The Milk Carton September 25, 2013

I am a woman possessed by her art class.  We are currently working on a “milk carton” project.  The idea is to design the carton packaging for a particular target of buyers, such as skateboarders or opera lovers.  I narrowed my thinking down to three audiences – puzzlers (like my daughter Annie), math geeks (like me), and haiku poets.  I went with the latter, and now I’m steeped in writing haikus about milk and cutting up bits of origami paper.  So simple and so captivating.

America's Cup September 25, 2013

One of the things retirement buys you is a little time to be impulsive!  I gave in to the hype about the towering catamarans and headed down to Crissy Field about 10 days ago to watch the America’s Cup, which is being held in San Francisco.  The truth is that I (and indeed many other San Franciscans) am rooting for New Zealand, clearly the underdog against the Oracle behemoth.  Now I’m hooked.  Amazingly, Emirates Team NZ was ahead 8-1, but then equally amazingly, Oracle Team USA has come back to tie 8-8!  Today is the final race, as whoever makes it to 9 wins takes the cup.  I’ll be there.   

The Red Nails September 7, 2013

The first Friday in September means opening night of the San Francisco Opera, and as usual, I was there.  The difference this time was that as a retired lady, I had time for a quick pamper before the opera.  I headed down to my local nail place – the lovely Lavande on Carl Street – for a mani-pedi.  But for the first time ever, instead of just “natural” polish on the mani, I went for matching reds on fingers and toes, choosing a hue called “Manicurist in Seville”, because tonight’s opera was Mephistopheles by Boito, and I was feeling a little devilish myself.  I was actually supposed to be in the opera as a heavenly host, a supernumerary, but there were simply too many conflicts with the Tosca rehearsals.  It’s OK.  In fact, as someone pointed out to me, I’ve been singing on opening night in the opera house for more than 30 years – the National Anthem – but hey, it’s a start.

Epiphany #2 August 31, 2013

In the second meeting of art class, our teacher passed out black squares of construction paper and instructed us to cut them into pieces and to reassemble them with various intentions:  reassemble as a square, destroy a square, reverse the design, or assemble “5 easy pieces”.  As I sat at the worktable during class, I attempted a variety of shapes and arrangements that I thought were expected of me, but I ultimately found myself shrugging off what I thought I should do and instead simply halved the squares and resulting rectangles into increasingly smaller quadrangles and using these as the bits of the composition.  Simple, logical, the essence of “me”. 

And so, within that first week of art class, I learned two important lessons:  be patient, something will bubble to the surface, and trust what you know to be true for you.

College of Marin August 28, 2013

In an effort to round out my haphazard musical education, I looked around for ear-training teachers and found a comprehensive program that might work for me at College of Marin.  The four-semester series on ear training was coupled with a separate course on music theory, another big hole in my background, and I wrote to the instructor Trevor Bjorklund who enthusiastically wrote back with a few suggestions on how to proceed.  I signed up for his classes as well as a beginning art course, and now Tuesdays and Thursdays I’m happily engaged at the north end of the campus in Kentfield, where the modern Performing Arts building lies adjacent to Fine Arts in a small grove of redwood trees.  The other students are all about my daughter’s age, and together, we are learning a lot.  I even have a student ID.  Woo hoo!