Sally, Speck and the Summer of ‘66

We have things in common, Sally Draper and I. We’re both about the same age. We’ve both lost beloved grandparents. We both watched President Kennedy laid to rest in black-and-white on TV for three solid days. We both love the Beatles. We both want a pair of white go-go boots.

But that’s pretty much where the similarities end.

Sally is the daughter of Don and Betty Draper. Don is a well-to-do ad man in New York City; he’s now divorced from her mom and Sally lives with her two kid brothers and her mother (who’s getting fat) and her politician stepfather (whose horrible mother babysits her) in a haunted mansion in upstate New York.

In the year 1966, right next to the “Mad Men” parallel universe, there’s me, living in blue-collar Berwyn, Illinois, with my working-class parents and friends whose parents couldn’t afford a divorce – their fathers just took a powder.

Sally Draper seems like a pretty lucky girl. She gets to spend weekends in a penthouse in New York City with her dad and his glamorous new wife, who takes her on shopping sprees to Bergdorf’s and Bonwit Teller.

But I was lucky, too. I had a Mafia-wife godmother who bought me cool dresses from Bramson’s in Oak Park, a gold Baume et Mercier watch, and bequeathed me her expensive tastes that my parents could only indulge with orders from the Sears catalogue.

I also never saw my step-grandmother-in-law giving head to Roger Sterling. I learned about sex around the same age, but it was from a whispered conversation with Maureen Hannigan at a Girl Scout Christmas caroling event at the local old people’s home. And anyhow, Maureen Hannigan was lying. There was no way our fathers and mothers were doing that disgusting stuff.

I wonder if Sally has any friends. There are no allusions to any on the show, and that’s a damn shame. The only friend she really confides in is the creepy former neighbor boy, and he’s off at a boarding school and probably has ulterior motives of getting it on with Sally’s mother.

If I knew Sally, I would have invited her over to my house for the weekend. We’d kick off the festivities by watching “Dark Shadows” on Friday afternoon, then go to the movies at the Olympic Theater with my friends. Then we’d have a big pajama party, with everybody wrapped in blankets in our front room floor, playing Beatles and Herman’s Hermits records all night long.

My mother would make a pizza from scratch and we’d put our hair up in big plastic curlers and read about our fave raves in 16 Magazine, tell Polish jokes and get goofy until my father would yell from upstairs to goddamn it keep it down, he had to get up early for work tomorrow.

It probably wouldn’t be sophisticated enough for Sally – who had grown up with a maid, who knew all about sex, who with her brothers and dad frequently assumes the role of mother, sliding into that frigid, stone-faced efficiency so perfected by Betty. No, if Sally hung out with us, she’d get a chance to actually be a kid – although there would be nobody embargoing the news for her. It would be blasting out of our TV set, out of the radio while we listened to WLS Top 10 and Barney Pip or Ron Britain on WCFL.

 She might be scared, considering Chicago is where that guy killed those eight student nurses, the guy who had scared her so much that her grandmother-in-law had to give her a Seconal and she ended up falling asleep under the sofa with a butcher knife clutched in her hand.

 I remember July 14, 1966, when we first got word about the slaying of eight student nurses on Chicago’s South Side. I’d been riding in our 1964 Ford Falcon, going somewhere with my parents, bopping in the back seat to the Top 10 Countdown on WLS. It was summer, the car windows were open, and I was nagging my father to switch stations when the news or the commercials came on because all I wanted to hear was the music: The Beatles’ “Paperback Writer,” Tommy James and the Shondell’s “Hanky Panky,” The Trogg’s “Wild Thing,” The Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Summer in the City.”

 When the news came on, I wanted to switch, but my mother shushed me. It was a bulletin, saying the girls had been killed. It was shocking and scary. Back in 1966, things like this didn’t happen.   

 The murders happened on a Thursday, so maybe it was Saturday that I was riding around with my parents. My mother worked nights during the week, so the only time we would have all been together would have a Saturday or Sunday night. Speck was caught four days later -- on a Monday. My mother would have been at work then. I seem to remember something about her actually taking the day off – something very unusual for her. But she may have been too freaked out to work.

 But even though Speck had been on the loose here in Chicago, Sally could feel safe with us. My parents didn’t drink martinis or go out much – my father worked in a factory and my mother worked in a factory and their idea of a good time was an occasional trip to a local Italian restaurant, where they might have one drink apiece.

 And my friends may have had their share of neuroses, but worrying that Richard Speck was going to come and get them was the least of it. We were glad when the news told us he’d been caught four days later, but I’d never felt that any of us were at risk of being hurt by him or anyone like him. We were just kids, safe and secure in prosperous, post-war America. Who’d want to hurt us?

 Speck died in prison in 1991, sporting a pair of hormone-induced fake breasts. He never even made 50.

 Today, the Summer of ’66 is barely a blip in the modern American collective memory. But in the intervening years, the legacy of Richard Speck has permeated the national zeitgeist, cropping up in new generations of serial killers, “Saw” movies and the fictional world of Sally Draper. Whose fear of life that summer, it turns out, was right all along.

