Guilty pleasure, highbred surprise

Make-up blogs. And make-up application and hair care tutorials on YouTube.

Seriously. That's my guilty pleasure. I grew up in the '70s, when everybody was natural and free to be you 'n' me, and we all wore burlap blouses -- or thought we admired Joan Baez for wearing burlap blouses -- and considered make-up and other female fussiness shallow and unworthy.  

Or maybe I was just none too bright. When I was a bridesmaid for the first and only time, I couldn't understand why, amid all the professional photographs being taken that day, the bridesmaids were requested one by one to come and have their pictures snapped, up close, with one hand posed (fingers extended) over their rubrum lily bouquets. It looked ridiculous. Much later I understood that the point must have been for each girl to show off her manicure. I didn't have one.    

Now, at the age when my next milestone birthday will be my fiftieth, I find it's great fun to surf the internet looking for advice on personal grooming. It all might have stood me in good stead a long time ago, more's the pity, but it might even help a little now. I still don't like to wear make-up -- too aging, especially on a face with big pores -- but the advice you'll find from happy, chirpy young women, on that and other matters, remains good and practical. My daughter learned how to French braid her own hair from a tutorial that I discovered for her on YouTube; last night I searched, and not for the first time, for received wisdom on that problematic area, the eyebrow.  

Eyebrows haunt me. When I was a little girl I used to love to draw them, great fluourishing swoops like hawks' wings over pages full of disembodied, sultry, staring, gorgeous eyes. I inspect other women's brows, and envy the beautiful, lithe leaping ones. The best description of what a good brow grooming does to a woman's face comes from a man, and my favorite author: E.F. Benson. In Trouble for Lucia he writes that when the middle aged ladies of Tilling-on-Sea discover maquillage, each choosing one feature to work on, the dumpy Diva Plaistow finds "arched eyebrows carefully drawn where there were none before gave her a look of highbred surprise." (Needless to add that the serious artiste of the town, Quaint Irene, disapproves of the frivolity, and walks down the street "with the tip of her nose covered in green billiard chalk" to express her contempt.) My own eyebrows were always disappointing. They showed no arch whatsoever, darkly and stubbornly plodded in a circle around the eye, and began their growth directly on the eyelid, like a man's. Timid attempts at plucking were painful. My frustrated '70s self reared up, à la Quaint Irene, and scolded me. "There are important things going on in the world." And I flounced off, for years.

Yes, there are important things going on in the world. But I think a philosopher might also smile and say, given what small spheres most of us travel in, that Woman doing what she can to grace her appearance and improve her feelings is no unimportant thing. Back in Tilling, "Elizabeth found that the rose-mantled cheeks she now saw in her looking glass made her feel (not only appear) ten years younger; Susan that her corrugated hair made her look like a French marquise." At one point in the series of Mapp and Lucia novels, even Georgie, surreptitiously devoted as he is to his hair dye and his toupee, earns a scolding from his friend Lucia when he balks at her suggestion that he actually dye his graying beard, too. " 'Why,' " she exclaims, " 'a woman with the prospect of improving her appearance so colossally would not be able to sleep a wink tonight from sheer joy.' " He does it.     

And bully for them all. Now, about eyebrows. Who knew that one tweezes in the direction the hair grows? "If you pull straight out, you're going to have pain," Kandee advises. So true. The rest of her six-minute video lesson is a flurry of pencils, template cards, tweezers, tiny razors, brushes, and scissors. She is happy, unhesitant, absolutely competent, and professional. After I watched it I took a deep breath, got out my tweezers and (even though the bedroom light was rather murky) followed her advice at 10:30 last night, not least because my other daughter, whom I had thought had simply been blessed with perfect brows, told me she has been tweezing since she was fifteen. More on my results later. 

The reason I find these videos and their related blogs -- Kandee has two -- so fascinating is because these women, apart from being skilled at what they do, are so giving and so transparently sweet-natured. So very natural, really, in a way that a '70s nature baby is not accustomed to recognize. They want to help you look pretty and be happy, and their joy in helping you just goes on and on. "YOU ARE AWESOME! YOU ARE LOVED!" they tweet. Apart from tutorials on specific personal beauty projects, they also give you news on shopping, home decor ideas, the occasional recipe, the latest in terrific music, relationship advice, -- there's no end to it. Recently the irrepressible Kandee has wanted you to make gold-studded glitter heels, romantic Bohemian rocker braid hair (note incidentally the fabulous eyebrows, though I did like her natural thick ones, which had a lot of character), to cook the best crepes ever, and to buy the best mascara in the world. She shares her inner cartwheel-turnings at finding herself on page 238 of this month's Glamour -- more on Kandee's fame later -- she wants you to see these great chain earrings, she wants to share her experience of home-birthing her fourth baby. Yes, she filmed herself in labor. Did I mention the word irrepressible?    

