Attention Noodle. You needn’t eat only spinach salads, or even spinach from a can like Popeye does, no, not at all, though that said, you are ahead of me in the race to drop fat.
Speaking of eating, I just finished T.C. Boyle’s The Tortilla Curtain, a 1995 tale (reviewed here and elsewhere) about the plight of Mexican illegals living in the bottom of a California canyon. Known as “beaners,” they were, and likely still are, given to dumpster diving in order to survive.
Diets, I guess, are reserved for the overly-fed. Combined with personal trainers, gym memberships, expensive DVD’s for working out, soy-based shakes and such, the fat tab is considerable. Getting thin, unless you are an illegal, is costly. Eggs are cheap and I hard boil mine, peel and pop them into my pie hole which no longer gets pie. Not even a taste of pie. I’m sick of eggs!
Enough bitching. It’s been a terrible “spring” and my northeast facing living room windows have continued leaking problems, despite the efforts of crews of head-scratching workmen sent in to find the cause of why, after many years, I still have water sitting on the sills of my interior windows. Living high in the sky behind expanses of glass, opens one up to all kinds of leaks. It’s a condo/hi-rise thing. Ask anyone who lives in one. It’s Easter as I write this and the M’waukee forecast has nothing but continued rain. Enough already. An Ark builder I’m not.
I made the rounds of the spring Gallery Night & Day, sticking to the Marshall Building mostly, where artists were running around distributing promotional materials. The event was pounded with rain and the pot holes in the Third Ward drank them up like crazy. Floor three of that building seems to be moving toward liberal causes, what with the new offices of the ACLU, a new venue devoted to stuff silk screened with liberal statements, and the fairly new (at least in their current space) Luckystar digs which frequently features art of the left-leaning kind. The liberal Shepherd Express offices are in the building too, along with valiant Valerie Christell’s great little Merge Gallery on floor two. Don’t go in there looking for pretty pastels. Merge is all about content of the thoughtful kind. Way up on floor five, plastered on the hallway walls, photographer Kevin Miyazaki installed images of folks protesting in Madison.
By the time you read this, if you read this, I’ll be in Kansas City visiting my sister, an activist of no small import in the city where folks wear cowboy shirts and cowboy boots to the opera. My two brothers also live there, both activists born of the Civil Rights era in an Iowa town where blonde hair and blue eyes reigned supreme. Righteous dudes, those two. They’re old now (though I am the oldest), but they stick to their guns and will no doubt die with their boots on which reminds me that on her final visit to an L.A. hospital, where she died, Elizabeth Taylor was photographed being wheeled in wearing cowboy boots. In the long ago, in my Brookfield suburban days, I hauled a small pair of green cowboy boots (made during a visit to Mexico), home to my four-year-old son who refused to wear them. “Nobody wears green boots,” he sobbed. Those boots were made for walking, but he never walked in them.
Check back with me while I’m in Kansas City. I haven’t yet decided if I want to blog while on vacation….