Talk Nerdy to Me

A grandchild of mine was accused, some years ago, of being a “Nerd” because she played War Craft, read and reread Lord of the Rings, and got hooked on TV shows like Fringe and the X-Files.  I wondered about this label at first, because she’s bright, outgoing and swims in a sizeable pod of friends. Then I realized that although the term “Nerd,” is fairly new, the profile remains the same. It’s an inherited condition.

My husband was always neat, even, his mother told me, as a child, a born organizer. The system might not always be apparent, but he will explain it to you, and he will back his preferences with inescapable logic. He built and flew model airplanes through adolescence, and in labeled boxes in the basement, beside his mourned for, obsolete darkroom, are the engines. I have not the least doubt they could be resuscitated.

After we married, he worked as a programmer. For fun, he spent a decade studying Ansel Adams’ Zone System. He could bring a loud party with the latest Stones album and 3 jugs of Mateus to a stand-still in five minutes if given an opening. His photography, as he practiced it in darkroom and with endless test sheets and kitchen table grokkings, was inspired. As a result, we’ve got rafts of wonderful pictures of our growing boys. 

 I was an only lonely child living in the country. Nearsighted, (“Lizzie Lens” was the standard ‘50’s joke) it was easier for me to read than to relate to a world of other children I couldn’t quite see. I hung out in my imagination, creating an entire world ruled by dogs; I drew charts of their dynasties. Oddly, the dogs rode horses, and I had a box of plastic and china stand-ins. Later, I cut to the chase and simply sat on the floor and talked to myself. When I was little, this was called “good” behavior. As I grew older and the habit of talking to myself continued, Mother had second thoughts. All of a sudden—or so it seemed to me—telling myself stories all the time was “weird.”

 I admit it; I’m obsessive. A Bambi fixation drove me to write a play--I guess you’d call it “fan fic” today--which was performed by my Fourth Grade class. I’ve always been vulnerable to historical characters.   I began with Davy Crocket, but by the time I was eleven, my affections had fastened upon Alexander Hamilton, who was a fairly odd choice for a crush in the age of Elvis Presley. Soon after I added Richard III to my obsessive roster, which led to Shakespeare, Laurence Olivier and occasionally parading around in the hokey outfit above.

 So, lately, when my granddaughter puts on her “Talk Nerdy to Me” tee shirt and heads out to play Trivial Pursuit or spends hours online with her friends, I feel a warm glow. She’s definitely a member of Our Clan.

http://www.julietwaldron.com

 

.

An excerpt from my oldest--and newest--book: My Mozart. The young heroine began to speak to me during 1986 and did not stop sharing her secrets until a little more than a year later. She first came to me around the time (I would later learn) of her birthday, in late April. Every year, my Blumechen would return to fill in a little more. I've finally let her story go, out into the wide and noisy 'net.  Here are the first few pages...

* * *

"Most painfully affected of all by Mozart's fatal illness was Fraulein Nanina Gottlieb..."

From Joseph Deiner's Memoirs, related at Vienna, 1856

http://www.amazon.com/My-Mozart-ebook/dp/B0089F5X3C/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1340501338&sr=1-1&keywords=My+Mozart

Chapter One

"Mozart, Ich liebe dich. I love you. Love you."

"Come here, Nanina Nightingale. Come and give your poor old Maestro some of your ‘specially sugary sugar."

My mouth on his‑‑the friction produced warmth and sweetness, with a decided undertone of the expensive brandy he liked, flowing from his tongue to mine. I slid my arms across the brocade of his jacket, none too clean these days, and swayed a slender dancer's body against him.

Let me assure you that my sophistication was assumed. It really doesn't matter - then, or now. I was young, foolish, and drowning in love. I was seventeen. He was thirty five.

He had once been boyishly agile, doing handsprings over chairs, turning cartwheels of joy at a prima donna’s kiss or a perfect performance of his own celestial music. He was never tall, and was, like most men of his age, working on a bit of a belly. Still, he kept more or less in shape by a daily regimen which included running from bailiffs, dashing out the back doors of taverns to avoid payment, and climbing in and out of the bedroom windows of adventurous (and talented) musical gentlewomen.

I believed he knew everything--that he could see right through me with those bright blue eyes. He probably could. He'd been my music master--and, more--my deity, ever since I'd met him, in my ninth year.

His jacket, now spotted and stained, must have been fine enough to wear in the presence of the Emperor. Bright blue, it perfectly matched his eyes. I can still feel the fabric sliding under my fingers as my arms passed over his shoulders and around his neck.

I can still see him‑‑a woolly frizz of blonde hair, long, aquiline nose--a ram that had once been an angel. Sometimes, when he was loving me in some exquisitely naughty way and joyfully smiling as he did it, I could almost see horns.

So you will understand exactly how I loved him, so that you will know that it was a real passion, I'll tell you that I adored the feel of him, the smell of him, the taste of him. They've tried to turn him into a tinkling porcelain angel, but I'm here to tell you, here and now--he was not.