About my results. Professionals -- any self-respecting fifteen-year-old -- will hardly credit it, but what you see below is an improvement. The new:

The old.

. You may understand better when you see what I inherited. There was Dad,

who I think inherited his look from his mother, Grandma Mabel.

Mom seems to have been lucky enough to get some height to her brows and, I daresay, did some tweezing and other normal maintenance before the wedding. Women in the 1940s also may not have been so burdened by the idea of being natural.

So here I am, at long last quite happy with my eyebrows. Saved money doing it at home, too. What is left me is to make like all Kandee's other readers and viewers, and all the readers and viewers of all the other happy women's make-up tutorials and hair care and lifestyle blogs, and thank her for her instructions. How they gush. And how many of them (us) there are. We '70s-era nature babies, we artistes who tell ourselves there are big things happening in the world, must stand astonished when we scroll down to the comments forum on the make-up divas' sites, and find that they routinely garner fifty and sixty comments per post, or a thousand on a video. Kandee's eyebrow tutorial has racked up almost 530,000 views, and her blog has a whopping two hundred and nine thousand "Likes" on Facebook -- 209,210 to be precise. I'm proud to be the 209,211th. The French braid tutorial has close to a half million views, and even a short video on making up deep-set eyes (another of my problems), done by the liltingly accented Oxford Jasmine in her bathroom somewhere in Oxford I presume, has more than 56,000. All this goes far toward explaining Kandee's presence, at least, in this month's Glamour, even on one page of it, and I won't be surprised to see either of the others follow her, and many more like her afterward. Small forces to be reckoned with, all of them. If any one of them ever persuades me to get a manicure, I will totally let "you guys" know.  

It's raining sheets

There are certain situations in life that call for the purchase of new, bright pink bedsheets. Like after he leaves. It's not a celebratory thing. You just want something new on the bed.

Then it rains. Again.

Then the sun comes out. Might there be a rainbow? You rush to take a picture.

So does he. The door to the upstairs apartment slams.

Why now

Why is it that now, of all times, people seem to come at me with gems like this? --

"That Skinny Girl margarita. Did you know Bethenny Frankel sold the rights to that drink mix to some big company for millions of dollars? ... And her dad left her and her mom when she was, like, three. She never forgave him for it. "

"No, I can see why." 

"Can you imagine doing that? The guy must have really hated his wife."

"Mmmm."

Then, Jim the butcher: "I need your husband's help."

Ah-hah.

It seems that Jim and his wife own houses locally which they rent out, and they have recently received an application from a would-be renter who claimed to work at the local fire department. They want to check up on this guy and find out if he really is employed there -- where my husband is (my daughter now calls her father simply "the Sir," and points toward the ceiling, in other words to the upstairs apartment, when speaking about him). I think Jim expected me to involve the Sir in this investigation in some way. I simply suggested he call the fire department, whose number I do know by heart after twenty-four years, and ask about the ostensible employee himself. I think he was somewhat taken aback by the simplicity of it.

The next day: "Are you John's wife?" the lady asked.

Ummm ...

She knows of him through the volunteer appearances he has put in at her grandchildren's schools. "Such a nice man. He said you worked here and that the next time I was in, I should look you up."

"Oh, yes! And what's your name?"

"Mary Costello."

"Oh, yes, that sounds familiar." So she went away flattered and pleased.

Field trip! more Springfield

Springfield, Illinois must boast the worst mishmash of architectural styles of any state capital in the nation -- I would say, of any community on the planet, but I could be wrong about that. Every visitor to the city comes, of course, to see this:

This is Abraham Lincoln's home, restored, but not with too heavy a hand, the National Park Service men told us. Eighty percent of the interior is original, as is sixty percent of the exterior. It sits in a neighborhood that looks reassuringly familiar -- spacious, calm, manicured and even up-to-date. The little four-block area might be a corner of any comfortable midwestern town even today, except for the gravel "streets" and the wooden "sidewalks." I use quotation marks because all of it except for Lincoln's house, right down to those streets and sidewalks, is reconstructed. Even if you weren't told so you would probably guess it. The beautiful houses have an eerie, perfect, plastic look, and if you venture inside those that have been rendered museums, you find the rooms are all painted a dull, clean, sensible museum-gray. Tap on the marble-look mantelpieces. Fake. They ring like metal.

Above, for instance, is a house painstakingly recreated to suggest one that belonged to a Lincoln neighbor. (His is behind you and across the street to your right when you stand here.) I couldn't resist snapping a photo of the view that neither Lincoln nor the neighbor ever saw: some modern municipal buildings, and the Hilton hotel towering over the city. This is what I mean by mishmash. Had I also troubled to photograph the new Abraham Lincoln Museum and its companion Library, both great tiered circles of shining wheat-blond stone and glass amid the gray concrete parking garages and the plain brown office piles and the circa 1890s brick and multicolored storefronts downtown, not far from the weathered Greek columns of the Old State Capitol, well -- you would have seen mishmash with a vengeance.

