Ugly

When I was born, my mother thought I was ugly.  Loud, red and guilty of a most painful arrival – I deny nothing.  Mother did see Elizabeth Taylor potential in my black hair and violet eyes, but I quickly broke that promise.  My hair eventually lightened to brunette and my eyes turned to hazel, with yellow prowling throughout the iris, like a cat’s (which I came to prefer, but that is another story).

Nurses cooed over me, but mother did not understand the attention paid to the 9 pounds of noise lying next to her.  She thought I was ugly.

It was the last time she would think that of me, this first meeting that took place over 50 years ago.

Since then, my mother’s pride in her daughter remained steadfast, even throughout decades when belief in my own self-worth differed and diverged in sometimes violent outbursts.  It was an incomprehensible devotion – unblinking and unceasing – and though there were times when I claimed I didn’t believe it, oh, how I depended on it.

I depend on my mother.  Without her humor, the delicate madness of her divine comedy, I would be sad.  Without her joy in my accomplishments, I would be unskilled.  Without our nightly phone calls, I would be silenced.  If I couldn’t see my reflection in her loving eyes, I would be ugly.

My mother defines me.

I have so little to give in return, except for my steadfast pride and unblinking and unceasing devotion – too rarely expressed.  But today, I will do so.  I love you mother – Happy Mother’s Day.

Searching Together

The New Girls

I saw them on the beach.  They were a winsome quartet:  slim and elegant, standing in the rushing foam that nuzzled their feet like playful, cream-colored kittens.

They were a clique-ish group, and kept to themselves – shy intruders to a seagull governed shore.  They made no noise, keeping their thoughts private – tiny, feminine observations that were kept secure and hidden.

Recurvirostra Americana: The American Avocet.  In summer they are black and white, with russet heads and necks.  But in winter the colors make a gradual, liquid change until they are completely black and white and ready to migrate across the country to the southern Atlantic Seaboard.

With their tall, model’s legs they are easily identified as members of the stilt family.  Grayish-blue and looking alarmingly breakable, they hold compact feathered bodies high above the salty shallows.  The feathers are knit into a tight tapestry of pattern and color, although I did see tiny plumes curl like ferns in the light breeze.

Their beaks are curved – hence the Recurvirostra – and have the width of a single, shapely pen-stroke.  Their eyes are black and secretive, holding memories of silent scrutinies of maritime lights and horizons.  Thoughts of sparkling fishes, of scents of blue and green and salt reside inside their shadows.

Their diminutive prints traveled up and down the shore connecting and creating salty runes and symbols.  But soon there was nothing left of them, no thought, no testimonial, except for the scattered crosses pressed into the wet sand that shimmered with quartz and the bending, endless sea.

Beauty And Scandal

She stands, elongated and slender, before a sky that combines a soft storm with a lurid light. Leaning forward gently, she resembles a glistening tree that bends in a mild and fragile breeze.  Everything about her is lengthy:  limbs that ripple under lace and silk, a neck that extends from sloping shoulders in a white, dizzying curve, powdered hair that is curled and piled – swept away from a sad, thoughtful forehead.

One arm is extended to grasp a length of taffeta – gold and melting – the other arm is bent, pressing the fabric to a pale, chaste breast.  Gilded rosettes bloom and descend down the edges of her overskirt, they huddle in an embroidered bower at her elbows.  Her shoes are tiny and painful, their dainty heels made for the refined tapping on polished, elegant floors:  the elegant language of comings and goings.

Thomas Gainsborough painted this portrait in 1778, when his subject was 20 years old.  A portrait with a dark and thunderous background circulating around a still, luminous center, it is a portrayal of a quiet beauty wrapped in arsenic-colored skin and metallic cloth.

She has all the outward modesty and grace of a girl who has spent her childhood in a convent. Serene and aristocratic, she seems to be made for quietude.  Snowy skin, discreet roses strewn across her cheekbones, dark and poignant brows that overshadow languorous eyes…she is Mrs. Grace Elliott Dalrymple.