Mozart's eyes were big, slightly protuberant, and as I’ve said, so blue. Alarming, those eyes! Once they'd shone with the pure light of genius, radiant and blissful as a summer noonday. Lately, they were simply wasted. My adored Maestro was mostly either drunk or hung over.

He'd fallen from grace. Everyone knew it. Creditors hounded him. There were too many wild parties, not enough money.  His wife had given up coping, had gone back to the Baden spa where she had an on-going romance with a big, handsome Major.

And who could blame her? Pretty Constance, in the last ungainly stages of yet another pregnancy, fleeing Vienna after a winter of freezing and begging for handouts...

Even a seventeen year old idolater could recognize her defection for simple self‑preservation. I didn't judge her. I didn't judge myself. I was simply glad to have her out of the way. When she was gone, he was restless, at loose ends, spending most of his time hanging around our theater. Of course, nothing could have suited me better.

Oh, I can still hear my painted Mama lecturing, telling me all about Wolfgang's debts, his drinking, and his wife. If I must go whoring, why couldn't I be sensible, make it pay?

Naturally, I knew that the lady who filled his mind was one of his damned piano pupils. She was struggling with a very real fear of her husband and with her own natural chastity. Dear Mozart always imagined that if a lady played his music with "taste and feeling", she belonged to him in a deeper and more complete sense than she could ever belong to a mere husband. The notion proved in every case disappointing, and, in the final exercise, fatal.

He often held forth upon "acting like a Kapellmeister/ dressing like a Kapellmeister", long after he'd been ejected both from the court and the wider world of gentlemanly convention. When sufficiently drunk, he used to amuse everyone at The Serpent, clowning with a violin like some impoverished, itinerant musiker.

One night, a pair of Englishmen who'd been dining there dropped a handful of kreutzers and asked in broken German if he knew the way to "the house of Kapellmeister Mozart." As the regulars roared, Mozart answered with the filthiest English curse he knew and haughtily stalked away, leaving the money on the floor. The waiter, Joseph Deiner, God bless him, scooped it up and applied it to Mozart's perennial bill.

* * *

It's hard to tell how you will like a true story, but to my mind, all the best tales grow. Have patience. This, I assure you, is a love story.

* * *

I was born a musiker, a poor, pretty, talented girl who could have become an actress or a singer, a dancer or a prostitute. When I was seventeen, with no parents and working for Emmanual Schikaneder, I'm afraid the latter was the fate most likely.

Today my beauty and voice are gone. Memories are all that remain. Except for my old friend Joseph, it was lonely for a very long time, but lately troops of well meaning Volk have been knocking on my door, bringing little presents and asking questions about the old days.

"Fraulein Gottlieb," they say, "you were the Magic Flute's first Pamina. Tell us about the way it was. Tell us about the great genius, Mozart."

I hardly dare speak. Once well begun, this old woman might ramble straight through from beginning to end. My adored, long dead Maestro has become famous, a kind of Martyr to Art. I have no wish to stain the marble purity of the image that his wife, with so much skill and determination, has spent the last thirty years creating. I understand the theater of life, this proscenium beneath the arching sky. Sometimes--paradoxically--honor requires a lie.

So, to such visitors, I say the obvious, about how poorly his talent served him while he lived. Then they reply, as if this makes up for the pain: "His music survives."

For a performer like me, it's the opposite. In that most present of present moments, we are the lark of song, the erotic geometry of dance, the drum beat of declamation. For a performer there's nothing beyond the flashing now, and when we grow old all that is left for us is the rusty rumination of some aged member of a long ago audience.

This being so, I'll tell you who I am, or rather who I was: Fraulein Anna Gottlieb, Nanina to my long dead friends. I was a performer once admired, first as a dancer, then as a singer, and last, when I grew older, as a comedienne who had learned all about getting belly laughs from those two great clowns of the Volksoper stage, Barbara Gerl and Emmanuel-The-Devil-In-Human-Form Schikaneder. I was the darling of the fickle Viennese for years...

* * *

~Juliet Waldron

http://www.julietwaldron.com

http://www.amazon.com/My-Mozart-ebook/dp/B0089F5X3C/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1340501338&sr=1-1&keywords=My+Mozart 

A 19th-Century Female Soldier

In my Promise & Honor Civil War trilogy, I included a female soldier in the cast of characters. Over 400 women are known to have served during the war, but it's anyone's guess how many went unrecorded. While researching my first nonfiction title, A Fate Worse than Death, I came across a fascinating article about a female soldier. Very few have read her story since the 19^th century. Unfortunately, I can't even tell you her name because the reporter in the 1863 Missouri Democrat article withheld it to retain her privacy. He described her in typical Victorian style, "... large lustrous dark eye... ruddy and fresh looking..." But from there on out, he let her tell her own story.

 

Even before the American Civil War, her story was far from mundane. She lost her parents at a fairly young age, and at fourteen she was married to a member of a minstrel troupe. Widowed after eighteen months of marriage, she was supported by her two brothers. Then, the war broke out, and both of her brothers enlisted.

 

Not knowing what to do with herself, she grew restless. She traveled to Baltimore to be near her brothers and became a nurse, caring for the sick and wounded. Before long, she got tired of being on the receiving end of "insults and ungrateful returns" from some of the recovered soldiers. An idea came to her, and she asked her brothers' permission to "dress in male attire and join their regiment."

