tea berry-blue

I went to Toys R Us on Monday to buy a stuffed animal as a gift for a friend, and on my way to the register, I passed the Strawberry Shortcake dolls.

Now, when I was little, Strawberry Shortcake was my life. My mother made me a costume. I probably talked Berry Talk a bunch. I must have had a dozen dolls. We couldn't afford the fancy accessories, so my mother sewed little sleeping bags for all of them and gave me an old makeup case for them to live in.

I still remember that there was one doll I wanted desperately: Orange Blossom.

Orange Blossom was probably my first introduction to the idea of tokenism: the sole black character on the TV show and among the dolls.

She also had hair like mine.

In the early 80s, before the advent of Barbie and the Rockers, it was not particularly common to find a doll with curly hair-- especially any kind of curls that looked like natural curls, as opposed to neatly-coiffed ringlets that looked like they'd been made with curlers. There were other Strawberry Shortcakes dolls with curly hair-- quite a lot of them, in fact-- but Orange Blossom had the same short curls I had when I was four years old.

My father brought her back for me from a trip to Georgia. I still remember that I was riding on his shoulders when he gave her to me, and I called him a softie.

Anyway, in the current SSC reboot, the Orange Blossom doll, along with all the other dolls, has long, straight, silky hair. (Her skin is a lighter shade of brown, too).

I've never really had any interest in buying one of the new Strawberry Shortcake dolls, but then I saw this special edition Orange Blossom:



And now I have a doll.

I lived in Boston and Cambridge during two very tough years.

It was hard, it was cold, and for this spoiled New Yorker, things closed early and often seemed to take too long. I didn’t have a job, I burned through money, and I couldn’t make friends.

It was also a beautiful place to live. I found four-leaf clovers in your parks. I sat in the Prudential Center at four in the morning, eating Krispy Kremes as they came off the belt, hot and sweet and sticky with glaze. I meandered quietly through your cemeteries, looking at the epitaphs and the carved skull angels on red stone. I followed the red-marked path of the Freedom Trail, sometimes to learn and sometimes just because it was like following the Yellow Brick Road. I dressed like a pirate and got mistaken for Sam Adams. I sat in bars until (too-early) closing time, shrieking like a gleeful child through the 2004 MLB postseason, and sang Sweet Caroline with a brass band in Harvard Square.

I bundled up and walked through feet of snow to the Galleria. I peered at the lovers’ tomb in the MFA. I rode the Green Line just because sometime it’s fun to ride a trolley. I sat in South Station feeling the immensity of space; I cried on a bench in Harvard Square.

I wrote a novel, a novel about cities and home and wandering and places as characters in their own right. A story I would never have written without Boston.

And Boston is the place where I really began to learn to be myself. To be strong against odds, to love and forgive and forge ahead even when it feels like the world hates you. I would not be the person I am today without Boston.

Scary things happen. Painful things happen, and while they’re happening, you’re stuck between numbness and denial and tears. I’ve been there, in that place where you want to claw someone’s eyes out and ask them why, why my city? This is my city. Why are you cutting it open and making it bleed? It feels raw and makes your eyes burn. It makes you realize how much passes between you and the city every time you take a step, how interconnected your bloodstream is to the pavement, how permeable your skin is and how much of you is made of the air and water and dust and stone that surround you. You feel cellular, as if you are just a tiny thing that is part of this larger organism that is under attack.

And I thought I would only ever feel that for New York. This place was my home before I chose it. I didn’t expect that two years of being comforted by the skies over your city would make me feel like a small part of my heart was left there. From far away, I feel myself straining toward you in my mind, feeling my blood wanting to run northward.

Love you.

Mirrored from Antagonia.net.