Nicknamed ‘Dally The Tall’ with typical 18^th century familiarity – the equivalent to a boisterous slap on the rump – she was one of the most renown courtesans of late 18^th century London.  Dally ruled with her fellow ‘impures’ over a city teeming with disease and debauchery.  The demimonde of England’s greatest city was a nest of snakes – horrible and beautiful – and they rose above the writhing half-world like indulgent, immoral goddesses.

Four years before this portrait was painted Dally was a young adulteress, running away from a marriage she entered into as a pale, 13 year-old bride.  Four years after this portrait was painted Dally was the mistress of the lush and improvident Prince of Wales (later George IV).  The daughter she bore soon after the beginning of this affair could have been fathered by any one of an assortment of men who were her ‘benefactors’ at the time.   The child was baptized Georgina Frederica Augusta Elliott Daughter of His Royal Highness George Prince of Wales & Grace Elliott – but whether out of audacity or accuracy no one ever knew.

Her adventures took her to Paris a few years before the storming of the Bastille; and no patrician loveliness could save her from a population that was threatened and therefore dangerous.  British, a known royalist, former lover of the Duke of Orleans (the Prince had introduced her to him), she was imprisoned in late 1793, shortly after the Reign of Terror had begun.  When she was released in October of 1794, Robespierre was dead , many of her noble friends were dead…but Dally was alive and free.

As with all women of beauty and scandal, rumors surrounded them like clouds of powder and blush, creating graceful, perfumed enigmas.  Rumor, for instance, had it that Dally was the mistress of Napoleon Bonaparte:  two warriors in their own chosen fields.  But what is surely known is that Grace Elliott Dalrymple, aka ‘Dally The Tall’, died in 1823.  She was sixty-five years old.

Gainsborough had no idea of the tumultuous life Dally still had before her once she stepped out his studio.   But perhaps through his earthy, intuitive genius he sensed her stormy future when he decided to paint her, a floating light, before a distant – yet impending – tempest.

Lunch Meet At Ballona Creek

My company moved to its new work space almost a year and a half ago.  One of the first things I noticed about our building was that it was mustard colored:  a bright, condiment yellow.  By itself that was prodigious.  But another thing that was notable was that it were located by a creek.  It was girdled by concrete, true, but it was a creek regardless.  A sign close by even confirmed the fact:  Ballona Creek.

I walk by it every working day.  In the autumn and winter the rain makes it thrilling and torrential.  In spring it relaxes into a mild, green current.  In summer, well, sediment is pretty too.

One day, months and months ago, I was walking to work and approaching the bridge that spans over the creek.  I look into the creek always, an innocent tryst born of curiosity and hope.  But this time I noticed that someone else was doing the same thing.  And something must have grabbed his attention, because he had paused:  he was watching something.

Now, I don’t know why I spoke to him:  perhaps it was, as I recall, a Friday – and on that special day I was more likely to approach a fellow-creature in a rare fit of celebration and friendliness. Anyway, I asked what was of such gripping interest, and he pointed towards the creek.   There were four female mallard ducks waddling in the shallows towards – as far as I could make out – the San Diego Freeway.

We happily watched their progress for some time before I had to continue my walk to work.   I spent the rest of the day in happy speculation:  what were they doing there?  How did they get there?  What were their plans for the day?  Were they on a lady-ducks’ day out?  Perhaps on their way to meeting some friends for lunch on the banks of Ballona Creek – or further on, where it empties into the Santa Monica Bay?

Whatever their plans were, it must have pleased them, because even now I swear that I heard them softly, contentedly, quacking to each other.

A Rebel In An Ugly World

I bought her because I thought she was pretty.  I liked her solemn eyebrows, the shade of dark intelligence.  I liked the pensive tilt of her head, the eyes that strayed beyond the postcard’s borders that held her melancholy image captive for over 100 years.  She dressed like a society artist:  feminine, excessive, slightly off-kilter.  She tied the bow of her hat to the side of her face.  Her jacket was a mad pattern of lace and buttons.  Finally – possibly best of all – she had placed her hands, one covering the other, atop a wooden cane.  This was no passive woman – this was a lady so overcome by insight that she had to pause:  to take the time to scrutinize her marvelous thoughts.

