnie is "Smacking" Micky (or vice versa?) ...obviously these Band-Aids are geared towards children. So who am I to say? But someone is beating someone up!


I need a Band-Aid.

PORK SHOP

Esposito's Pork Shop dishing out delicious pig parts and more since 1933 in Hell's Kitchen, NYC. Truly a beacon in the night after a spirit-sucking sort of day that called for a closing portion of spicy Italian sausage from some of the more than 10,000 pounds of the stuff they produce each weeks. (Don't really want to imagine the mass of that but..maybe the size of a VW van? Or two?)


Thank you pork people at Esposito's.

PERFECTLY PLASTIC

Tupperware held all of his sadness: a middle class and midwestern thump of hurt. The sadness of being raised on iceberg lettuce instead of arugula. It was the damage of the scraped and dinged (slightly melted at the lip) frosty-green iceberg lettuce crisper. The Tupperware that was no longer in use because no one could find the lid. The crisper was expendable, but no one cared enough about the container to even throw it out! It had so little value that it wasn't even worth throwing away. 


The guy hadn't showered in weeks. I couldn't smell him right then, but I knew who he was and he never showered. He was a drunk boy/man with a hurt heart and he stood screaming below our apartment windows that night in Cleveland. He wasn't looking or yelling for me specifically - it was my room mate who had caught his wrath - I was just in hearing distance, and yet he seemed to be yelling at me too. He cursed her, he cursed all of us (women), he was hard to understand at times but the proclamations were building to one last insult - the crescendo - bellowing..."You, you treat me...you treat me worse, you treat me worse than anything! You treat me like...like, I'm Tupperware! TUPPERWAAARE!"

I still recall his name. I remember his sour body smell in our house mixed with turpentine and stale cigarette. I remember the look of his paintings and that he was smart and well read. But today the only thing that truly resonates carried through the windows that night: You treat me like I'm Tupperware.