On Saturday, we attended the Clayton art fair. It was a beautiful day, sunny, not to hot and not too cold. This is a relatively small art fair, about five blocks of booths. It is juried and the art is expensive. The few artists that we discussed this with, thought highly of this fair. For them it is a money maker. We got there early and had a jump on the crowds for a while. This allowed us to command the attention of the pictured balloon festooned minstrels and get a photo with them. How does she get that blue dress on? At the far end of the fair, we grabbed lunch at Herbie’s, an eatery that is usually too slammed to even get a table at.
For years, we missed this art fair, because it always coincided with the Bike MS charity ride. In the past, we committed to that event instead. We are older now and this year, we have travelled too much to participate in that ride. Last week, we attended a Team Kaldis dinner party, where we got together again with some old bike buddies. At that dinner, for remembrances sake, we played a video that was produced for the 2011 ride. It is a very well-done movie. Although the team still persists, looking back that year was probably its high point.
Kokopelli is a mythical figure in Native American culture who is often depicted as a humpbacked flute player with feathers on his head. The name Kokopelli is thought to come from the Zuni and Hopi word koko, which means God. This artwork was acquired at Indian Market in Santa Fe. This festival was a big draw that drew my parents all the way from Dallas. This work’s intricate design is more beautiful in real life than this photo can possibly show.
We had a couple of wins yesterday. We managed to reclaim the majority of dad’s savings from its estate limbo. Work continues to reclaim it all, but we are slowly making progress. Once his money is in our hands, I can distribute it to my bros. Our other big victory was more ephemeral. Frankly, we were left reeling after the realtor’s aesthetics coordinator visit, and it was for the silliest of reasons. She wanted to see a king-size bed in the primary bedroom, where Anne and I are currently sleeping. Even though we could buy a new bed and have it delivered for just a few hundred dollars, the waste involved with this strategy kind of stuck in our collective craw. That sleepless night we were lying awake in bed devising alternative plans. We figured that we could move the two twins from downstairs, shove them together to make a faux king and then haul the upstairs’ queen downstairs in their place. Easy-peasy. The next morning, we were pleasantly surprised when the realtor called and proposed the exact same plan. I know that it is silly to be niggling about such small stuff as the price of a cheap bed, but as I told our realtor that’s just us. However, now we have to move two beds.
Dan is overjoyed with the results from yesterday’s NYC mayoral election that all but installed Zohran Mamdani as its next mayor. He was crowing this morning about the almost autocratic levels of support that he had garnered in Dan’s own precinct. Gone are the days when New York can no longer have nice mayors.
Pictured is a coffee cup with a story. Last year, my brother Chris was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He believes that he caught this cancer from his exposure to the herbicide Roundup. After this was diagnosed, his oncologist prescribed Rituxan the first monoclonal antibody drug developed for cancer. So last year, in addition to caring for our already ailing father, he had to contend with his own illness. He was prescribed roughly half-a-dozen monthly infusions of the drug. Even after his first dose, there was a marked improvement. By the end of his regimen, he was pronounced cured. But this story began long before.
Rituxan was developed by IDEC Pharmaceuticals, a San Diego pharmaceutical company that focused on developing and commercializing targeted immuno-therapies for cancer and autoimmune diseases. In the early nineties, Kathy, Frank’s wife, was a director there. More particularly she was the project manager for the development of Rituxan. It made a big news splash at rollout and not in a good way as the $2,000 a dose cancer drug, which back then was deemed exorbitant. Times change. For Chris, Rituxan’s cure for cancer would have cost twelve-grand, but Medicare paid for everything. Such a deal! Anyway, in 2003, IDEC merged with Biogen, where Frank was working, to form Biogen-IDEC, which later became just Biogen. Kathy and Frank both retired shortly after the merger, sold their stock options and have been living the good life ever since. Later this week, Anne and I are planning on taking a break from “flinging” to stay as guests at their vacation rental, on the coast of Mendicino.
Wilber Wright Circling the Statue of Liberty in 1909, Dean Mosher, 2013
Yesterday, was a day of rest. We unpacked our bags, did some laundry, and paid the bills that had been waiting for our return. This morning, our house is wrapped in fog, an outside fog that matches my interior mental fog that hopefully enough coffee will dispel. There are more things to do today, as we pick up the pieces of our homelife. This day we will do some chores, make some phone calls, and then dive headfirst into the onrushing Christmas season, but first let us revel a little bit here in our recently concluded journeys.