So, I’ve decided that for the purposes of Nommable, I have to stop just writing gushing mentions of places I eat and start actually talking about them in detail. Last night, my mother and I decided to take a little trip for dinner. It was just too hot to eat in the barn, so we got in the car, pulled up some reviews on my mother’s trusty iPad, and ended up heading for a wood-fired pizza place about 30 minutes from the barn: Stanziato’s Wood Fired Pizza.  This was a last-minute selection because we started out by trying to visit a pub that was highly-recommended by locals, until we got there and discovered that Friday night is karaoke night.  And as much as I love karaoke, I don’t really equate karaoke with a nice dinner out.  At least not when they happen in the same venue.

When we got to the pizzeria, we were met with this sign:

So, okay, you know, I love this sign. But I also have to take it as a challenge, because this is kind of a big claim.

A bit of a digression:

What you might not know, unless you’ve had the misfortune of seeing one of my internet arguments about it is that I’m kind of a pizza snob. I grew up eating my mother’s pizza, which is like something out of a pizza fairy tale. I have been making pizzas since I was about six. For a brief period when I was seven, my mother had a catering business making pizzas for private parties. The first food review I ever wrote was of a new pizzeria down the block from the house where I grew up. I was impressed at eight years old because it was the first local pizzeria that actually offered a pizza bianca, and I grew up with an Italian mother for whom sauce was an option on pizza and not a forgone conclusion, and I’d never been to a restaurant that fell in line with that way of thinking before.

My standards for pizza perfection are Trattoria Dante in Florence, although I haven’t been there now since 2003, so I can’t speak to whether it’s as good as it used to be. But I have the fondest memories of a pizza they used to do with arugula, mascarpone and speck (no longer on the menu, though there’s a different arugula and speck one with scamorza) that I used to gorge myself on whenever I was in Florence. And I can summon the taste of it back any time I want, and it is glorious.

Back to last night. I saw this sign, and I was like, oh, pizza, oh, you and your wonderful audacity.

Then I walked in, and unfortunately, a lot of my photos came out kind of grainy because I was taking them on my mother’s phone.  I was honestly not intending to write about this place until I got there and saw that sign outside. Seriously! So I didn’t have a camera with me.  And then the sign happened, and I was all, GAME ON. but I walked in, and the first thing I see apart from the oven is totally two big blackboard menus, labeled:

RED and WHITE.

Separate menus. So this is a plus. Then I started reading the separate menus, and discovered a few things:

1) flour imported from Italy
2) pizzas made with mostly-local ingredients including bacon from a smokehouse down the road.

Awesome? I think so.

Anyway, we ordered a couple of beers and look at the menu, which has a whole bunch of other stuff on it besides pizza. We ended up with a Pork Slap Pale Ale, which I’ve had before and quite liked, especially for a beer in a can – It’s a good malty beer- and City Steam Naughty Nurse Pale Ale, which was not bad but not particularly memorable, either. They had two beers on tap, UFO Hefeweizen, which I’m not a fan of– I find all the UFO beers to be a bit too light and watery for my taste– and Shipyard IPA, which I like a lot, so we split a pint of that once we finished our bottle and can. They had a pretty decent bottle selection, too.

We ordered a beet salad that had feta, edamame, sunflower seeds, and shaved marinated fennel. It was a pretty darn awesome salad and very large for the small-sized portion. We really liked the fennel on it best of all; it was shaved very thin and was tender, not crunchy.

We got two pizzas to split. One was the “Piggy Piggy,” which was a pizza with local bacon, caramelized onions, and cherry tomatoes. The other was the “Summer Lovin’,” which had a nice olive pesto on it, red onions, and then all the other toppings were put on after it came out of the oven– goat cheese, oregano, and cherry tomatoes. The oregano was really fresh, good, spicy oregano and I loved it.