If only it all looked as turn-of-the-twentieth-century-dignified as this.

On the right of this photo, the Greek-columned Old State Capitol, again. Site of the famed "house divided" speech, 1858.

There was one more very interesting house in Lincoln's neighborhood, this time a real one, falling to pieces with age but more alive than all the others for all that. I wonder if this is what an architectural historian might call a piece of Victorian gingerbread.

I wonder, too, if the colors of pale salmon and slate blue were the height of chic at the time. When I look at it somehow I imagine the daughter of the family, a hundred or more years ago, dressing and primping excitedly for her first grown-up party. Fond father, town brahmin complete with watch chain, mutton chop whiskers, and monocle, looking on, etc. The house has a femininity about it, right down to the violets and grasses still struggling to grow in the yard, and the ivies trailing into the deep sunken brick-lined bowl which I suppose was once a fish pond, or the basin to Mother's precious fountain. In the photo below, you are standing with the house at your back, at the bottom of "Old Aristocracy Hill" -- the sign says so -- and looking up Eighth Street toward the Lincolns' place in the distance.

The salmon-and-blue affair is surely within a hair's breadth of being condemned and torn down; bright warning official stickers on the boarded windows are already almost too weathered for passersby to be able to read "Dangerous Structure" on them. This is what happened I feel sure, one by one, to the real houses near Lincoln's corner, and this is why all the reconstructed homes around his are such perfect but eerie ghosts. They all just weathered and crumbled. This house is for sale, but would cost a fortune to revive. It lies outside the sacred precincts which the National Park Service now owns and keeps frozen in 1860, so I imagine if it were not perfectly revived -- if you bought it and did what you liked with it -- if it were simply made safe, pretty, and livable, that would be all right.

In fact I almost wish all the others up the street had not been so perfectly revived themselves. Though the window back into time which they provide is interesting, I wish living families with children were still in these homes, even at the price of historically inaccurate doorknobs or windows glowing blue with television, rather than that Lincoln's part of the town should be the so pristine, still and dead. Our park service guides lamented to us that, before the government began buying up the four block area with preservation in mind, there had been not only real people's, non-1860 homes all around but also "a Piggly-Wiggly" (tacky grocery store chain) cheek by jowl with the Lincoln shrine. Well, what if there was?  People need groceries, and Lincoln, ex-store clerk, was nothing if not sympathetic to the human comedy. By this lofty argument, however, I should not complain about the mishmash effect of Springfield's architecture taken altogether. People need parking garages, and hotels.

A final thought, prompted by the scenery on a warm spring day. Springfield gives the strange impression that it would never have remained the state capitol were it not for Abraham Lincoln's presence here. The seat of Illinois government, already four or five times removed from more rural locales before arriving here in the 1840s, would have naturally moved on again. The mishmash, the isolation and the ghostliness are un-capital-like. And then, the rolling up of sidewalks on Saturday night is another matter. 

Field trip -- the drive to Springfield

Illinois does go on for miles and miles, hours and hours. Photographs of a farm beside the highway, and another farm past it in the distance, and a third and fourth in yet further distances, still don't convey the endless expanse of land and sky. Imagine walking through here beside a creaking, slow- moving covered wagon, when all the land was prairie cut through with meandering small creeks burbling down in the grasses. They named them "Vermilion" or "Money." I think scenery like this is the reason why, the few times in my life that I've seen mountains, I have found them weirdly disturbing and almost confining. Beautiful of course, but still. Imagine never being able to see the horizon.

Then again, imagine reaching a certain point -- right here -- and deciding, this is a good place to stop. We'll live here. Or, imagine deciding, no, let's go on walking for two or three more months and settle in Nebraska ... or Utah ... or Oregon.Who knows? Maybe some people in the wagon trains were thinking, I'd like to live near mountains. Or the sea.

The change in the look of growing things was noticeable once we reached a certain point south. The spring day was unusually warm everywhere, but beyond a certain point, the meager springtime colors of our northern part of the state changed, from the grays and browns of bare trees and plowed fields, the bright tans of last year's grasses and the deep reds of the almost budding trees, to a more uniform stippling of the palest green along the treetops and in the underbrush in the woods zooming by. Had we passed, in our drive, from what the gardener knows as USDA Zone 5 to Zone 6? In Springfield -- yes! the excitements of the capital were our destination -- things had gone even further. A few flowering crabapples were in full bloom, and a magnolia across the street from Abraham Lincoln's house had already dropped most of its petals. Then there was this odd thing.

This tree graces the site of Lincoln's first law offices in downtown Springfield. On the building next to it, in the picture below, happens to be a reproduction of a flowery painting by Vachel Lindsay, who struggles to be the second-most significant figure ever to come from the town. Poor fellow, it's not his fault. What can one do, when one is a forgotten poet-artist who happens to share a bit of biographical coincidence with an incomprehensibly epochal figure? By way of thought experiment: who, for example, counts as the second most important man from Stratford-on-Avon? Answer comes there none.

