Here are some exciting things from my world lately:
- Pies! Recently I got a hold of a book of pie recipes - including a recipe for depression era pie crust (which reminds me of a time I was in England when I was very young and very broke and we made pancakes out of flour and water - only - and then used that same batter as paste for some mail art collages! Yummy!) Yesterday, while soaking up the super hot evening weather, after sitting outside all day, which was like sitting in the furnace with the heat on full blast, I went into the kitchen to make a caramel pie and a blueberry orange cream cheese pie. All was good except for grouchiness at having to turn the oven on when it was so sweltering - and having to stand next to the on oven, for the duration, sweating.
Beautiful pies, though, which I am looking forward to enjoying, possibly poolside at K & P's house in a little while.
- Colors! Last night I dreamt about the artist's supply store and I was very affectionate (in the dream only) with the manager of the artist's supply store - which speaks to me of my lusting for more time with paints and such. I'm reading "Color - A Natural History of the Palette" by Victoria Finley. Yippee. She is telling the story of how artists' paints got developed, telling the story of colors and how they came from rocks, roots, twigs and insects and were once carried around in pig's bladders by the masters. Here's an excerpt:
"Colormen first appeared in the mid-seventeenth century, preparing canvases, supplying pigments and making brushes. In France some of them were originally luxury goods grocers selling exotica like chocolate and vanilla alongside the cochineal, but most of them quickly turned to full-time art supplying."
- Opera! Here in Santa Fe it's opera season and it's an incredible treat to sit at night in the open amphitheater with a soft summer breeze, a slice of golden moon and hello - Madame Butterfly, with it's music by Puccini that turns people like me into the super sappy, weepy cliche version of the opera watcher (before this opera I didn't know this was possible) - just so much beauty it overwhelms. I have to admit though that I was hoping, hoping by the end of it that she would kill herself because it's the only way a story like this can go, it's the only way. Hello, Madame Butterfly, love addiction at this order of magnitude can only end in death! It must end in death! And this is the beauty of fiction and of opera, the beauty of story that turns the human drama into something larger than life, like something wrought with a painter's palette knife, something so incredibly vividly hued it would burn through our corneas if it was real and not made up. Thank heavens for the unreal, it sure does satiate something, something deep down in there that wants to burn itself up but knows this is not sensible, we must wake up tomorrow and live another "real" day, a succession of all too real days.
Ooops, gotta go eat some pie. I'm late.