But I had much more to learn about her.  She was Elsie de Wolfe: an actress, and a most inventive society hostess, delighting the polite elite in New York, Paris and London.  She was also a famed decorator, literally creating the occupation of Interior Designer. Never before had it achieved the stature of a profession: and it was commandeered by a woman.

Since she was a young girl, Elsie was repelled by the muddy colors and dusty rooms of her Victorian childhood.  The heavy shroud-like curtains, the tables obscured by photographs and scattered memorabilia:  her sensibilities cringed at such late-century relics. Her sensibilities were light and feminine, and she yearned for surroundings that were nimble and Baroque:  expressing the brightness of a new world.  Even then she described herself as ‘a rebel in an ugly world’.

As a designer, Elsie was inspired by the 18^th century, creating rooms that were elegant and luminous. She painted the walls with pastels, replaced suffocating carpets with tile, painful, wooden chairs with gentle upholstery.  Her languid rooms had delicate writing tables, gilded mirrors, chintz curtains, exotic rugs:  the sentimental trinkets of the Louis XVI style.  Her rococo chic appealed to clients with names like Vanderbilt, Morgan, Frick and Windsor.

Elsie’s rooms encouraged confidences.  They were made to echo sound – the clicking of heels, clouds of laughter, the rapturous tangle of jewelry – not to muffle it.  These were playful, intimate rooms, made for small groups of people:  arrangements that introduced society to the cocktail party.  Some say that Elsie invented that most feminine of cocktails, The Pink Lady.

She made the news when she married Sir Charles Mendl in 1926.  Soon after, French diplomatic society got an idea of whom they had just acquired when Elsie attended a masquerade ball dressed as a dancer from the Moulin Rouge:  entering the room turning handsprings.  A fellow guest felt compelled to inquire, “do you think it is in perfect taste for the wife of a diplomat to perform acrobatics in a ballroom?”

Her marriage raised eyebrows even before this topsy-turvy entrance.  Since 1892 – when she was 27 – Else had been in what had then been called a ‘Boston Marriage’ with Elizabeth Marbury, a successful literary agent and business representative for talents such as Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Sarah Bernhardt and Edmund Rostand.  This type of marriage was usually between two women living together for financial reasons.  But in this case, a sexual motive was assumed as well.  Society referred to them as ‘the Bachelors’.

Elsie de Wolfe, Lady Mendl, made history in her weightless, elegant world.  She took interior decoration away from the upholsterer and gave it to the artist.  She appeared in newspapers and magazines.  Cole Porter was suitably impressed by her:

“When you hear that Lady Mendl, standing up/Now turns a handspring landing up/On her toes/Anything goes!

And when she was young, she appeared on a postcard, whimsical, contemplative and dedicated only to beauty.

Sparrows

The bushes were chattering:  their branches twisting with hidden life.  Their jumping leaves were bright with gossip and the blossoms were shattered by the strident conversaziones.  The petals rested like detached words on the sidewalk.

The impenetrable languages spiraled and sparred, coiling around the branches like a violent filigree of noise.  The bowers of a fledgling Spring shook with an angry din.

But suddenly the tumult was silenced, and the confusion unwound into a shock of quiet.  There quickly followed a soft explosion of feathers – an outpouring of flight in a paroxysm of calm.

They fell onto the grass like a brown, flying carpet.  They put aside their disagreements and fluttering discords.  And they ate in peace.

Starry

Like children, they shoot and fall

Tumbling across the sky

A celestial playground

They slip across the icy dark

The freezing velvet

Wrapping them in a bitter grasp

Like pins of light, with silver thread

They pierce nighttime’s skin

And make it hum with myth and life

They stir inside the arching bowl

Pouring like bright honey

Into a hive of galaxies

Like youthful broods they gather close

To their moonlit mother

A family of constellations

They glitter in twilight’s window

Celestial gems

That hang beyond our outstretched fingers

‘The Ugliest Girl In Paris’

Emilie Marie Bouchaud was born in Algeria, in 1874.  She spent her childhood in a harsh landscape, with colors blasted into sepia by a sun so hot it seemed to kiss the mountains with a fiery, merciless passion.

Her father died when she was five.  Of her eleven siblings, only one still lived by the time she was sixteen.  When she was seventeen, she had run away to France. She sang in cafes and cabarets, her smoky voice wafting above the demimonde that assembled there to in their lavender languor.