Safety

Snow. With a vengeance. Howling winds. Darkness. "White-out conditions." "We are encouraging everyone to stay off the roads after 6 pm."

Four of the family are safely home, but not the fifth. It's 5:30 in the afternoon, it's 5:33, it's 6:00. There were rumors that the store would close early for the night. "Sixty percent of what you fear doesn't happen." Images: the long drive home through the woods. Fishtailing trucks, lonely roads, looming headlights, taillights; the flickering, pale orange sparkling lights of a plow far, far away. You cook a very plain meal and do the dishes because it seems better to do that than to look casually out the windows.

Images, states of mind: the eerie in-between feeling of anticipating what it will be like when everything is all right of course, when it's not all right yet. An hour from now perhaps, or an hour and a half. Or twenty minutes? You can anticipate the slam of a car door, the usual footsteps on the porch. But they haven't happened. It snows. The windows rattle, the snow against them sounding like whipping, rustling cloth. 

After dishes, then what? There's a difficult feeling in the stomach. You have no desire to do anything giving any pleasure or relaxation. That's like another country, which you haven't reached or even embarked for. It's 6:04, it's 6:17. Phone calls. "Just checking to see if everyone's home safe." 

The cat, from out of nowhere, spreads herself lazily on the floor at your feet, near the back door. That might be the sound of an engine outside, but looking won't make it so. And what if it isn't?

But there are stories of cats knowing when their people are home, or even on their way home. You part the blinds. There is the car, halfway in the driveway, but stuck, and the snow streaming wildly in its yellow headlights.

Well of course. Naturally nothing would have happened. A great breath of normalcy. "She's home, she just can't get in the driveway. I'll help shovel her out." Actions: throwing on boots and coat, hat and gloves. Stomping out to the wind and the darkness that isn't real darkness but a geometry of weird, orange-gray wedges. Stomping out into shadows and angles of light from the big streetlight and the shape of the house, stomping out into the fine lashing snow. It billows and rolls off the neighbors' roofs. The temperature really isn't that bad. It's even enjoyable, to be out in the elements like this.

We shovel. The wind pushes at our backs, tearing at the snow and throwing it from our shovels. She complains that her first serious problem on the drive home "had to happen right in front of the house!" I said, better here than in the woods.

We finish freeing the car and clearing out a parking space for it. She pulls in. Inside, there is much thudding of boots and tossing of wet clothes over the shower curtain bar to dry. There are phone calls returned -- "oh, good" -- pajamas, a late dinner, a movie. Pleasure and relaxation. Everyone has the day off tomorrow, while outside, the worst of the night blizzard is said to be only just beginning. Hours and hours of it. Safety.

Across the street the neighbor's dog bounds out, leashed to the silhouette of her owner in their yard's geometry -- in the glare of the porch light, the angle and shadows of their steps, the overhanging gutter, the roof and the vague square of the house behind. She relieves herself, bounds about as if wanting to chase squirrels or the snow, and hunches over again beneath the tall, bare, straight-swaying trees while billows of snow and wind pour around them. Then her leash tightens as she bounds back to safety, dragging Master. A mile away, the deer we'll see in spring must huddle in the black woods.

Hey, Jude! Yesterday, Eleanor Rigby and Lucy left home on Penny Lane, and went to Strawberry Fields with the fool on the hill while fixing a hole on the long and winding road with a little help from their friends

Or, what gets engraved in your brain while listening to the Muzak piped into a grocery store every day. Lord have mercy, how I do loathe the Beatles. And who decided that only their most depressing songs are slow enough to please the morning shoppers, who tend to be elderly and (I suppose) in need of nice slow music to keep them maundering along the aisles and absently filling their carts with more stuff? Who, I ask?

Someday I want to own a grocery store where we pipe in Saint-Saens' Bacchanale the moment the doors open at 7:00 a.m. I don't know what other music, but certainly that.   

A new experience

What I saw and heard at a political candidate's "meet and greet" at a crowded local sports-bar restaurant, amid the thundering din of twenty televisions blasting out the Chicago Black Hawk's Stanley Cup playoff game (#6 in the series):

I saw a barely-known candidate and his staff circulate among tables full of strangers, introducing the concept of a challenge to a Chicago Democratic machine incumbent whom most political observers would consider unbeatable, no matter the dirt clinging to him.

I saw a handful of people, among them young marrieds and another political candidate too, approach him, introduce themselves, and talk to him about their concerns.

I saw a young woman approach her potential future U.S. Congressman and ask him "just one question" -- namely, whom he held finally responsible for the oil spill in the gulf. His answer satisfied her, and then she explained her background. Her husband, she said, worked for BP, and most people's views on the subject infuriated her because most people did not have the facts. (I didn't. Who has ever heard of TransOcean, and the argument on the rig the morning of the explosion?)