So…best pizza in the universe? Here’s my take:

The toppings were all really amazing, really fresh, and yummy. They clearly timed when they put which toppings on, rather than throwing everything on at once, which is a nice detail and one I appreciate, because it means the ingredients are being used in their best state. Especially with the tomatoes, because I prefer raw tomatoes to cooked on pretty much every occasion. The crust didn’t do it for me, though. I was impressed with their whole attention-to-flour thing, but the flour didn’t work for the kind of crust they were doing, which was a much more American-style crust with a poufy edge, although the middle was relatively thin. It did have just the right amount of char on the bottom, and the wood stove made it really nice and smokey, but the texture was off for the style of crust they were doing; it was too stiff  and chewy and didn’t have quite enough flavor. I do suspect though that the crust would be better with a red sauce on it, and my mom and I have already made plans to go back and try the meatball pie.

So, no, Dante is still my number 1, probably followed closely by Otto in New York. But this was some pretty good pizza and our salad was excellent and I will probably be going back there soon!

Mirrored from Nommable!.

sileri gave me this meme. Here's the deal:

You comment to my post asking for five words. I will give you five words that I think of when I think of you. You will post them to your blog and post what those words make you think of, in depth.

The words sileri gave me are as follows: crusader, honeycomb, natural, egg, mix

( my take on these words and how they apply to me below the cut )

Do you want to play? Let me know you want words, and I will give them to you!

sileri gave me this meme. Here's the deal:

You comment to my post asking for five words. I will give you five words that I think of when I think of you. You will post them to your blog and post what those words make you think of, in depth.

The words sileri gave me are as follows: crusader, honeycomb, natural, egg, mix

( my take on these words and how they apply to me below the cut )

Do you want to play? Let me know you want words, and I will give them to you!

I don’t remember if I was twelve or thirteen. I do know that it was sometime during Bar Mitzvah season, the spring of seventh grade or the autumn of eighth. I’m pretty sure it was after someone’s Bar or Bat Mitzvah, and I’m pretty sure that it happened at a synagogue, even though my memory tries to replace the space beyond archway where I waited that night with the backdrop of my high school. But I remember fairly well that I was underneath a brick archway, the kind at pickup spots, where you can wait in the rain for your ride to come.

And I remember what I was wearing.

It was a black satin sailor-style outfit– one piece, with a high neckline and long, knee-length culottes instead of a skirt, white piping on the collar. It was dressy, and conservative, and appropriate to wear to a Bar Mitzvah service. I also thought it was very grown up.

It was dark, and most of the guests had left. The parking lot lights glowed overhead, but it was well into evening and the sky was dim. There were just three of us there, waiting for our parents to come pick us up. I was standing against one side of the arch. The two boys, both boys from my grade at school, were standing against the other side, chatting. I went to a small school, so while I wasn’t friends with them and wouldn’t say I knew them particularly well, I knew who they were, what classes they were in, that sort of thing.

The funny thing is, all these years later, I cannot for the life of me remember who the second boy was. I don’t remember if he did anything or said anything. I know there was a second boy there, that’s all. The other one, I remember vividly.

I don’t know how it started, but they came over to my side of the arch, and I think they chatted with me a little bit. Harmless, casual chat. I don’t remember that either. I do remember that I was downright shocked by the question the boy asked me.

“Can I touch your breasts?” he asked, suddenly, out of the blue, out of nowhere.

I felt like I’d had the wind knocked out of me. “What?” I asked him, and I hunched my shoulders over to make my breasts look smaller. They were already extremely large; I was already self-conscious of them. “No,” I added, once I came to the full realization that he had really asked that.

He seemed undeterred. “Please?” he asked. “Why not?”

I remember being mostly incredulous that he asked that. I think I laughed. I asked him if he was joking, and told him no again, more firmly, and probably with whatever kind of strong language passed for a swear in my very stuffy preteen mind.

He told me that he just wanted to see what it felt like.

I told him no, repeatedly, and in no uncertain terms. I am pretty sure I told him that was gross.

And then he reached out, and grabbed my breast, and squeezed it, with all five of his fingers. And then dropped his hand, and described it to his friend, as if I wasn’t even there anymore, now that he’d gotten what he’d wanted. I remember him saying it didn’t feel any different from any other body part, and sort of squishy.

