1. My most recent Neflix DVD was the Royal Ballet’s production of Prince of the Pagodas – music by Benjamin Britten, choreography by Kenneth MacMillan, starring Darcy Bussell and Jonathan Cope (oh Jonathan Cope! where are my smelling salts?), with a character performance by the incomparable Anthony Dowell in a story that’s essentially Lear + Beauty and the Beast.

Talk about front-loading. And YET. That thing is a dang hot mess.  I fast-forwarded through about half of it, just to get to the DB, JC, AD parts. Don’t get me wrong: the music is lovely. Much of the choreography is interesting. The costumes are flattering, except when everyone turns into a monkey.

WHY DOES EVERYONE TURN INTO A MONKEY.

For a story that makes plenty of sense (Lear + Beauty and the Beast), it don’t make no kind of sense! There are Random Acts of Corps de Ballet. There’s a Dream Act in the middle where everyone wears a Ming the Merciless hat. I was not electrified.

Still, this is a lovely pas de deux:

Pagodas1 (She is blindfolded because if anyone sees him, he becomes a salamander. Really.)

The entire scene is here: Pagodas2

Right around 2:18 Jonathan Cope comes out as the salamander. There is some VERY interesting dancing in there.

A couple of years ago, when Anthony Dowell played one of the stepsisters in Cinderella, he made a comment that if Darcy Bussell had been playing the lead, he might have actually fit in the shoes because her feet are so big. I think all ballerinas look as if they have huge feet because of their pointe shoes, but I will say that she is one of the steadiest dancers I know of. There is nary a wobble to be seen. Whether she has big feet or no, she definitely has a solid base.

But, alas, two stars.

2. I went on a search last year for a fountain pen with a flexible nib. I learned a great deal about how much money people are willing to pay for pens that might not even work, and what a miser I really am. Oh right, I posted about this already.

ANYWAY, I ended up with my nice 1910 Mabie Todd Blackbird (much like the one here), which I love very much. Because I know very little about ink sacs, I thought it would be best to keep the same color in it all the time. I had been using J. Herbin’s Diabolo Menthe

Kicky, huh? It’s very pale, but I like it.

THEN Noodler’s had to come out with a “shaded” ink called Black Swan in Australian Roses:

NICE.

And I made the very happy discovery that a lever-filler can be cleaned out with some tepid filtered water, so now I am happily writing away in my goodgy semi-flex pen with a whole new color.

(I also ordered Noodler’s Squeteague, because it is a perfect greyish-blue. I like to order from Pear Tree Pen Company, because they are about the nicest people imaginable. They send their orders with hand-written notes that always tell you what ink color they used!)

This will be an occasional theme – I have a bunch of talented friends.

This is the painting that I have hanging in my office at work:

That really makes me with I were I better photographer, because it doesn’t do the painting anything like justice. It’s called Roses and Strawflowers, and there are a couple of people in the department who come by sometimes just to look at it.

I’m not sure why Mrs. Kortheuer and her husband took an interest in me when I was a teenager. They were impossibly cool and interesting. At the time when I felt nerdy and lame, and their affection made me feel that there was hope I’d grow into someone worth knowing.

She was a violinist before she was a painter, and for many years she taught Suzuki method violin to the tiny children of Charlotte, NC, until back troubles sent her back to her easel.

I used to love go do visit her. We would talk about absolutely everything, starting with art, moving to religion, to food, to fashion, and back again – one of those friendships that makes me lose my voice from talking so much.

She was full of hilarious/wise comments: “I’m mostly a Buddhist six days a week, and mostly an Episcopalian on Sundays” and “I took up going to church so my daughter would have something to rebel against as a teenager that wasn’t me.”

She would wander around her house and scoop up all the tea cups, pour the contents into a saucepan, heat it up, and take a sip. Her response was usually something like “Ooo, horrible! But interesting.”

She lived life wholly as herself, and she made beautiful paintings. Her voice remains in my head. It’s one of the things that shaped me as a young woman. I’m very happy to have a part of her in my daily life, still.

This is my ugly hipster cardigan:

Now you might say, “But Virginia, if you think it’s ugly, why keep it?

That’s a fair question. It really is quite hideous. I think I bought it at Urban Outfitters 11 years ago, which is approx. 10.5 years longer than the intended life span of Urban Outfitters clothing. It has a terrible, slouchy fit, like all hipster clothes.

But I love it. It reminds me of Mr. Rogers. And I always vastly preferred Mr. Rogers to anything else.

Now we shall talk of the Plague of Holes.

For example:

I have a bunch of small, round holes in just a few of my wool sweaters. These holes tend to line up when the sweater is folded. Because it is only a few sweaters, I suspect I have not had moths. But I do have a cat who likes to muddle around in the sweater drawer.

Another thing I like: mending! I love to feel thrifty, y’all. There is a book called Make Do and Mend, and I cannot BELIEVE that I do not already own it. In my mind, it is 1952 Britain, and you can’t get butter or  or silk stockings. (Too many crusty novels.)

However, just because I like mending doesn’t mean I’m good at it.

Having examined the hole,  I determined that the wool of my cardigan is something between lace weight and sock weight. I have a ggreat deal of tiny ends of lace weight. Also, because the cardigan is already ugly, I figured why not just make the mend obvious?

So to start:

You pick up the loose stitches on a needle. (Hey look, I learned how to use the macro function on my camera!)

Then you join the yarn and commence to knittin’, knitting the new yarn together with the old stitches at the edges:

And that’s it. You knit a row for every corresponding row in the hole, then knit together with the next complete row, stuff the ends to the wrong side, and weave them in. Voila! If you’re any good at it, you end up with a nice darn.

Not me:

Very lumpy! It’ll get better with wearing. But what the heck. It’s an ugly cardigan anyway.

I should get  a darning egg.

My poem “Laying Small Ghosts” is up at the Jabberwocky web site.