I heard the candidate's campaign manager describe her own experience running for office in the state. She was ahead in all the polls, she said, until the Wednesday before the primary election this past February. She attended meet-and-greet events, she traveled, she spoke with mayors in her district, she tried to be the best candidate possible and to get the word out about herself and her views. The weekend before the election, her opponent, unknown, inactive, and invisible, received a cash dump of $35,000 into his war chest, the bulk of it from a local union and the rest from two big local construction industry firms. "So what did this do?" I asked -- "it bought exposure for him?" She agreed. "It bought exposure," she said. He won. Memo to the common man: you may only contribute $2400 to the candidate of your choice, in a primary and in a general election.

I saw the candidate's wife, young and pretty, cheerfully greet total strangers in a loud, strange, and tiring venue for what probably seems, and indeed may be, the umpteenth time that day, that week, that month. It was also their wedding anniversary.

I saw the candidate, and the staff and the small handful of people who had come out to meet him, at length relax and eat potato wedges and chicken wings, and crane their necks to watch a bit of the hockey game along with the rest of the patrons, because really there was no getting away from it.

I heard the candidate admit "it is tough" drawing a decent sized group to these meet-and-greet events. It's only June, the November elections seem a long way away, and the very people who might be most inclined to vote for a conservative Republican representative in Illinois are also the type to not put politics at the center of their lives. They are the type to want to live and let live.

And at the end of the night I saw the candidate take the bill for the potato wedges and the chicken wings, look at it, and reach into his back pocket for his wallet and his credit card.

We all shook hands and left, and the hockey fans stayed.

By the way, the Hawks won.

For more information: Isaac Hayes 2010

Alphonse, the evil neighborhood cat

Alphonse is not really evil, it's just that our own cat, Martha, thinks he is. In truth he may be misnamed as well. He may be Alphonsa. Or Alphonsina?

This cat, black with a white chest and white paws, has prowled the neighborhood for upwards of five years. He survives all weathers. I have seen him loping down ice-crusted backyard snowdrifts in the howling winds of February, and trotting along the alley in the sunny blazing heat of August. What he eats or drinks in any season is beyond me. He must know how to hunt, for I've seen him eagerly tearing at and gulping down things in the neighbor's lily of the valley bed. And yet he is also glad to consume a plate of roasted chicken by porchlight on a darkening winter afternoon, when nature's pickings must be slim.

Last spring, a full year ago, he emerged with a friend who looked exactly like him, accompanied by three gambolling gray kittens. Unhappily, the three gambolling kittens were picked off, I fear, rather quickly by an impersonal and pitiless fate following the glorious day in May when they leaped about the soft green grass, learning the difference between sun and shade, and practicing climbing trees. In a few weeks there was one kitten, and then there were none, and Alphonse's friend also disappeared. But the two adults looked so alike -- perhaps it was Alphonse (or Alphonsa?) who disappeared. Perhaps this seeming long-term survivor is actually the Friend.

At any rate one of them is back, and taunting Martha as usual. Martha used to be a stray herself. She is an enormous and beautiful calico, picked up on the streets of Whiting, Indiana, three years back and shipped off to the local Humane Society shelter in nearby Munster, which is where I found her. When I first brought her home she was thrilled to be with people and to have a whole domain to herself. She sat in laps, and purred. Then after two weeks she came to her senses, remembered she was a cat, and became cat-like again: aloof and imperial, willing to tolerate being fed and let down into the basement to prowl her daily rounds, willing perhaps to sleep on the humans' ankles at night provided they didn't thrash about too much. To this day she hovers about doors and windows, always anxious, it seems, to get outside again and give the local squirrels what for. I don't allow her out, for fear that she would be taken, at best, or at worst meet another impersonal fate under the wheels of a car or in the talons of a local hawk. (As the Lolcats site might put it, "hawwks -- we haz tehm.") We scold her that she "doesn't really" want to go back to Whiting and all her reprobate friends.

Now that the good weather is here and the windows are open again, and only flimsy screens stand between her and freedom, the main and terrible excitement of her life has become Alphonse. She does enjoy some mild excitement year-round in the form of our other cat, Nicholas, whom I adopted (much to her shock and disgust) a few months after Herself. But he is so fat, and deaf, and friendly, and oblivious, and he slouches so in doorways, that he hardly counts as a proper enemy. One may sneak up behind him and box his ears -- she seems obsessed with his ears -- and be done with it; and as for the times he chases her under a bookcase and keeps her penned there hissing, his white tail puffed up like a bottle brush, well, the less said the better.

