Doodle #5.
Doodle a quiet moment.
This is the San Marcos River edged by willow trees and grass and such.
Well, it is if I say it is.
Here’s a better picture.
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Prompt from 365 Days of Doodling by Carin Channing.
Doodle #5. A Quiet Moment
Tag: doodles
Doodle #4. History of Hair
Doodle #4.
Doodle something you love about yourself.
Doodle #4: I thought about skipping #4 because I couldn’t think of anything. But skipping one might lead to skipping two or three, or… It’s a slippery slope. So I settled for the question mark.
Then I remembered hair. We’ve had our battles, but for the most part I like it. Neil, my stylist, told me if he ever puts on a show, he will take me along as his model. I’ve been taken to spelling contests, declamation contests, prose reading contests, ready writing contests, and typing contests, but at each I had to do something. Neil is the only person to suggest I could just sit and let people look at me.
About that typing contest: Friday morning, my teacher thought I could type. Friday afternoon, she knew I couldn’t. She never said a word of reproach to me, but I’m sure she wished I’d just sat and let people look at me. What she said in the teachers’ lounge I can imagine.
But back to hair: Here’s a personal chronology:
*Bald plus curls.
*In vogue: the ponytail.
My ponytail was so successful that the neighbor’s granddaughter, Connie, wanted one and wanted it now. Her mother, thinking way outside the box, pulled up what hair Connie had in back and put a rubber band around it. Then she cut strips of newspaper and stuck the ends under the rubber band. Instant ponytail.
*Gone with the ponytail.
Weary of doing battle every morning over tangles, my mother and I agreed a new ‘do was in order. Dixie at the beauty shop whacked off the ponytail. Somehow, the curls went, too. Cowlicks stayed.
*Pain.
Pink foam rollers. Brush rollers. Bobby pins. Hair dryers. Teasing combs. Hairspray. Hairspray combined with high humidity. Wishing for the ponytail.
*Short and… Short and straight. Short and Afro. Short and straight. Short and gray. Short and rinse. Short and gray. Curls are back. Don’t know why.
*… shorter.
Doodle #3. What I Want to Be When I Grow Up
Doodle #3.
When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up? Doodle it in the simple way a child would.
When I was four, I wanted to be Davy Crockett.
I had the official outfit, complete with coonskin cap, and a charred mop handle named Old Betsy, and I spent a lot of time in the back yard hiding behind the butane tank and shooting bears and Indians. I would have made a good Davy Crockett. I knew the song by heart and was happy to belt it out for anyone who asked.
But somewhere along the line I lost focus–maybe when the TV show was canceled–and by the time I was eight, I had my heart set on growing up and wearing very high heels and smoking Winston cigarettes and leaving a red lipstick stain on the filter, like my cute little red-headed aunt Betty did. She gave me a pair of decommissioned very high heels for play clothes. I tied an old sheet around my waist and clomped up and down our concrete driveway, holding a candy Winston in the approved fashion and looking teddibly sophisticated. It’s a wonder I didn’t fall and break my neck.
Actually, I wanted to grow up and be Betty. But I didn’t have red hair. You couldn’t be Betty without having red hair.
Well, anyway. By the time I was ten and had outgrown Betty’s size 4½B shoes–she was my cute little red-headed aunt–I knew that wearing spike heels and smoking wouldn’t be quite enough for a career. I also knew that if I even thought about taking a puff of a real cigarette I would be grounded until I was older than Betty. So I settled on my third and final choice:
I would grow up and be Roberta Peters.
I would wear low-cut gowns with fitted waists and big, swishy skirts and sing at the Metropolitan Opera.
I would include lyrics here, but the only ones I’ve located online aren’t nearly so amusing as those Ms. Peters sang, and I refuse to settle. If I ever find my opera book, I’ll come back and fill in the blank. The book is around somewhere, in a box or maybe just under something. Many of my possessions are currently under something.
The doodle depicting my career choice shouldn’t require commentary, but I’ll comment anyway, just in case. As you might have inferred, the ha ha ha‘s are taken from “The Laughing Song.” The notes rising from my/Ms. Peters’ right hand to the top of her head symbolize the range the singer covers at the end of the song. I think it goes from D above middle C to a high D-flat. When I find my opera book, I’ll check that. Some singers work their way up. The genuine articles make the jump from low to high with nothing between. No safety net.
Here’s Roberta Peters singing “The Laughing Song” in German. The language doesn’t really matter, nor do the lyrics. The voice is everything.
Although this blog is dedicated to telling the truth, mainly, I’m going break with tradition and tell the truth whole, plain, and unvarnished:
I still want to be Roberta Peters when I grow up.
