Warming to camping

       

Camping has come a long way. Every year about this time I go to the Lake Michigan Camp near Pentwater. Along with friends Sue Willison and Mary Kay Williams, I rent a platform tent that comes with six cots. It's got a power pole within extension cord distance so we cook on an electric skillet, heat water in an electric tea kettle, have a lamp on the table and a fan if it gets hot.
          But this year, for the first time since I started going to the camp 10 years ago, it was cold and rainy. Instead of going over the dune to the beach we stayed inside and played Jokers and Pegs. But even with our sweatshirts and hoods we were still cold. Then we discovered the extra heat generated by the crockpot that was cooking our dinner. We put the pot at our feet under the table, stretched that beach blanket over the knees of the three tentmates, and stayed toasty warm while we played.
         Wonder what our pioneer ancestors would say?

Shoe fetish

        

         Remember pet rocks? Well I have a pet shoe.
         In some ways she's like an abandoned kitten that I rescued from the animal shelter. With her stately red heel, satiny pleats and tiny black bow, you know she has an exotic past. I imagine she was originally purchased for a wedding or prom or to complete a very special outfit.
        But I didn't get the shoe as an addition to my wardrobe. I was looking for a red shoe with pizazz to use as a model for the cover of my second mystery, One Shoe Off.  I found this beauty at a used clothing store in Hudsonville. In the meantime, however, my graphic designer, Ryan Wallace, had already created a hauntingly iconic open-toed shoe for the cover design.
       But my classy shoe didn't get her bow in a snit. She's a team player. She holds bookmarks at book signings and always steals the show.  Everyone asks where she came from.
        There's something intriguing about a solo shoe. In  One Shoe Off, newspaper editor Zelda Machinko disappears leaving only a shoe behind. The abandoned shoe pops up thirty years later and reopens the investigation into the Zelda's disappearance.
       Zelda's spirit has been extra restless this summer. My pet shoe  has been popping up all over, from beaches to mountains, graduations to barnyards. And now I hear she's headed to Russia to track down who's responsible for all those reports of election tampering.
        You never know where #1shoeoff will lead.

   

How's your summertime?

            Today as I was setting up this photo as part of the #1shoeoff promotion for my second mystery, I thought of the song "Summertime" from the operetta "Porgy and Bess" by the Gershwin brothers. It's always been one of my favorites.
            The show opens in a black tenement in Charleston, South Carolina. A mother sings the lullaby to her baby, extolling the easy life of  summer. The song fantasizes a bit that the child will have an easy life because "your daddy's rich and your ma is good lookin'." Life can be like summertime.
           Then I realized that nobody in Charleston, where I lived in the 1970s, would call summertime easy. It's hot as hell, drippy humid and swat-craze buggy. February and March are much nicer. In fact rich folks from the Charleston Lowcounty used to escape inland in the summers, which accounts for the founding and naming of the pleasant little town of Summerville.
            Ira Gershwin, who wrote the lyrics to "Summertime," lived in New York. He probably saw summer as a welcome reprieve, as did most of the New Yorkers watching this show on Broadway. Ira used his view of summer, not the character's view.
             It reminded me of a mistake most of us make. We see the world from our perspective and assume that perspective is true for everyone. Many of our disagreements over "truth" are just a matter of perspective.

Is it the goal or the game?

           

Cabin mates Angela, Shirley and Wendy.

              I was really looking forward to spending my annual week at the Peninsula Writer's Retreat at Glen Lake. Back in 2010 I polished my first novel "Great News Town" here. In subsequent years I wrote several chapters of each of the next two: "One Shoe Off" and "Full Moon Friday." I really needed a week to concentrate on writing my current historical novel, "Crown of Gold."
             I arrived with a goal to write the next three chapters. Instead I rewrote the first chapter three times.
           And climbed to the top of Alligator Hill to look out over North Manitou and South Manitou islands in the early morning fog.
            And watched a sunset that made the hill look like it was a forest fire.
            And listened as a rumbling team of earth movers gobbled up the old log cabins next door and replaced them with carefully layered gravel and sand and topsoil.
             I reconnected with writer friends I hadn't talked with in years and met new ones whose enthusiasm and creative ideas warmed my soul.
             But no, I didn't reach my original goal.
            "My business training tells me to set goals," said cabin mate Wendy Schweifler. "But if I go off kayaking or enjoying a good meal it's important too. It's part of the process."
             "I spent a whole day trying to create a better narrative arc," reported cabin mate Angela Sweet-Christian. "The next morning I decided it was too forced and went back to the original. I thought I had wasted a day, but I didn't because that work was valuable too."     
              "I've been slacking on my writing for too long," said our third cabin-mate Shirley Jones."My goal was to become re-impassioned about a book I've been working on.  And, wow, the muse was with me!"
               Our speaker Mary Ann Samyn told us writing is about revealing the truth in ourselves. That is the ultimate goal, not a certain number of pages or words or chapters.
                Hmmm... sounds like confession.