Within the year she was singing and dancing in music halls.  She named herself after the Pole Star – the brightest star in the sky:  Polaire.

During a time when women were as indolent as flowers, when pink and porcelain coursed through their skin in delicate confusion, Porlaire was viewed with both horror and desire.  A lithe, dark animal, she was a feral object who twisted and coiled like a cat trying to escape.

Her short, thick hair was wavy and expansive; it was parted on the side so that one undulating curl draped across an almond-shaped eye, steeped in shadow, caught in a perpetual eclipse.  The mouth was wide and spoke of a curved invitation, even when silent.  Everything about her face was bold and seductive, alarming those who could not accept a woman who felt no shame.

She was proud of her sweaty barbarism – the scandal of her magnificent allure.  When she debuted in New York, she was billed as ‘the ugliest woman in the world’.

Polaire danced like an untamed sprite, a thunderstorm descending from the sky and unleashed upon the stage.  Her spitfire body was fluent and sinuous, and when she pulled her skirts to her knees, balancing on unstill muscles, she moved with an unhinged grace.   She sang ‘Ta-ra-ra- Boom-de-ay (“Just the kind you’d like to hold/Just the kind for sport I’m told”).  Toulouse-Lautrec sketched and painted her inelegance, her cropped hair, her wide mouth and shrouded eyes.

People came to watch her dance and act.  They came to listen to her sing.  But they also came to stare – at her tiny, tortured waist, punished inside of a ring of whalebone that rumor claimed was as small as 16 inches.  Though petite – she was 5 foot three inches and naturally slim – women “gasped sympathetically” at the sight of the ribcage crushed like folding hands, and men swooned at its minute perfection.  Her agent, displayed one of her 14 inch corsets in a theater where she was performing, describing her waist as “this gift of the gods.”

This was a superficial time that embraced beauty and triviality.  Women at the opera stood on their chairs and balanced their lorgnettes on judgmental noses for a close look at the current mistresses.  They crowded bridal paths to view courtesans drive their carriages paid for with the wages of sin.  They made Polaire the star she always wanted to be – because they wanted to stare at the forests of furs wrapped around her shoulders, the jewels wrapped around her arms and neck.  They came to regale in the foreign magnetism that burned within her shocking silhouette.

Someone in that admiring, desiring audience had written a song for her, which began:

“When I started in a music-hall, my waist fitted in a man’s collar” (“Quand j’députais au music-hall,/Ma taille tenait dans un faux-col.”).

Many gentlemen found this a charming image, and sent her their collars, to see if she would fulfill it.

Polaire died at the age of sixty-five in 1939 – a time when such gallantries would have been laughed at.  It was said that she suffered from depression – the spider that crushes mind and body within its shadowy web.  But for a few delirious decades, she was the brightest star in the sky, guiding Paris’ ships in the night, their bright faces staring up at her like lanterns held aloft.

Liebchen! Liebster!

La Dauphine, from her land beyond the rainbow, has been good enough to nominate me for the Liebster Blog Award, and it is too blush-making.   Anyway, this was completely adorable of her, and of course I accept.   I am greedy for renown.

As is the case of such awards, when one stops giggling with childish delight one must next take note of Certain Rules.

• Give thanks
• Tell 11 things about yourself – subheadings,  charts, etc. are not necessary.  If  you like bunnies, for Christ’s sake just say so.
• Answer to the best of your ability the 11  questions that are asked of you.
• Nominate 11 bloggers for this award – let them know too, please – keeping it to yourself would be mean.
• Ask the above nominees 11 questions of your   own, or use the questions you were asked.

Let’s get this party started.