I remember my face going completely hot, and I remember being struck dumb. I’d told him no, over and over again, and he didn’t listen.

I was lucky, I guess, that we were in a public place, even if it was fairly empty, and that my parents were on their way to pick me up, and that all he wanted was to touch my breast, because if he’d asked for something else, he clearly didn’t seem interested in taking no for an answer.

I have never written out this story in detail. I have mentioned it in passing a few times. I did drop out of peer tutoring in high school when I was assigned to tutor him. I couldn’t bring myself to tell the advisor why I was dropping out. I just explained that I was too busy.

I was wearing knee-length culottes and a short-sleeved top with a high neckline. It was black, and dressy, and conservative. It was not low-cut, or high-cut, or tight, or fitted. Because men (and boys) don’t take our clothing as an invitation. They take our existence as an invitation. A man who wants to humiliate a woman, or touch a woman in a way she doesn’t want to be touched doesn’t think about a woman as being a person with feelings and wishes of her own to be respected. He doesn’t care what she is wearing.

This wasn’t the last time this happened to me, although it was certainly the most shocking. That outfit was only the first in a line of outfits that I have taken home, and crumpled up on the floor of my closet, and been unable to bring myself to wear again. Because even when I know the things I’ve said above, girls are taught that it’s either something they’re wearing, or something they’re doing. I know it’s not. But it’s still easier to blame it on the clothes, even when the clothes were knee-length, high-necked, black, dressy and conservative.

Mirrored from Antagonia.net.

This weekend, I spent some time sorting and packing up books that have been living at my parents’, so they can take the trek from Connecticut to my apartment that actually has space for books in Queens.

While doing this, I found a diary from 1984. Let’s just get this straight. In 1984, I was 6 years old.

There were only two pages in the entire diary filled out. I scanned them in so you could see.

Those are the only pages I filled in the entire book. Draw what conclusions you will.

Mirrored from Antagonia.net.

Rina posted a link to this article on Friday, and I have been thinking about it and about my own art experiences as they apply.

The article doesn’t really say anything new– in fact, it sounds an awful lot like the intro-to-drawing class that I took my sophomore year of college. But it made me think about it again.

I have a lot of friends who fall into the “I can’t draw!” category. I can even pinpoint about when it happened, age-wise, because it was sometime in middle school. I was always the kid who wanted to draw with my friends. But sometime around ten or eleven, that’s when the other kids didn’t want to draw, were embarrassed to show their drawings, especially if they felt the other artists in the group were the “better” ones.

When I was very young, around seven, I think, I wasn’t the best artist in the class. I was probably fair-to-middling. But I wanted to be a good artist. There were so many other things I wasn’t so good at but that I tried a couple of times and promptly ignored, because I didn’t see myself liking them enough to put a lot of effort into getting good. But I ached to be a good artist. And I started working at it, the only way a seven-year-old knows how, by copying images I saw elsewhere, until I understood how they were constructed. I copied comics and pictures from coloring books and picture books. I drew eyes and noses to look like the ones the little cartoon people in our CSMP workbooks. I copied the way my older neighbor drew hair, and then found my own way to draw hair, when I realized that you don’t have to draw every line of an object but that a basic shape will suffice.

And by middle school, I could draw. I was the kid who did the drawings on the front of various school publications and flyers and handbooks. I illustrated articles in the school newspaper. And I loved it. But the more I loved it, the more I excelled at it, the more the kids around me hated it. I remember in sixth or seventh grade, having an assignment where we had to draw our shoe in pencil, much like the illustration accompanying the article I linked to. I not only drew my shoe, but the shoes of two other girls in my class, because they simply couldn’t bear to do the assignment– not because the didn’t understand it, not because they didn’t know how, but because they were ashamed to have to hang up their own work. I don’t even think it was a question of a grade; we got graded in art based on participation, not quality of work. It was a question of having something nice to give to their parents.