 

Her younger brother brought her to some "rough places" for her to learn how to act more like a man. No one noticed, and she enlisted as the major's orderly. Shortly after, the regiment was sent to New Orleans. Her younger brother was wounded in a skirmish and later died. She had no time for grief. In the second assault on Baton Rouge, she received a "severe sabre cut on the right arm. A ball grazed one of the lower limbs, and a number passed through my clothes."

 

As a result, the inevitable happened. The major of the regiment discovered her gender. During the war, if a female soldier was discovered after she had proven herself in battle, she was often allowed to stay. So it was for this woman.

 

For the most part, she lived as any other soldier, doing her job as best as she could. Another man learned her identity and attacked her in a "out of the way place." Her would-be rapist failed to realize that a female soldier could defend herself. She shot him. "I meant to disable his arm, but he stooped... the ball entered his face and found its way under his skull-cap." Instead of being angry at him, she tended him until he was out of danger. He sent her a written apology "in such a manner that I forgave him."

 

Although the article is unclear as to how long she remained in the regiment, she continued working for the major until he resigned. When she went home on furlough to Michigan, she had every intention of returning to her brother. Unfortunately before she could get back, he died from a fever.

 

Alone and uncertain what to do with herself, she had a few non-military adventures before enlisting once again. In a familiar job as a major's orderly in Rolla, Missouri, she met a young officer from Iowa where she fell "desperately in love." He had no clue of her true identity until she finally told him. "The result was that we engaged to be married this fall."

I salute this 19th-century soldier, and truly hope that she lived a long and happy life with her Iowa officer.

Source

"Genuine Romance in Real Life," Missouri Democrat, September 1, 1863.

Kim Murphy

www.KimMurphy.net

Crone-Transition

This month, sixth of my 65th year marks a major transition: from working to make a living to working only when it suits me. This change has been anticipated with pleasure for my body has been saying "no" for several years. There must be, however, some recognition given to the other murkier emotions, the anxieties that ooze out of brain cracks in the middle of dark, sleepless nights.

What if there are more expenses than resources?

What if the free hours fill up with boredom and laziness?

What if the loss of laughter with my co-workers brings loss of life-joy?

My years as mental health counselor have taught me that what I tell myself about the story of my life will create the reality of my own experience. What is perceived, what is remembered, what is filtered out to be discarded are all choices made every moment of every day.

 Dread/Anticipation..  Fear/Anxiety… perhaps they are the meanders of the same river.

Working, even when interesting and rewarding, has often seemed to be a daily struggle to keep people afloat, and provide enough resources that they can reach their destination.

How is it possible to deliberately change direction from forging upstream to relaxing into the gentle flow of downriver? What skills do I need to navigate to calmer waters? Experience teaches lighter travel requires lighter watercraft.

Maneuvering is easier when the boat is empty of all except essential gear.

Some wise words of an old friend come to mind "there's too much stuff in my canoe of life". What weights are mine to jettison?

A Reluctant Wedding Guest

I have become a wedding curmudgeon. I used to think it was just because I don’t like getting dressed up and going to church. While that is true, it sounds like a very weak excuse - not a reason to avoid a wedding.  Another excuse is the idea that it’s boring. Weddings today are anything but boring. The ways to prolong and over-complicate the joining of two people into one social and financial unit are awe-inspiring. Consider this menu that I found online.

Lighting candles, mixing sand, throwing rocks, and filling a bowl with colored glass are all tributes to the uniting of people and families. The rock-throwing thing is not as transparent as the rest; the idea is that the stones sink into an eternal ocean where they will remain unchanged forever. I think this is laughably wishful thinking. Even stones change eventually. Besides, how often do people get married next to a body of water?

More alarming are the practices of releasing butterflies or doves. Forcing winged creatures to sit in a box for hours and then fly out in a display of ecstatic levity is not only ridiculous, it’s cruel. Having the couple face each other and wrapping a chord around their clasped hands is too close to bondage for my taste. A variant is looking at each others’ hands while saying that these are the hands that will help, and comfort and work for each other. I am pretty sure I would giggle if I saw that. Doing any two of these things in the same ceremony would be downright annoying.

The only idea I really liked on this list of possibilities was the children’s ceremony. I saw that done, recently. It seemed lost on the children, but it was a great reminder to everyone else that it isn’t all about the happy couple in blended marriages. Stepchildren are being married, too.  At the same wedding, the couple walked in together and sat down at the front of the church instead of doing the grand procession of the bride. That set the right tone, for me. Marriage shouldn’t be about the dress and the makeup and the graceful (yeah?) walk of the bride. In fact, I was happy to be at that wedding.

So – weddings are not by their nature boring. I still don’t like going. I have considered the idea that I am envious of the two people starting a new life together. I can dismiss that quickly by noting that I think they are in for a rocky road to comfortable cohabitation. And in spite of that, I am really very happy for people who are willing to try to love each other for life. After all, I was foolish enough to think a ceremony solidified true love. My love is true, but rarely solid. It waxes and wanes, flies and slogs along by turns. Fortunately, my husband is still willing to love me.