11 Things About Me:

1. I have a towering, stupendous fear of  insects.  When I was a child, this   was not so, but as I grew older and came to experience the Cricket-In-The-Bathtub   and the Cockroach-In-The-Kitchen, things rapidly deteriorated.
2. I have hazel eyes with a spark of yellow in  them – this pleases me, as I believe they resemble a cat’s eyes.
3. I am a victim of jewelry.  There is nothing I can do about this, and      frankly, there is a type of comfort in coming face to face with your weaknesses.  Embrace them.  Run with them.  Buy some earrings.
4. I make outstanding spiced pecans.  Aubrey does not like to boast, but  really, they are truly full of delicious flavor.
5. I detest cynicism.  It’s a bubbling pot pie of pretension, with insincerity as its meat, and having lived in Los Angeles all my life      I’ve had my fill of this bilious recipe.
6. I don’t drive.  I’m not only a bad driver, but I am a  frightened driver.  Sometimes fear makes one careful, but this didn’t stop me from confusing the accelerator with the brake pedals and shooting into Hollywood Blvd. without looking.  It bears  repeating:  I am a bad driver.
7. My God, I love cheese.

8. I own a bustle skirt.
9. Boyfriend is trying to teach me to surf.  So far, he’s been able to get me to lay  flat on the board, and when a suitable wave is pending, he gives me a push – and I ride to shore, clutching 8 feet of fiberglass.
10. Every Christmas, I read A Child’s Christmas In Wales, I watch the beautiful televised version, and I also listen to Dylan Thomas recite this gentle story.   The words are as rich, whimsical and evocative as the holiday itself.
11. I live about ½ mile from the La Brea Tar Pits – one of the richest fossil sources in the country.  In 2009, the bones of a saber-toothed cat, of dire wolves – as well as the nearly intact skeleton of a mammoth – were discovered in this area.  The fact that 10,000 years ago these creatures were biting and trumpeting exactly where I am typing this is a fact that I cannot wrap my poor head around.

The questions I have been asked are as follows:

If you were a vending machine snack, which would you be?  The one with the most garish wrapping.

What’s your favorite thing about blogging?  The marvelous creativity and freedom of it all.  It’s your own room, and you can play there even after bedtime.

What’s your least favorite thing about blogging?  Extremely time-consuming!

Use at least 5 words to describe your personality.  Sarcastic, Sardonic, Satiric, Self-conscious, Self-deprecating

What are the 10 places in the world you have to see before you die?  These are a combination of places I’d like to see, and places I’d like to see again:

1.  The Tower of London (graffiti in the Beauchamp Tower!)

2.  Brighton Pavilion.  They have dragons.  If they aren’t living now, I’m convinced that they once were.

3.  Bath (When I was there before I did not ‘take’ the waters.  This should be rectified.)

4.  Visit my friend Jan in Breconshire (Wales)

5.  Ireland – itinerary to be decided upon later

6.  Scotland – itinerary to be decided upon later

7.  Devon (PONIES!)

8.  The Artisan Hotel in Las Vegas

9.  The Mauritshaus (Vermeer’s Girl With A Pearl Earring is making a very limited tour of the states and is quite significantly skipping Los Angeles.  Apparently my only chance of seeing it would be to visit it in the comfort of its actual home)

10. The Pacific ocean, some 2 hours off the coast of Ventura, between November and March, on a boat, watching the gray whales

Are you a cat person or a dog person?  A cat person.  People even say that I look like I’m a cat person.

Do you think your perception of yourself is the same as how others see you?  A thousand times no.

What’s your earliest memory? How old were you?  Filling my toy baby carriage with dirt and watching what would crawl out.  Whatever did became my family.  I might have been eight.  I was certainly odd…so perhaps I was seven.

Do you feel like your astrological sign describes you fairly accurately?  I am a Gemini, a sign given to creativity and a certain stupidity when it comes to numbers, equations…any one of the more sensible sensibilities.  Geminis – two-faced and confusing – are erratic emotionally, as well.  So yes, quite accurately.

If you could travel to any time and place in history, when and where would you go?  There are too many times and places.  I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I would have liked to be in the crowds, listening to Elizabeth I’s speech at Tilbury.  Just let me hear her say:  “Let tyrants fear!”  and I will be content.   Also, could I please visit the Café Royal, in its 1890’s heyday?  Only to see Oscar, Max, and dear, tubercular Aubrey, and to listen to their languid, dandified chatter.