But Alphonse. Alphonse is a challenge. He saunters along the sidewalk of a morning, under the mulberry tree. He has the effrontery to actually mount the steps to the back porch, and once even to jump on the purple table there and peer into the office window. Her office window. Sometimes on deep quiet nights in summer he patrols the front of the house, skulking along close to the wall in the soft dirt beneath the evergreen bushes, directly below another of Martha's very special observatory windows. And she can't get at him, because of the d----d screen. She sits there, fat and tense, watching Alphonse's lithe virileness, and she makes horrible high-pitched noises in the back of her throat.

We named the virile one Alphonse in a moment one evening this week. My daughter had been saying that if ever "we" get another cat, a good name for it would be Alphonse. I thought this an excellent idea, and then as we pulled into the driveway, returning from a family party, there he was -- the black neighborhood stray with the white chest and the white paws. "Ooh, look!" I said. "There's that evil cat Martha hates. Let's call him Alphonse." And while I was babbling about Taking Him In, my son got out of the car and bounded up the porch steps three at a time to go in the house. It was a late and chilly evening, past eight o'clock. The summer darkness was at last falling, and the robins were chirping, not only their evening carols in the distance, but their slow, rhythmic bip--bip--bip that means "danger" closeby.

Then there was a sudden, startled movement, a confusion, a blur, and a rattling among the furniture and empty clay pots at the corner of the porch. My son reared back and gasped, "Nick got out." This is bad news. Nicholas really is deaf, and commensurately panicky at any moment. (The staff at the Humane Society warned me that he is a sweet cat of course and just like other cats, only um -- moreso, because of the deafness.) When he decides a certain situation has become uncomfortable, he bolts for safety where another cat might merely begrudgingly shake itself and saunter off. We call it freakout mode, and there's no knowing when it will come. Since he has never been declawed and since a characteristic of freakout mode is that all twenty little nails flash out as he gropes for traction, we just stand back. Indoors, he need only fly under a bed or a couch until he feels better; the danger of his ever escaping the house is that there would be no way to call him back, and increasing panic would send him shearing ever off into the beyond like a great, fat, white fur golf ball. Like Martha, he would be a beautifully colored target for any predator.

Indeed "Nick" had gotten out, but how could he possibly? We were away at the party and had safely locked the house. Then we noticed. The screen on the office window, giving out on to the porch -- one of Martha's special observatory screens, looking over Alphone's porch, you might say -- had been burst through, and dangled crazily off the window frame. There inside the office, perched on her computer printer but with full free access to the outside world, sat Martha, looking somehow determined, guilty, and perplexed all at once. Nicholas cowered in corner of the porch, amid last year's clay pots. Alphonse had long since vanished.

I grabbed Nicholas from behind, after first trying in vain to get his attention with hand-wavings near his head and with thumps on the porch floor beside him. (I should explain that it's a high porch planted with tall bushes here and there, and built in such a way that I could approach it, and him, directly from the driveway, with him at my eye level but unable to notice me.) I didn't know but what one unexpected touch of a human hand might go through him like an electric jolt and send him soaring into the darkness, claws scrabbling for a hold. But there was nothing to do but grab him before he bolted anyway.

He held steady, my husband cleared away the protective furniture, picked him up, and brought him inside, and we all followed in and made sure of ourselves and him and Martha being inside the house. Then we looked about, secured the hanging screen, stepped on a few large flying bugs that had taken the opportunity to explore the world of humans, and generally talked and exclaimed and worked off the adrenaline that had gone coursing through five people at once, at this unprecedented crisis. A stenographer taking it all down would have found us talking in enough soulignes to satisfy Queen Victoria herself. How did it happen? We thought someone had broken in. And Martha -- what a brave cat, protecting her home! And I petted her as perfervidly as if she had brought home one of those offerings -- a bird, a mouse -- that we are always supposed to praise our pets for. Honestly, the things that pass for crises among pampered people really don't bear thinking about. Our hearty ancestors used to tie cats up in bags, with only their heads exposed, and hang the bags from a tree to use for archery practice. Not that I agree with doing that.



After that stimulating evening, the next morning Alphonse returned. I was calmly eating my breakfast when I heard Martha, once again in the office and at the vital window, making that horrible high-pitched noise in her throat which either sounds as though she is sick unto death, or as though she is seeing pure evil in action. And there he was. Alphonse, the neighborhood cat.

He is frightened of people and of doors opening, but I moved quietly. After spying out how things lay, petting Martha and reassuring her on her wonderful good sense and keen powers of observation, I went into the pantry. I fetched a handful of kibble from the plastic jug where we keep it -- she knows the delicious sound of that rattle, of course -- closed up the jug again, and then softly opened the back door and stepped down the porch stairs. She was still on station at the office window, but made no move to burst through the screen again. (We've wondered whether, for all her imperiousness and growlings, it may have been Nicholas who did that anyway. He was the one actually outdoors. This morning, however, he was asleep and oblivious.) I laid out the little handful of kibble on the sidewalk, and in a few moments Alphonse came along and ate it. Then some people walked past, and he scampered off. Until next time, I presumed.