The kind of wedding I would really enjoy attending is one that is simple, on the short side, and emphasizes the personal transitions of these two humans. This woman will be putting her maiden self aside. She will rely more on wisdom and patience than on beauty. She may need help to keep from losing her self hood in this relationship.  And probably she will become a mother – the most profound transition in a woman’s life. This man will let go of selfish activities. He will mature to the point that his family’s welfare will be as important to him as his own. He will learn to defend his values, not his abilities. And he will multiply his inner strength and sense of responsibility by two or three or more in the years to come. 

Why don’t we say these things? Why do we cling to the notion of miraculous and effortless happiness right down to the moment when that fantasy ends? We could acknowledge the magnitude of this moment. We might make this a rite of passage as well as a celebration. It would bring a sense of reality and profound importance to a personal transformation that throwing rocks and releasing birds and lighting candles cannot pretend to signify.  I would be much happier to attend an nontraditional but truthful kind of wedding.   Even though I still don’t like to dress up and go to church.   

Lari Jo Walker

May 31, 2012

http://www.huntervalleycelebrant.com.au/Wedding_Ceremony_rituals.html

The Night the Moon Sang

My husband, two little boys and I had driven 7 hours north through snow and ice from Connecticut to Maine to see his favorite cousin, Susan. She and her family were house-sitting in a large, lovely 18^th Century sea-captain’s home whose sloping lawn stretched down to an inlet of the sea.

The whole world was electric blue in the twilight when we piled out of the VW and waded the last few feet of their driveway. We stomped our feet to get rid of snow in the unheated mud room. The kitchen was wood fire piecemeal hot, and Susan was belatedly beginning to work on a sink full of dishes. The family lived for the winter in a few downstairs rooms, and kept the pipes warm for the owners, who were off sailing in the tropics, very upscale and almost unimaginable to us. Sue’s husband was a potter, and while he made beautiful things, from dinner services to exotic display pieces, they were not exactly flush with cash. Beans or spaghetti and homemade bread were probably supper that night; I don’t remember. It was Susan’s birthday, so she’d made a delicious, heavy, scratch chocolate cake, and I’d brought up Grandma Carol’s family famous “Cowboy Cookies.”

Night grew deeper. Finally, the kid cousins were extinguished, the adults all talked out. We retired to couches and sleeping bags. It was cold as the hinges of the 9^th Circle of Hell in any room not heated by a woodstove, an utterly clear, dark sky, starry night—at least, until the full moon got up over the tall black pines. Then it was like day out-of-doors, the moon balefully glittering down on those crisp, fresh pillows of snow. Susan and I had agreed to wake up later, because we’d consulted the almanac and learned that there was to be a lunar eclipse around 1 a.m. It was the night between our birthdays—mine would be tomorrow. We were a kindred pair of magical-mystery-tour women, both Pisces in the cusp, and not about to miss such a grand celestial side-show.

Exhausted from carbohydrates and driving , I’d fallen into a deep sleep, but in what seemed to be only a few minutes, I heard Susan urgently whispering.

“Juliet! Get up! Get Up!”

I sat up groggily. I could see her quite well with the moonlight pouring in the windows; it was amazingly bright.

“Get your boots and get downstairs—quick—quick--hurry!”

I did as she asked, for she sounded almost desperate, as if something was terribly wrong. Not only that, but she enforced the idea by rushing out of the room as soon as she finished speaking. I heard her feet going down the stairs rapidly. I got my boots on and followed, fast as I could. When I reached the kitchen, there she was, my coat in hand.

“Is it the eclipse? What’s up?”

“Come on—quick! You have to hear this! It’s crazy!”

I threw the coat on and followed her out the door. The first breath, as we stood on the back steps, froze my nose and made me choke. It must have been zero—or lower—outside. She gestured upward toward the moon, sailing high now over the forbidding, snow robed pines.

As we stood there, trembling, it acquired a halo of dull red as the eclipse began. The weighted branches of the pines randomly cracked. I had an odd feeling inside my head; I seemed to be looking up through water. Next came a kind of hum, a low tone that reverberated through the scene, and then I heard sweet round tones, like a flute or an electronic instrument, ring across the sleeping, snow shrouded land and across the icy ocean at the bottom of the hill.

The veiled moon grew redder; the sweet little song repeated. Susan grabbed me by the shoulder.

“Do you hear it? Do you?”

“Yes! Yes! What on earth…?” I kept looking up and down and side to side to see if anything was different, but nothing else in this reality appeared unusual.

“Thank God!” Susan giggled. It was a beautiful melodic –and normal--sound. “I thought I’d completely lost it.”

Well, when the “singing” stopped, we went back inside and attempted to wake our respective spouses, but that was hopeless. Neither of them wanted to leave the warmth of their beds—besides, they knew that the two Pisces women were engaged in some weird, annoying folie à deux.