Then I moved on to high school, and my art education ended abruptly. My high school had an art program, but due to state requirements and scheduling constraints, it was impossible to take both art and music. And I was in the band, and unwilling to drop band for the intro art class which mainly involved more craft-type projects than the kind of intensive art education I so craved.

I studied on my own, buying books of famous artwork and copying them, the secondhand version of setting up an easel in a museum to duplicate a masterwork. I copied illustrations in picture books, too, and frames of Disney movies and anime. I copied photographs.

But no one ever taught me how to draw from life, to look at a thing and render it on paper. I tried; God knows I tried, but no matter how many times people asked me to draw them, I did a much better job copying a photograph than I could ever do drawing them from life. My life-drawings looked distorted, features the wrong shape where I substituted in the semiotic language I knew for the shape I was not looking at as skillfully as I should have. I never got to take a drawing course; later, after I dropped band to continue in physics, I spoke to the art teacher about picking up art. I showed her my sketchbooks, filled to the gills with drawings that were quite good for someone with no formal education (and still look quite good to me in that context, even when I see them today), and she told me I would have to start n the intro art class, the one that was not all drawing. I was heartbroken– I was going to be a senior; I saw no point in taking that course. Maybe she thought I needed fundamentals, but I have a feeling that this was more a case of having a strict rule about prerequisites that was totally inflexible, even when a student was going to graduate without getting to take the class she desperately wanted to take.

I got to college, and couldn’t get into a drawing class my freshman year, so I started in basic drawing my sophmore year. It was one of the hardest, most challenging classes I had ever taken. At first, I hated my professor, didn’t understand the lessons he was trying to impart; thought he was teaching me the wrong things. All he wanted to do was teach us how to see things, not to do the things that I thought of as basics or fundamentals, like how to control a piece of charcoal. And he wouldn’t let me use the materials I was most comfortable with, like pencil. There was one girl, who had been taking art classes for years and years and years, whose assignments were always the ones he held up as the paragon of whatever lesson we were meant to have learned. I lamented to him, publicly, in front of the whole class, that I couldn’t draw what I was seeing because I didn’t know how to use the materials to get the effect I wanted to communicate. And that it was unfair to expect someone like me, with no training, to be able to use materials as adeptly as someone like her. I really thought the only difference was in how facile we each were with the materials.

And he spent an entire class teaching us how to hold our charcoal and how to erase and how to control it so that something was darker or lighter.

This teacher wouldn’t let me copy from a photograph, and wouldn’t let me use my imagination. One class, he set up this huge, towering sculpture of cardboard boxes, and challenged us all to “draw what you see.” I was still of the basic, naive belief that when someone says “draw what you see,” they mean “draw what you imagine when you look at this.” A Rorschach test, of sorts. I never in a million years imagined he meant it literally.

It was a hard year, in that class. At the end of the semester, I transferred into another class, claiming scheduling grief when in reality I thought that he simply didn’t understand what I was trying to get out of the class. I felt like a failure in his class, when there were so many students who literally had not drawn before they’d taken it who got better critiques than I did, no matter how hard I worked. So I switched.

And when I switched, something happened. I’m not sure what, exactly, but with my new teacher, I started to grasp the things my first teacher had been trying to teach me. I started to realize that he had been right.

Within a few weeks, my second teacher had to stop teaching due to the cancer that would eventually take her life. My teacher from my first class stepped in to teach this one. And suddenly, I understood everything he said. I could follow his instructions. And I could see the world the way he had been trying to teach me to see all along. I understood the importance of the tools he was trying to give me. And suddenly, when he would choose pieces to show to the entire class as examples of how the assignment was to be done properly, my work was included as often as the work of the students who had been taking formal art lessons for years and years.

It was one of the most eye-opening experiences of my life. Literally and figuratively. And though I may still never understand how to draw in perspective, or how foreshortening is supposed to work, or any of those basic things that are supposed to make a person a good artist, that was the year I learned how to see.

Mirrored from Antagonia.net.