Chocolate warms the heart

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On this cold, blustery day, I walked over to the Chocolate Festival fundraiser for the New Haven Montessori School.  It warmed my heart.

Upon check-in, we were given small tokens-a red glass heart and a pink glass heart.  These tokens served as a  vote for my favorite professionally-made chocolate goodie (red) and my favorite amateur-made chocolate goodie (pink).

 

 

So…you get to vote:  which is amateur and which is professional?  The answers are at the bottom of this blog.

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1. Amateur or Professional?

 

 

 

 

 

 

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2. Amateur or Professional?

 

 

 

 

 

 

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3. Amateur or Professional?

 

 

 

 

 

 

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4. Amateur or Professional

 

 

 

 

 

 

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5. Amateur or Professional?

 

 

 

 

 

 

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6. Amateur or Professional?

 

 

 

 

 

 

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7. Amateur or Professional

 

 

 

 

 

 

Okay.  How’d you do?

1. Professional                                                                                                                    2. Amateur                                                                                                                         3. Professional                                                                                                                    4. Professional                                                                                                                    5. Professional                                                                                                                    6. Amateur                                                                                                                         7. Professional

1-3 correct – eat more chocolate!                                                                                       4-5 correct – know your stuff                                                                                               6+  correct – chocolatey guru!

 

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Happy almost February!

 

Art of the Road

One of the joys of Connecticut is its natural beauty.  I first fell in love with what seemed like a gracious place, when driving years ago on the Merritt Parkway.  Well, tonight, I got some insight into how the magic of that road came into being, viewing a documentary called “The Road Taken…The Merritt Parkway.”

Like so much else, politics were important in the conception of the road in the 1920s, but so were values.  Schuyler Merritt was a Congressman who wanted to create beauty in a road connecting New York City and Connecticut.  The idea was to create a park, a very long park, with a way through it–a park-way.

Cars were not as common as now, of course, with only the wealthy driving.  They didn’t want a parkway going through their estates, so the road was designed, winding not to follow the natural landscape, but to skirt the large estates.

Still, creating a road of and for beauty was inspired.  Merritt and others with this vision were followers of The City Beautiful aesthetic, emerging from the 1890s and 1900s.  Architects, sculptors, and city planners worked in conjunction to make cities better places to live.  With beauty as a major goal, this road was designed for a time when cars “purred,” according to Merritt, and the drive was a leisure-time activity for the whole family.  The results were meant to be “exhilarating”!

An architect was hired, not an engineer.  Each bridge spanning the Parkway is different, ranging in styles from Art Deco to medieval to natural.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poetry and lyricism were added.  A metal worker spun his magic…

…as did stone masons…

…and carvers

Construction was mostly done during the 1930s, as a public works project that put many unemployed men to work.  Here a bridge carving honors their efforts.

What also makes the Merritt special is the way it harmonizes human-made with nature.  A landscape architect was hired to ensure that.  He planted trees in clumps, the way they grow in nature.  Larger trees were planted well away from bridges to create a kind of entrance to the bridge as a focal point.  Like Connecticut, the Parkway has four-season beauty.

Apparently, John Lennon would rent a car in New York City and take a drive on the Merritt to clear his head and find peace, before returning to the city, refreshed and with new ideas.

My favorite story comes from the transition period just when tolls were no longer collected, and the toll houses were removed.  One man reminisces how he loved the signs that read, “Toll House 1 mile ahead.”

He approached the Department of Transportation about handing out Toll House cookies on the day tolls were no longer collected.  They said , “no.”  Insurance, liability, blah, blah.

“No” didn’t stop this man.  He had two women bake 750 cookies, and he placed them in wax paper bags.  On the day the tolls were no longer collected, 750 drivers passed by a sign that read “Toll House Cookies 1 mile ahead,” then passed through the booth for the last time with a smile on their faces, cookie in hand.  Try that on I95!

Try any of this on I95, add a little beauty to the mundane, and what a better world we would live in.

 

 

Studying structure

I watched the new play “Row after Row” at the Women’s Project Theater with great interest.  You know I’m interested in new works and am a passionate advocate for women’s creativity.

In particular, I found myself analyzing the structure of the play, which interweaves contemporary scenes with historical.  The writing is fairly taut, playing out the themes of loyalty and union among the three characters, both the set of Civil War re-enactors of today and the soldiers characters from the war era.  Following the time shifts was effortless, aided by lighting and subtle transitions of costume.  I noticed how the playwright used humor and soliloquies, and when those strategies worked and didn’t.  I noticed when I was tense enough to clutch my hands and when my mind wandered.