Now if you are thinking about Close Encounters of the Third Kind, go right ahead. Our brush with the other happened in 1973, four years before Spielberg’s blockbuster. In fact, when I heard "the tones" in the movie, all the hair on the back of my neck stood straight up, as I remembered the night the moon sang to Susan and me.

~~ Juliet Waldron

http://www.julietwaldron.com/

Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun

Self-portrait, 1800

Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun (Marie Élisabeth Louise; 16 April 1755 – 30 March 1842) was a French painter, and is recognized as the most important female painter of the 18th century. Her style is generally considered Rococo and shows interest in the subject of neoclassical painting. Vigée Le Brun cannot be considered a pure Neoclassist, however, in that she creates mostly portraits in Neoclassical dress rather than the History painting. In her choice of color and style while serving as the portrait painter to Marie Antoinette, Vigée Le Brun is purely Rococo.

Early life

Born in Paris on 16 April 1755, Marie-Louise-Élisabeth Vigée was the daughter of a portraitist and fan painter, Louis Vigée, from whom she received her first instruction. Her mother was a hairdresser.[1] She was sent to live with relatives in Épernon until the age of 6 when she entered a convent where she remained for five years. Her father died when she was 12 years old following an infection from surgery to remove a fish bone lodged in his throat. In 1768, her mother married a wealthy jeweler, Jacques-Francois Le Sèvre and the family moved to the rue Saint-Honoré close to the Palais Royal. She was later patronised by the wealthy heiress Louise Marie Adélaïde de Bourbon, wife of Philippe Égalité. During this period Louise Élisabeth benefited by the advice of Gabriel François Doyen, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Joseph Vernet, and other masters of the period.

By the time she was in her early teens, Louise Élisabeth was painting portraits professionally. After her studio was seized, for practising without a license, she applied to the Académie de Saint Luc, which unwittingly exhibited her works in their Salon. On 25 October 1783, she was made a member of the Académie.

Madame Le Sèvre, 1772, fashionable hairdresser in Paris, 

née Jeanne Maissin (1728-1800), mother of 

Elisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun (Paris 1755-1842)

I'm going to interject my own comment here.  Of her works that are online, I could only find one portrait of an older woman (her mother) that was painted by Louise Élisabeth.  Much is made of her history as one of Marie Antoinette's favored artists. And comments are made that her likenesses aren't "good" (too flattering, is the consensus) - because her father died and she was largely self-taught.  No apparent appreciation of the fact that she was a highly successful and popular portrait painter without Daddy's help! 

And keep in mind that this woman was literally working during the "off with her head!" time period.  Clearly, one would be wise to flatter rich young women who are paying to have their portraits painted.  And frankly, I don't think she was overly flattering of Marie.  Actually, the young queen did much to help Louise Élisabeth.   But as history shows, the biggest threat to a painter much favored by the Queen of France was not from her patrons but the guillotine. 

Marie Antoinette

Marie Antoinette en chemise, portrait of the queen in a "muslin" dress, 

by Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun (1783). This controversial portrait was 

viewed by her critics to be improper for a queen.

On 7 August 1775 she married Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Le Brun, a painter and art dealer. (Her husband's great uncle was Charles Le Brun, first Director of the French Academy under Louis XIV.) Vigée Le Brun painted portraits of many of the nobility of the day and as her career blossomed, she was invited to the Palace of Versailles to paint Marie Antoinette. So pleased was the queen that during a period of six years, Vigée Le Brun would paint more than thirty portraits of the queen and her family, leading to her being commonly viewed as the official portraitist of Marie Antoinette. Whilst of benefit during the reign of the Bourbon royals, this label was to prove problematic later.

On 12 February 1780, Vigée Le Brun gave birth to a daughter, Jeanne Julie Louise, whom she called "Julie".

Self-portrait with her daughter Julie, 1786

In 1781 she and her husband toured Flanders and the Netherlands where seeing the works of the Flemish masters inspired her to try new techniques. There, she painted portraits of some of the nobility, including the Prince of Nassau.

On 31 May 1783, Vigée Le Brun was accepted as a member of France's Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. She submitted numerous portraits along with an allegorical history painting which she considered her morceau de réception—La Paix qui ramène l'Abondance (Peace Bringing Back Prosperity). The Academy did not place her work within an academic category of type of painting—history or portraiture.

Adélaïde Labille-Guiard also was admitted on the same day. The admission of Vigée Le Brun was opposed on the grounds that her husband was an art dealer, but eventually they were overruled by an order from Louis XVI because Marie Antoinette put considerable pressure on her husband on behalf of her painter. In 1789, she was succeeded as court painter to Marie Antoinette by Alexander Kucharsky.

French Revolution

After the arrest of the royal family during the French Revolution Vigée Le Brun fled France with her young daughter Julie. She lived and worked for some years in Italy, Austria, and Russia, where her experience in dealing with an aristocratic clientele was still useful. In Rome, her paintings met with great critical acclaim and she was elected to the Roman Accademia di San Luca.