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Doodling prompt from 365 Days of Doodling by Carin Channing
Doodle 2. The Crossword, Sort Of
Doodle 2.
Doodle one of your favorite things to do.
My favorite thing is to fly to Albany, rent a car, get a hotel room in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and spend several days driving up U.S. Route 7 to Burlington, Vermont, and down U.S. Route 7 to Lenox, Massachusetts (Edith Wharton’s house), and up to Burlington, and down to Lenox, and then turning east to Amherst (Emily Dickinson’s house), and on to Lexington and Concord (Emerson’s, Hawthorne’s, the Alcotts’, Margaret Sidney’s, etc., house…) But that’s more of a video than a doodle.
So I chose to draw my Saturday morning occupation, the Sunday New York Times Crossword Puzzle. We don’t subscribe to the Times, so I wait till it comes out in the Austin American-Statesman and do it retroactively.
Working the puzzle is a two-step process.
Step One: I start. Sometimes I finish the whole thing or leave only a few squares empty. Sometimes it goes fast. Sometimes I suffer and struggle but persevere. Sometimes I get mad and read Dear Abby instead.
I use a pen. It’s better to blot out wrong answers than to erase and make holes in the paper.
Step Two: When I’ve gone as far as I can go, I hand the paper to David. He fills in the rest. In other words, I do the easy part and he does the part that uses the other 90% of the brain.
Here’s a current photo of today’s Step One. It’s not as neat and tidy as I’d like because (a) Ernest the Cat was draped across my right forearm, pinning it to the arm of the chair, while I wrote; (b) Ernest the Cat insisted on nudging the pen while I wrote; (c) I woke up in a nasty mood and hadn’t worked my way out, and superior penmanship wasn’t a priority.
Yesterday I veered off course and skipped the Times puzzle, and because these things have to be done in the proper sequence, the Los Angeles Times puzzle, which I normally work on Sundays, will have to wait till tonight. Or tomorrow. Or whenever.
In other words, until the nasty mood has passed, I may do no puzzles at all. I may instead hop a plane to Albany and spend the rest of the year visiting every literary house in New England.
Doodle prompt from 365 Days of Doodling, by Carin Channing
Doodle 1. Don’t Judge, Mrs. Pollock
Doodle 1.
Doodle something abstract, using shapes and only one color.
Words & Wine Wednesday at Austin’s Writing Barn featured Carin Channing discussing her book 365 Days of Doodling: Discovering the Joys of Being Creative Every Day.
Ms. Channing didn’t know she was a doodler until she was forty, when she accepted an online 30-day Doodle Challenge. When the month was up, she began doodling with friends… and with strangers… and then she started teaching doodling.
Why? Because doodling is–I’m pulling from her long list of adjectives–“fun… liberating… fun… energizing… youthfulizing… clarifying… fun…”
I’ve never been a doodler. I have a heavy touch and a tight grip. My pencil doesn’t sweep lightly, freely, and steadily across the page. The pictures on my paper don’t look like the pictures in my head. Frustration guaranteed.
But at Words & Wine, Ms. Channing made doodling sound as much fun as her book claims it is. She handed out paper and markers and invited us to draw.
I used the prompt “Draw how your day started.”
The picture wasn’t worth a thousand words, so I added some. The zigzaggy lumps that look like armadillos are cats.
David is a word person, too, but he employs more subtlety:
Ms. Channing’s books were, like Mt. Everest, there, so I bought one.
Today I did my first official doodle, displayed at the top of the post.
Didn’t Jackson Pollock’s wife say to him, “But you have to abstract from something. What are you abstracting from?” (If Mrs. Pollock didn’t really say that, Marcia Gay Harden said something similar in the movie, which is close enough.)
I quashed the dither by turning my pencil on its side and making a blurry square, and another one, and then a couple of ovals, and another blurry square, and another oval… and the ovals began to look like eyes and a mouth. An oval blur in one of the eye-ovals looked like an iris, so I added a blur to the other eye-oval. That made the eyes focus. I restrained myself from putting a ladybug on the shoulder.
So much for abstraction. Some of us, I guess, abstract to rather than from.*
Where creativity is the goal–and this is oh, so important–judgment must be silent. As Mr. Pollock no doubt said to his wife.
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*I write that way, too.
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Typewriter Rodeo, who create “custom, on-the-spot poems for event guests, using vintage typewriters,” was also featured at Words & Wine Wednesday. The typewriters are beautiful. More about that in a later post.
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Kathy Waller 