Desert Island: one book, one meal, one beverage, one album. Which are they?  The book:  possibly Collected Poems by Dylan Thomas – some earthy and dense words to take me out the horrible heat and dryness.  One meal:  Pizza.  Nothing else needs to be said.  One beverage:  diet 7-up; an ideal refresher when wrapping up a New York-crusted, cheese-laden meal.  One album:  God said to Abraham…Highway 61 Revisited.  And it must be the album, so I can be sure I can re-read those mad and delightful liner notes.

The following are my 11 choices – if you choose not to accept the nomination, please take this attention and intention in good humor, and know that I enjoy your blogs excessively.  Now, ‘leibster’ means ‘dear’, or ‘cute’ or ‘young’ – the award refers to up-and-coming bloggers with two or three hundred followers.  If you have more than that, well, I still think you’re cute:

By Word of Beth

Marilyn Kay Dennis

The Rag Tree

In The Barberry

Team Gloria

The Girl In The Hat

FifePsychoGeography

Madame De Pique

The Haunted Shoreline

This Writing Life

Bookish Nature

And now my questions for you:

1        Why did you start blogging?

2        Do you find that you usually prefer the book or movie version?

3        Are you wearing jewelry now?  Bonus points if a parure is involved.

4        Name five places you would never want to visit again.

5        Ocean or lake?

6        What is the first book you couldn’t live without?

7        Are you one of those bloggers that believe that people resemble their icons?  Do you, for instance, think that I am wearing a periwig and holding a star?

8        If you were alive in 1902 would you be tempted to ride in one of those new car-things or would you prefer to continue driving your four-in-hand?

9        Which actor has provided you with your favorite rendition of Sherlock Holmes?

10    You’re getting dressed for work.  You open your closet and find your clothes are not from this decade.  Are you happy about this?  What decade do you hope is represented?

11    Have you ever mixed a cocktail – for either yourself or others?  And if you have, can you mix a tall Bloody Mary – now?  All this writing and thinking has made Aubrey thirsty.

No One Knows

At first it looked like a torn shadow, tiny and lost as it trembled above the ocean.  It might have been the smallest corner of a map, carrying an insufficient knowledge of latitudes and continents – the squandered seed of the compass rose.   It struggled with the invisible complexities of the air currents, changing height and direction with dizzying fear and confusion.

That day, rays of sunlight intersected the gray air like a cat’s cradle.  Whenever the dainty wings crossed the strings of light they gleamed with bronze and auburn.  They shone like cathedral glass, the towering panes that once transformed the sun’s luminescence into color and religion.

But there was an imperfection in the flickering wraith.  The wings were ragged, like exhausted flags – they beat against the wind with a heart’s weakened pulse.

It was odd that such a creature would be seen at such a place – Southern California – and at such a time, early February.  This was a Monarch Butterfly on its migration – the grandchild of the butterfly that began this journey.  No Monarch born knows where it will travel, how, or when.  There is no one to follow…only the DNA passed from one to the next, the chemical spark that propels each one on its flight.

On the west coast, the monarch butterfly winters in Monterey and Pacific Grove (where it is a misdemeanor to kill or threaten a butterfly, punishable by a $1,000 fine).  They keep warm in forests and sanctuaries, their vibrant flocks blotting out the sky, startling the air into prisms the color of sunset.  They stay there until spring, when they begin their 2,000 mile flight into Canada.  By summer, these wintering populations will all be dead.  It will be up to their descendants to continue to their balmy destination, powered only by instinct – the element too subtle and distant to be measured on any table.

Some say that they are guided by the sun, reading its position and angle as if the sky was a compass riding an arc that gathered information from the horizon to the final curve of twilight.  There are theories that solar winds, swirling in heated gasps across vast magnetic fields, energize the butterfly’s direction, and pulls it on to its mysterious course.  Perhaps circadian rhythms – the cadences that hum behind the return of tides, of seasons, of sunlight – provide an invisible admonishment.  Then there are others that say that they follow the evergreen scent of the distant groves – the verdant fragrance of amber and resin that lurks amidst the alluring trees.

But no one knows for sure.

This particular butterfly had begun its northward voyage early, urged on only by the blood of its predecessors.  It was alone, damaged and doomed.  Two generations would pass before this migration would end.  But it had begun here, before spring had unleashed the exodus, with an impatient traveler listening to the whisper of its reflexes, above the darkened sea.