In Russia, she was received by the nobility and painted numerous aristocrats including the last king of Poland Stanisław August Poniatowski and members of the family of Catherine the Great. Although the French aesthetic was widely admired in Russia there remained some cultural differences in what was deemed acceptable. Catherine was not initially happy with Vigée Le Brun's portrait of her granddaughters, Elena and Alexandra Pavlovna, due to the area of bare skin the short sleeved gowns revealed. In order to please the Empress, Vigée Le Brun added sleeves giving the work its characteristic look. This tactic seemed effective in pleasing Catherine as she agreed to sit herself for Vigée Le Brun (although Catherine died of a stroke before this work was due to begin).[2]

Alexandra and Elena Pavlovna, painted during Vigée Le Brun's time in St Petersburg.

While in Saint Petersburg, Vigée Le Brun was made a member of the Academy of Fine Arts of Saint Petersburg. Much to Vigée Le Brun's dismay, her daughter Julie married a Russian nobleman.[3]

After a sustained campaign by her ex-husband and other family members to have her name removed from the list of counter-revolutionary émigrés, Vigée Le Brun was finally able to return to France during the reign of Emperor Napoleon I. In spite of being no longer labeled as émigrée, her relationship with the new regime was never totally harmonious, as might be expected given that she was a strong royalist and the former portraitist of Marie Antoinette.

Much in demand by the élite of Europe, she visited England at the beginning of the 19th century and painted the portrait of several British notables including Lord Byron. In 1807 she traveled to Switzerland and was made an honorary member of the Société pour l'Avancement des Beaux-Arts of Geneva.

She published her memoirs in 1835 and 1837, which provide an interesting view of the training of artists at the end of the period dominated by royal academies. Her portrait of fellow neoclassical painter, Hubert Robert, is in Paris at Musée National du Louvre.

Still very active with her painting in her fifties, she purchased a house in Louveciennes, Île-de-France, and lived there until the house was seized by the Prussian Army during the war in 1814. She stayed in Paris until her death on 30 March 1842 when her body was taken back to Louveciennes and buried in the Cimetière de Louveciennes near her old home.

Her tombstone epitaph states "Ici, enfin, je repose…" (Here, at last, I rest…).

Vigée Le Brun left a legacy of 660 portraits and 200 landscapes. In addition to private collections, her works may be found at major museums, such as Hermitage Museum, London's National Gallery, in Europe and the United States.

References

1. ^ CyberPathways Art World
2. ^ Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun: the odyssey of an artist in an age of revolution/Gita May
3. ^ CyberPathways Art World

