FINALLY!
The piece of paper upon which all our pieces of paper is based!
And it totally belongs here in Boston, at the Museum of Fine Arts, in a marvelous exhibit which says it all, “Magna Carta: Cornerstone of Liberty,” which is on the 18th Century floor of the Wing of the Art of the Americas.
And plus, it’s called Magnuh Caaaaahdah, right?
The gi-normity of this single piece of paper cannot be over-estimated
(All images courtesy of Wan Chi Lau)
It was all love and happiness, that first Thanksgiving, what with the Pilgrims and the Indians all playing nice, and the table groaning under the weight of all those pumpkin pies and turkey. Riiiight.
Below is a more accurate depiction. Sort of.
I am a Bostonian.
I was born in Boston, my sister was born in Boston, my parents were born in Boston. They met in Boston, they married in Boston, and they lived in Boston for the first 10 years of their marriage (then they moved next door to Quincy).
My father’s father was a Boston policeman until the strike in 1919, and then he became a Boston postman.
My father and his brother were both members of the Boston Fire Department. My father was the firefighter shot during the 1967 Welfare Riot. My uncle was a district chief of the Department for many years.
My mother’s parents individually came down from the Maritime Provinces of Canada to Boston to look for work in the 1910′s, and found both work and each other, and then raised nine children (Alice, Nan, Tina, Lorraine, Kitty, TeeCee, Sonny, Frank, and Ned) in Boston.
I went to London. Not exactly recently, but I went.
I went where I wanted, did what I wanted, ate what I wanted. It was awesome.
There are those who think I made the whole thing up, but I didn’t. It would’ve been a lot of work to do if hadn’t actually gone.
Click the map for the travelogue. You should probably get yourself a glass of whiskey before, though, I did a lot of stuff…
I’m going to here, and here, and oh, here!
We walked up to the Roslindale Farmer’s Market this morning.
We have now walked back home. You can do that when you live in the city.
Below are all of the things we bought.
I can’t say any more because I am eating, right now, all of the things we bought.
After the images are links to all the people from whom we bought all of the things we are eating right now. (more…)
My year has been a good one: we are happy and healthy, our financial situation is stable, and there have been no huge/negative upheavals in anyone’s life. We are all good.
I leave this year with a comment recently made by my almost 82-year-old mother.
Eighty-two is a long time to be alive. She was born before the Great Depression to a family that eventually had eight children and no bathtub, she went to work at the age of 16 and didn’t stop until she was 67, she lost a husband to death and a child to drugs and mental instability, but she had this to say:
“Why shouldn’t we people who are comfortable try to make the lives of others a little more comfortable, too?”
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston has a present for you.
We didn’t tie a bow around it, but we did put it in a box.
For you, for me, for everyone.
It’s a very nice box, though.
And the present is its newly opened Art of the Americas wing.
And what’s in it is fabulous!
Five thousand pieces of art on four floors, all from, uh, us. Just the Americas, old and new, South and North, big and small, in fifty-three galleries that make so much sense your brain says to you “Of course! This was always meant to be with that.”
If you were a woman of certain means (meaning, a lot of means) and had some fancy-do-dah where to go—your husband’s night club, say, or the Academy Awards to pick up yours—you would need a fancy-do-dah frock to announce your right to be there.
Say, you don't make anything that goes with flip-flops, do you?
And if you were amongst the ladies of stratospheric means, you would want Arnold Scaasi to come up with it.
This old thing? Really darling, you're too too much of a flatterer...
Richard Avedon, the photographer who “invented” modern fashion photography, had a career spanning sixty years, and the MFA is hosting one stupendously fashionable retrospective of his work.
No, it’s not a piece of paper stuck over her head, it’s FASHION.
Put your best dress on, Martha, because you are going to want to go.
Wait, I’m almost ready!
Dorian Leigh, hat by Paulette, Paris studio, August 1949
Photograph Richard Avedon
© The Richard Avedon Foundation
My father taught me so many things, among them:
When he died, I burst into tears, I was so relieved.