I have thought that really I ought to make an effort to collar Alphonse, as someone once collared Martha, and bring him to the Humane Society where he too may be cleaned up, fed regularly, and have a chance to go to a "forever home." But then I think, after all, Alphonse so far has been doing all right for himself. He is free, he shows no signs of being in any major cat fights, he seems not to be ill or even overly skinny. And anyway he has all the amusement he wants in Martha -- and sometimes Nicholas -- and their observatory windows. The occasional plate of chicken or handful of kibble may or may not be welcome. When he returned for a third morning, I thought, O God -- now I've done it. He expects to be fed, poor thing. So I stealthily put out another handful. But at the end of the day it was still there, food for ants. Apparently he had better things to do, or to eat.

Only do not tell Martha that. Souligne.

Art exhibits

In the richly red and beautiful Sidney R. Yates gallery of the Chicago Cultural Center, two modern art exhibits are just coming to the end of their run.



One is called "Expect the Unexpected," and is a collection of paintings -- plus one delightful set piece that the viewer walks into as if he were entering a painting -- by Hollis Sigler (1948-2001). These paintings first caught my eye from outside the gallery's glass doors because they looked so pretty and colorful, so unlike modern art. I walked in.

The paintings are pretty and colorful, and they have interesting and poetic titles. Some Days You Feel So Alive. One of the best is It keeps her going, a beautiful imaginary scene of a table set for two on what seems a tropic beach, under an incongruously huge splashing fountain, all seen through a curtained window. Before the window lies assembled all the accoutrements of daily life: stove, washing machine, a little electric mixer here, an ironing board there. It's all done in a childlike, firm, skewed-perspective style called "faux naive" I gather, and this one especially is witty, light, and if not profound, at least pleasing.

It didn't take too long, however, to figure out that all the paintings in Expect the Unexpected, scores of them in total, are about breast cancer. Hollis Sigler suffered it and died of it while just in her early fifties. Her mother and great-grandmother had also had it, and knowing this from the accompanying brochure helped lay the foundations of a foreboding which otherwise the gallery patron might not have looked for in any Sigler works before 1985 (the year of diagnosis).

As I walked about looking at all the paintings, and reading the descriptions beside them -- she wrote long explanations of cancer research, or of her own treatment at the time of a particular work, on the frames, explanations which are hard to read and whose prose has therefore had to be posted neatly under plexiglass alongside -- it struck me that this isn't so much an art exhibit as it is a voyeuristic plunge into Everywoman's nightmare. After a while, the motifs of little birds, chairs, skewed-perspective rooms, dead trees, cracked mirrors, and bloodstained women's clothing become emptied. As art, it's not much beyond the level of greeting cards. The heavy reliance on text seems almost a cheat, or for a painter a crutch at any rate.

But as chilling, vicarious descent into illness and death, woman's death, the exhibit is fascinating, the moreso to women. Brochure in hand and plexiglass addenda well digested, I found myself looking for signs that the sufferer's, the patient's, painting changed in 1985. I found them. Her paintings turned red. Just before the fateful year, she could still paint a bright picture of a woman in the shower, her bathroom filled little hairdryers and stockings and lots of other stuff pertaining to beauty and grooming. There is still foreboding here, because we know that many women inadvertently find the lump in their breast while showering. But the picture itself is still a picture filled with normalcy and a future, and all the colors of a spring garden.

Then, 1985. Lump. Family fate. Diagnosis. Change Doesn't Come Easy for Her shows a volcano spewing rocks, snakes, birds, and lizards into a room; a television set is cracked and a chair and coffee cup bounce and spill. Yes, that is illness: what was normal yesterday, and what you felt you were entitled to because of course everybody lives normally and you are normal just like everybody, is no longer yours. (A later work in fact is titled something like "This is no longer yours," and copes with another effect of illness. No, you can't walk, run, or garden now. My lord Sickness has shaken His royal Head, and said you are unable.) Another red 1985 painting, another grappling with "it's happened it's happened," shows a Greek statue (the famed bronze Poseidon Soter, I think) with broken arms in a little shrine on a hill, and a river of lava flowing down from it to busy, bright, modern Everywoman's world. There are chairs and wine bottles and clothes and green trees and shoes. It's More Than the Loss of My Breast shows another skewed-perspective room, full of womanly things, a pretty dress, high heeled shoes, a broken pearl necklace, a chair and a vanity with a broken mirror. All the things that don't matter anymore when you've had your mastectomy.

Or maybe they can still matter. Some women survive breast cancer. Maybe a lot of women do, which is why we hear so much about it. I recall reading this once -- it was the opinion of a doctor I think -- who also pointed out that there's a painful reason why society bothers to designate a color "for" breast cancer ribbons, but not, say, for pancreatic cancer ribbons. (Gray? Black?) Not too many survivors to hold fundraisers for there.