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
• Lebrun, Souvenirs, Paris, 1835–1837 (translated by Lionel Strachey, New York, 1903).

~~~~~~~~~

I'm not crazy about this mini-bio because it leaves so many questions unanswered for me. But I have to say, this was one strong, gutsy woman!  She made it out of France alive, worked and supported herself and her daughter - alone in foreign countries - for several years.  What happened to her mother?  And why the reference to an ex-husband, who helps get her off the list of counter-revolutionary émigrés, and  back into France?

Did he divorce her to save her life? Divorce was unheard of (if not impossible) in Catholic France until after the revolution.  And why did he stay and then campaign for her return?  It seems to me I'm going to be reading this woman's memoirs. Forget Marie Antoinette! As much as I found Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette (2006) fun and fascinating, as I said, I think there's quite a story about a strong woman lurking in this sketch.

Grief, The Great Yearning

From fellow Second Wind Author, Pat Bertram, a personal and beautiful meditation upon one of the toughest things about the Crone-Age, which is that Death becomes our constant companion. We open a newspaper and read the Obits, perhaps for the first time in our lives, and see the names of friends, family, and our own husbands and wives who have fallen into the past.


Connect with Pat at   http://www.secondwindpublishing.com/product_info.php?products_id=94

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Death came in the spring.

At the beginning of March 2010, the doctors said that Jeff, my life mate—my soul mate—had inoperable kidney cancer and that he had six months to live. He had only three weeks. We’d spent thirty-four years together, and suddenly I was alone, unprepared, and totally devastated. I couldn’t even begin to comprehend the wreckage of my life. It wasn’t just he who died but “we.” There was no more “us,” no more shared plans and dreams and private jokes. There was only me.

Other losses compounded the misery. I had to sort through the accumulation of decades, dismantle what was left of our life, move from our home. We bereft are counseled not to make major changes during the first year after a significant loss—one’s thinking processes become muddled, leaving one prey to faulty logic and rash decisions—but I needed to go stay with my father for a while. Although he was doing well by himself, he was 93 years old, and it wasn’t wise for him to continue living alone.

I relocated from cool mountain climes to the heat of a southwestern community. Lost, heartbroken, awash in tears, I walked for hours every day beneath the cloudless sky, finding what comfort I could in the simple activity. During one such walk, I turned down an unfamiliar city street, and followed it . . . into the desert.

I was stunned to find myself in a vast wilderness of rocky knolls, creosote bushes, cacti, rabbits, lizards, and snakes. I’d been to the area several times during my mother’s last few months, but I’d spent little time outside. I hated the heat, the constant glare of the sun, the harsh winds. After Jeff died, however, that bleak weather, that bleak terrain seemed to mirror my inner landscape. Wandering in the desert, crying in the wilderness, I tried to find meaning in all that had happened. I didn’t find it, of course. How can there be meaning in the painful, horrific death of a 63-year-old man? I didn’t find myself, either. It was too soon for me to move on, to abandon my grief. I felt as if I’d be negating him and the life we led.

What I did find was the peace of the moment.

Children, most of whom know little of death and the horrors of life, live in the moment because they can—it’s all they have. The bereft, who know too much about death and the horrors of life, live in the moment because they must—it’s the only way they can survive.

During the first year after Jeff’s death, I lived as a child—moment to moment, embracing my grief, trying not to think about the future because such thoughts brought panic about growing old alone, trying not to think about the past because such thoughts reminded me of all I had lost.

And so went the seasons of my soul. The spring of death gave way to the summer of grief, and grief flowed into the fall and winter of renewal.

As I struggled to get through that first year of grief, I wrote blog posts, letters to Jeff, journal entries, anything to help me stay in the moment, and afterward, I compiled the best of my grief writings into a book called Grief, The Great Yearning, which has been released by Second Wind Publishing. Our society seems to value cheerfulness at all costs, and I wanted to let people know that sometimes those costs are too high. It’s important to grieve but it’s also important to know you are not alone in your grief. Whatever you feel, others have felt. Whatever seemingly crazy thing you do to bring yourself comfort, others have done. And, as impossible as it is to imagine now, you will survive.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Great Yearning and four novels --- Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. All Bertram’s books are available both in print and in ebook format. You can get them online at Second Wind Publishing, Amazon, B&N and Smashwords.  At Smashwords, the books are available in all ebook formats including palm reading devices, and you can download the first 20-30% free!

Ethyl: 1976-1988

Her name was Ethyl—the perfect name for a battered redhead well past her prime but still up for adventure.

The year was 1986. I was a freshly minted journalism grad who had relied on Chicago public transportation to get from my apartment in Evanston to school, work and socializing in the city and never thought she’d need to drive again. But after I landed my dream job as a beat reporter at Chicago’s legendary City News Bureau, I knew I’d have to relinquish my CTA tokens for an ignition key. I needed a cheap, reliable beater, and fast.

The solution came from my high-school buddy Georgia and her motorhead husband Mike. The car in question was a 1976 Chevy Nova, orange, with well over 150,000 miles on her odometer. Georgia had driven the car for several years but was finally in a position to upgrade. Mike was constantly working on it and could vouch for its reliability. Asking price? $350. Done.

I’m not big on naming things, but just looking at the rust-scabby redhead with the torn black-and-white checked cloth upholstery evoked the name Ethyl—a play on words referring to both the old lead additive to gasoline and my high-school principal, Sister Ethel. She was loose-limbed and well broken in—the car, not the nun—with manual steering and a windshield that leaked around the edges in a heavy rain, giving the interior a distinctive musty smell.

Ethyl and I immediately started a drivers’ ed crash refresher with my father—a guy with a serious history behind the wheel (a novel in itself, involving both his activities as a wheelman for some nefarious West Side Chicago characters and the Bronze Star in World War II). In the two weeks before I started the job, the old man rode shotgun while I struggled with parallel parking, overcame my expressway phobia and practically wore out the little blue-and-white “Chicago Streets” book that listed all the city’s byways. By the time I started the job, I was as ready as I’d ever be.

City News was a baptism by fire for a suburban kid and reporting newbie, and Ethyl was the perfect accomplice to my adventures. She waited at the curb as I tailed Mayor Harold Washington and various Chicago pols and celebrities (Adlai Stevenson Jr., former Mayor Jane Byrne, Irv Kupcinet, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert) as a regular part of my rounds. She was a regular fixture in the parking lot of the old District 20 police headquarters at California and Pershing. In those pre-cell days, I used the phones to call bereaved families for comments on dead loved ones, checked with the coroner’s office for gory details, called in stories to persnickety editors, and got endless good-natured grief from Chicago’s Finest. She nervously waited on the street when I accidently got locked into a West Side community center after hours on a Saturday night. And I had to rescue her one day when she was towed from a downtown street. My efforts to free her from the auto pound in the labyrinthine bowels of lower Wacker took on the desperation of Dante in one of the Seven Circles.

In our free time, Ethyl transported me and my favorite drinking buddy Eileen to a myriad of locations—from Joe Danno’s fabled speakeasy Bucket O’ Suds, to the then-funky Higgins Tap, to the Sunset Inn on Cermak in Berwyn to the dive bar attached to Dino’s Pizzeria in Norwood Park.

Ethyl was as far from high maintenance as a gal could be. My old man and his buddy Lou were constantly tinkering with her, replacing her innards as they wore out with parts scavenged from their Sunday morning sojourns to Maxwell Street. As a result, she was the healthiest, if not most attractive beater on the streets.

But finally, inevitably, our days together drew to a close after Ethyl got a fatal transmission diagnosis and I got another job and was making enough to buy an almost-new Chevy Cavalier.

She was a fighter until the end. She was still running when my old man managed to sell her at a neighborhood gas station for $350—the same price I’d paid for her two years earlier.

Requiescat in pace, old girl.