This painting, in the newly reopened Air and Space Museum commemorates Wilbur Wright’s 1909 flight in NYC. Celebrating the achievements of Henry Hudson and Robert Fulton, Wright had agreed that he would make a flight. In exchange, the city would pay him $15K. What worried Wilbur was that his flights would be over water. On the morning of the flight, he had made a modification to the Flyer: Beneath the lower wing, he had slung a bright red canoe, a top-of-the-line Indian Girl canoe made by the Rushton Canoe Company, it featured a sturdy 16′ frame made of northern white cedar, which Rushton claimed was nearly a third lighter than other cedars. In essence, the canoe turned the Flyer into the world’s first floatplane.
Taking off, he arose and flew east. A man in the crowd exclaimed, “I believe he’s off for Philadelphia!” Charlie Taylor, Wright’s crew chief, corrected him: “No, he will round the Statue of Liberty.” And so, he did. Crossing between Ellis and Liberty islands, Wilbur steadily gained altitude, then began a turn to the left, closing the distance to Lady Liberty. At an altitude of 200′, he passed in front of the statue, his wingtips only a few hundred feet from her waist. He then flew back to Governors Island and landed, completing a flight of 20 miles.
Last night, Anne and I began this year’s fall theater season, with dinner and a show. We went to see the Rep’s House of Joy. Before the show, we had dinner at Cyrano’s, which has had a long and checkered tenure throughout our residence in Saint Louis. In our first year living here, while we were away on our honeymoon, it moved into where our favorite pizzeria had been, after its building had burnt. Then in the nineties there was that infamous “extra whip cream” incident. We’ll say no more about that here. Ever since then, Cyrano’s has remained in the regular rotation of dining establishments prefacing the Rep. Our visitations there, like with a lot of other things, kind of fell of the map, because of the pandemic. So, last night I was surprised to learn that Cyrano’s is now owned by Sugarfire, my favorite go to spot for BBQ.
Not to worry though, because Cyrano’s still features their signature ice cream desserts (with extra whip cream), as demonstrated nicely when a nearby family of three ordered the flambee for two. Prepared tableside, as her parents watched on, the little girl was enraptured by the spectacle, although the flames did startle her, but her eyes remained steadfast in happy anticipation. By the time that the dessert was finally served, she had the full attention of the entire restaurant.
Joy has a ghost story, a love story, political intrigue, fantasy, bawdy jokes, fight sequences and an assassination. This play is set in some unnamed emperor’s harem, during the 300-year rule of the Mughal Empire of what is now India. The Mughal’s are famous for the Taj Mahal, one of the seven wonders of the world and also a tomb for some dead emperor’s favorite wife. I had the good fortune to visit this place, when I was about the age of the little girl from Cyrano’s, in the fifties. It was an experience that was also enrapturing.
The play opens with a street urchin, who had recently beaten a man to death. She’s approached by the steward of the house, about becoming a harem guard, an all-female cloister where the empire’s royal women live. She agrees and discovers that this magical house will let women enter but not leave and won’t let men enter at all, except the emperor, who we never see. The only other person who is free to come and go as they wish is the steward, who is “both boy and girl”. Aside from the steward and the house, which is a character unto itself, the rest of the cast are all women.
To cover the gambit of outlined stories, the play regularly veers from one direction to another, leading to a convoluted plot. Also, our seating was quite different than normal, adding to the weirdness of the experience. We were in the second row, center. Where we normally sit, rows back, was closed off to seating. Still, the house last night was so small that not even half of the available seats were filled. Sitting where we were the action occurred all around us and often felt up close and personal. All-in-all the play was an unusual experience and we have been going to the Rep for over thirty years. So, that is saying something. What? I am still coming to grips with that.
Diatoms are single-celled alga which have a cell wall of silica. Many kinds are planktonic, and extensive fossil deposits have been found. When we were in the Garden this week, at the home gardening center, I noticed that many of the plants had been dusted with a fine white powder. I asked a gardener if it was an insecticide? In a sense is was and it wasn’t. It was diatomaceous earth.
Composed from the bones of millions of microscopic diatoms that over the millennia had built up into a sedimentary layer, diatomaceous earth is sold as a natural alternative to chemical insecticide. Its sharp silica bones act as an irritant to insects, getting into their exoskeleton’s joints and tearing them up. It is less dangerous to humans than conventional insecticides, but care in its handling must still be taken. It is much safer to the environment than most insecticides.
In the play that we saw this week, Mlima’s Tale, the actor portraying the elephant Mlima, first smears his torso and face with white powder, evoking the ritual body painting of African tribes. This powder has a way of transferring itself, as an emblem of complicity, as each player playing a link in the chain that is the illegal ivory trade, is marked with a white powdered handprint on their bodies. In this instance the white powder was likely talc, but I wonder if the choice of its white color was supposed to be evocative of powdered ivory. Powder created when the ivory tusks are carved into objects d’art, their final form.