As I’m starting to put a play together coming out of my thesis, all this analysis proved fertile fodder.  I am working through a similar structure weaving the historical and the modern, as the issues haven’t really changed all that much.

I do hope to get back to simply enjoying a show for itself.  In the meantime, my next analysis will come with the new play about the founding of the NAACP, through the lens of “Dr. Du Bois and Miss Ovington.”  Let me know if you want to join me.
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The World in Miniature

The set designs of Ming Cho Lee are getting artistic treatment at the Yale University Architecture Gallery.  Each 3D model becomes a world of its own, and I readily saw how the set design can effect the temper of the play, at least as powerfully as any director.  The set immediately sets our mood in the audience, before a word is spoken.

K2

 

 

I remember Lee’s set for “K2” at the Kreeger in DC.  Chilling in every conceivable way.  Palpable even in the miniature model.

 

 

 

Much Ado about Nothing

 

Lee has probably worked every Shakespeare play, and a large number are represented in the show.  Lingering in front of his “Much Ado About Nothing,” a play I know fairly well, I could hear Benedict and Beatrice carping at each other, in their silly prelude to love.  All set to the jazz beat of Lee’s set.

 

Also interesting is how the sets act as minimalist art objects, in miniature, and I imagine even more powerfully on stage.  What a production of “Elektra” this must have been.

Electra

I haven’t seen Martha Graham’s dance called “Witch of Endor,” but maybe you, too, can imagine her organic, twirling Witch of Endormovements performed under and around this set.

If the set were a painting, it would hold forth with minimalist power rivaling Donald Judd and Robert Morris.

But Lee says he also was interested in realist work.  As an adult, more than as a child, I’m fascinated by doll houses with hyper-realist furnishings.  I think of Carrie Stettheimer’s dollhouse, created over 25 years, at the Museum of the City of New York.

Perhaps this is why Lee’s “A Moon for the Misbegotten” was probably one of my favorites in the exhibition.  It’s a ragged, sagging, tattered, sad dollhouse, already alive, just waiting for its actors to add some words.

A Moon for the Misbegotten

 

Next, I’m off to the Bruce Museum, for the miniatures of artist studios.  Since learning about Jimmy Sanders and his perspective boxes at the New Britain Museum of American Art, I’m a fan.  He has one of the miniatures in that show.

 

 

Come join me to see the world he creates!

 

Unportentious gem

On a quiet winter day–no snow squalls, no howling winds–I went to Hill-stead Museum in Farmington.  A lover of house museums of all types, I was quickly taken in by this one, because it really feels like the family is just in the next room.  Unlike Winterthur, so self-consciously gorgeous, this place has worn carpets and tchotchkes scattered over every level surface, just like you and I might have.

Don’t get me wrong.  It’s a showplace.

Self-taught architect Theodate Pope designed the house, completed in 1901, for her parents for their retirement.  Pope is well known enough to attract me, but I didn’t realize the art I would be seeing.  Purchased by her father, who clearly had an eye, the collection features several Manet, Whistler, and Monet paintings, as well as three Degas pieces, including this top-notch work.

As you can see, The Tub is clearly major-museum-worthy, part of a series of Degas’s experiments with the depiction of space.  See how he tilts the background forward, unnaturally flattening the scene.  This compression technique would go on to influence Matisse, and well, 20th century art in general.

Degas and Mary Cassatt, also well-represented in the house, learned this method from studying Japanese prints.  One room nearby is filled with the Asian prints Pope’s father collected, so that the house provides a mini art history lesson as well as beautiful pleasures.

 

 

Among his Monets are two of the Grainstack paintings, positioned opposite each other in one of the parlors.  Here is White Frost from 1889.

 

 

 

What makes these familiar works appear fresh is seeing them hanging above a settee, in a room comfortably furnished.  Of course, these rooms are loaded with invaluables–porcelains, silver, clocks, intricately carved knick-knacks, gorgeous inlay on what-not furniture.

I love the souvenirs Pope’s parents bought on their Grand Tour.  The pieces of this chess set are a charmer and also familiar, like something my mother had in her house.

The unportentiousness of the place is what makes it remarkable.  You and I could have a sit with a cup of hot tea and catch up.