Executive order from the past

      

"Order #11" sounds like something from the recent  parade of presidential pronouncements. Was that the Muslim Ban? Or the one about dumping coal waste into streams?
          Actually it's the name of a 150-year-old painting by George Caleb Bingham. It depicts an 1863 order by Union General Thomas Ewing that evacuated four counties in Missouri, confiscating all property of the residents and burning all the farms.  The order was in response to a raid by Quantrill's raiders on Lawrence, Kansas. Guess you would call Quantrill's Raiders the terrorists of the 1860s.
        And like most knee jerk reactions to terrorism, the order went too far, punishing people who had nothing to do with the crime. Some of my son's ancestors, the Mockbee family,  were among those run out of their home and forced to flee halfway across the state. The Mockbees weren't slaveholders. They weren't even Southern sympathizers. They just had the bad luck to settle in Missouri where the disagreement between Missouri and Kansas was the hottest.
          Those four counties became a barren, burned-out graveyard dotted with crumbling chimneys where farm houses used to be. They remained deserted until well after the end of the war two years later. Bingham was a Union supporter but he painted this work to show the world that the Union had gone too far in Missouri.
          I was back in my home state recently to do some genealogical research in the State Historical Society and was pleased to discover this painting on display there. It really brought to life a little bit of family history.

Triple XXX rated week

          

Della, Carol and Sue at Christopher Wren Church at Westminster College

I didn't grow up with sisters, but adulthood brought me a bevy of sisters-in-law. In addition to the wives of my three brothers I also found myself related to my husband's sister, Carol, and Della, the wife of my husband's brother.
            For a dozen years we shared babies and Christmases and reunion dinners. We decorated family graves together on "Remembrance Day." We helped out when our husbands put in a "new bath" in the family farm house. We exchanged cards and presents and telephone calls.
           But our marriages didn't last as long as we'd vowed. Della and I became part of the divorce statistics. Carol eventually was widowed.
           This week the three of us were sisters again. We gathered in Missouri at Carol's house which hasn't changed all that much in the thirty-some years since the divorces. It still echos with the memory of the booming voice of Carol's late husband, Newt. And I can almost smell the shiny red cinnamon apples Aunt Opal always made for family dinners. Now the energetic little boy running around in superhero undies is the grandson of Carol's middle child, Susan. So I bounce little Gabriel on my knee just the way I used to bounce Susan.
            Carol, Della and I  spent a day visiting graveyards. There are a few newer graves now and many of the old remembered names. We visited the Churchill Museum at Westminster College where the British prime minister gave his famous Iron Curtain speech. And we ate tables full of food, much of it prepared by Carol's daughters and granddaughters.
            We laughed and talked and recalled all those babies and Christmases and dirty dishes to wash.  We may be exes, but we're still sisters.

Thoroughly Modern Modern

  

Matching dresses for the steno pool 

      Did you realize that the word "modern" -- meaning "of or pertaining to the present time" -- was first used in 1580? That's right. Shakespeare would have considered himself Thoroughly Modern Will.
       And that's part of the joke in the musical "Thoroughly Modern Millie," which opens June 2 at Grand Rapids Civic Theatre. Small town girl Millie Dillmont heads to the big city in 1922 and thinks she's reached the peek of modernity by bobbing her hair and putting on a short, fringed dress.  She and her friends are the trendsetters of almost a century ago, tapping away to tempos of yesteryear and talking in a lingo that was as hip then as today's texting.
      Based on a 1967 film starring Julie Andrews, the 2002 stage version featured a spicy score by Jeanine Tesori and turned the title performer, Michigan's own Sutton Foster, into a Tony-winning star.

Carly Uthoff rehearses Millie

      Civic's director Allyson Paris has some ideas to make the local production even more modern. Like the Broadway version, Civic's show will use projected subtitles to add to the comedy of two Chinese characters in the story. But Paris doesn't plan to limit the projections to subtitles. She has a few fun surprises in store.
        "Projection is the way of the future in scenic design," Paris said before a recent rehearsal.
        Costume designer Robert Fowle has 20 volunteers working on a collection of flashy flapper togs for the large ensemble, but even these styles have been updated to today's tastes. The straight, boxy dresses make everyone look fat, Fowle said, so he's added a little shaping to his designs.

Audiences can count on a ton of tap dancing, as well, with lots of large production numbers and 18 ensemble members who have honed their dancing skills in Civic's tap dancing classes.
          "I want the audience to leave tapping down the aisles," Paris said.
          The show runs through June 18. www.grct.org