But is Hollis Sigler's breast cancer journal art? We read the frames: "now the cancer is in my bones, my pelvis, and my spine." We shudder vicariously. In small later paintings, she raised up, in thick applications of paint the same color as the scene, single words that physically loom: Heredity, or Organochlorides. We shudder again: imagine having to come to terms with sheer stupid bad luck. Why did it have to be me, and my great grandmothers? But at last, that raising up of paint, a physical sensuous thing -- not prose, not explanations -- struck me as art. Art: communicate something to me in some other way than explanatory prose and illustrations. Make me "see" in some other way (which is a gift that explanatory art gallery brochures are always claiming artists have), a way I also can't necessarily put into explanatory prose.

Seeing so little of that in Expect the Unexpected is why I could turn to the neighboring, much smaller exhibit and learn with surprise that even though it didn't look nearly as colorful or pretty, it showed the work of a far better artist. Angel Ortero (Touch with Your Eyes) lays on to canvas or wood little squares of gold paint, silicone, and what looks like mesh and foil, and creates an elegant, monochrome mosaic picture of a vase of flowers on a tabletop covered by a carelessly flowing cloth -- or is it a woman holding the flowers in her lap, and is that perfectly molded gold mosaic shape her breast in profile? He puts up a piece of gorgeous stuffed, ripped purple floral upholstery, and a mess of more thick paint, mesh, and silicone, calls it My Grandmother's Couch -- and makes you laugh. One of my favorites was a piece called Untitled -- dear me, when will artists stop indulging themselves? -- in which a beautiful lump of blue and white porcelain drips off a table and lands and rolls to a stop on the floor. The table is spattered with another mess of colorful paint, mesh, and twists of foil and silicone. It was simply lovely, refreshing, and interesting to look at. Words and explanations would be beside the point. The artist has communicated something pleasurable in some other way.

Downstairs, in the Cultural Center's Michigan Avenue galleries, was another exhibit, this one of photographs of the interiors of some mausoleums in the Midwest. The photographer is John Allan Faier, the collection Queen of Heaven. The photographs were beautiful, they could almost have been "interior design porn" except of course that they had a posed, spotlit stillness that no art editor for Southern Living or Real Simple wants to see. Looking at them, I was struck by the effort that mausoleum designers must put into making these places as sumptuous and vibrantly colored as possible. Clearly, the object here is comfort, not mourning. Hospitals, where there is still hope of life, are dismal prisons of white and olive in comparison. Here in these photos, chairs, carpets, walls, and stained glass all shone in jewel tones of red, fuschia, purple, raspberry, green, and blue; lamps and lampshades were tasteful old gold. Everything was spotless; there were simple, sleek wooden statues of obscure saints (Elizabeth of Hungary) standing in quiet corners amid the walls of names on black-gray marble.

Alas, I seem to have taken all the wrong lessons from this exhibit. Would you like to bet a nickel that the explanatory brochure accompanying Queen of Heaven included the words "loneliness," "alienation" and "kitsch"? How about "suburban entrapment" and "rage at society's treatment of"? Oh wait -- that was the breast cancer collection.

Have you laid your nickel down? Good show. You win.

Art

The Chicago Cultural Center, formerly the Chicago Public Library building, Randolph St. and Michigan Ave. Built in 1896.





If ever you listen to radio station WFMT's Wednesday "Dame Myra Hess" concerts broadcast live from Preston Bradley Hall, why, you might enjoy knowing that this is where they are performed. The arches and domed ceilings are a glittering Renaissance fantasy of verdant, coiling green mosaics on white marble, and of sublime quotes, carved in gold, about learning and wisdom in a dozen languages, including Chinese, Arabic, and Egyptian hieroglyphics.



The lamps are from a maharajah's palace; the names of the great stud the arches; the Tiffany dome is the largest such in the world.







Even the carpets are beautiful.



The work of master mosaicists, and master woodcarvers, circa 1896.







Shall we decorate the underside of a staircase? Yes, let's.



Shall we also carve the ceiling, deeply? Yes.



The Hall of the Grand Army of the Republic on the second floor. No photograph can do justice to the scale of the two rooms -- the second lies beyond the open doors to the far right -- nor the size of those massive wooden doors. Alas, the room beyond was closed for a theatrical rehearsal, so I can offer no photos of opulent, martial swords-and-bunting wood carvings all around its ceiling, nor of the names of the Grand Army's Civil War battles, stamped somberly six apiece over the doorways. Fort Sumter, Gettysburg, the March to the Sea, Cold Harbor -- in 1896, all were only thirty years gone.





Visions of Escher?



Mosaic work and marble.



Part of the Sidney Yates gallery, where we saw two modern art exhibitions. One was better than the other.



Lions guard the outdoors.



We forget, it was a library.



Vale, until next time.