Yes, I have run away to Hawaii – the southern tip of the island of Oahu. The picture above is a wedding venue within walking distance of the Obama estate (via the beach). You can’t actually see his estate from the road.
Path leading to beach. On Oahu people cannot restrict beach access. Even ex-Presidents.
The second image is from a small botanical garden near the Obama estate which is free to local residents and rather difficult to find!
This tile mural was installed on the masonry wall of the Orinda Community Center. To get close enough for a photograph you have to climb the stairs leading to the adjacent library. Thus the slanted angle.
Care to guess what it is a “visual metaphor” for? Here are a few clues:
Above the bull are images of people many of whom are glued to their iPhones. Transposed in front of them is a figure all in white. Why is he running? Is he a cricket player? Do you recognize the climate activist hidden amongst the crowd? How about the political sign?
Below is a close up of the bull – note the palm trees blowing in the wind etched on his torso. Humm, palm trees blowing in the wind … a hurricane?
And then there’s the crumbled figure at the bull’s feet. He’s not dressed like a matador. He’s dressed like a farmer. What does he represent?
Surrounding the the bull (on the red tiles) are images of wild animals – an owl, a lion and a wolf and others. On the blue tiles (and admittedly harder to see) are images of cartoon animals. I think that’s Goofy on the upper left.
I was completely stumped. What on earth was the artist trying to say? A murderous bull with hurricane tattoos, people who only see the world through the lens of their social media, a cricket player trying to run away from the whole bizarre scene?
Here is the official explanation.
Apparently it’s either La Course Camarguise or the Death of James Merry (a Scottish farmer who wanted to be a matador and practiced his skills by wrestling with a young bull. All went well until the bull grew to his mature size and then well …)
I don’t know if there’s any difference between teasing a bull in the bullring or wrestling a bull in a muddy field. Granted, in the bullring you might have a better chance of surviving. What am I missing?
We had to put in a new retaining wall and fix a drainage problem which required a lot of dirt moving and unearthed tons of rocks. Literally. The entire project was supposed to take a week. It took over a month. I just wrote the final check.
I began noticing many smooth rocks were being unearthed. The kind of rocks that are gentle to bare feet. The Mexican guys who did most of the work must have thought I was nuts, stacking piles of silty stones along the new retaining wall, but I grew up in Nevada where rock collecting used to be a very popular hobby. Admittedly most people were looking for arrowheads.
Amazing what you can find in nature. An art gallery once the silt of ages is washed away.
Peter gave himself up for lost, and shed big tears;
but his sobs were overheard by some friendly sparrows,
who flew to him in great excitement and implored him to exert himself.
Lately I’ve found inspiration from an unlikely source. Care to guess who the Peter in the above quote is?
A plaque thanking all the contributors to the park’s playground for …..humm, what age group could that be?
A mural I’ve never noticed before titled “Bear and Friends.” What’s that in the top right corner?
A house on the hill with an infinity pool and a roof top helicopter pad? Oh my, do you think that might be Bear’s home?
Meanwhile the Starlight Players are getting ready for another production. The last one of their season, LeFanu’s Carmilla.
Check out other #WordlessWednesday posts at Hugh’s place.
I’ve never been a big fan of circuses. I always have visions of the tightrope walker slipping and falling head first into the path of an elephant who’d been whipped into obedience a wee too many times. Or the clown on meth who flips out and decides to randomly fire into the audience. Only with real bullets and not water balloons. And then there’s the evil ringmaster with his Snidley Whiplash mustache!
Luckily my parents much preferred torturing us on the ski slopes or on rocky, dusty trails into the back country. Bears versus demented clowns, hum, I don’t know. Which one would you prefer?
However, many years ago I visited a friend in Las Vegas who was the “queen of props” for Cirque du Soleil’s Mystere and she was able to wrangle us “very special seats” for the midnight show. Despite my fear of clowns, we just couldn’t pass up very special seats to a Vegas show even if it was a circus. I hadn’t seen Jo for many years and was surprised that my brilliant friend, a person so well read and so knowledgeable in so many fields, would find joy and fulfillment dealing with, as she called them, “childish Russian acrobats with garlic tinged breath.” But she did.
Just before midnight, we slipped through a guarded back door and then rode the freight elevator up, up, up to a room which was basically a glass bird cage suspended from the ceiling. There, a team of technicians monitoring the sound and light equipment greeted us with a list of instructions:
Our “seats” were actually a bench that faced a wall of windows sloping dangerously forward. Far, far below we could see the stage and the audience as they trickled in to find their seats. To be in that box as the theater went dark and all you could see were the muted lights on the various instrumental panels was … well I couldn’t breathe. It became even more surreal when several acrobats on swings dropped down from the ceiling, their faces so close to the glass we could see them chewing gum!
Then the beating of the giant taiko drums announced the start of the show. The acrobats flipped over backwards and dropped headfirst down towards the audience as search lights highlighted the startled faces in the audience. The acrobats flew over the audience like the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz until this creature appeared.
The story line is impossible to follow as act after act explodes upon the stage, each one more daring and mind-blogging than the one before. If you’ve never seen a Cirque du Soleil performance, it’s hard to believe the acrobats, dancers, contortionists and magicians are really human beings. We were bedazzled, shocked and almost dizzy with excitement as we left the magic lightbox and exited into the now quiet casinos of the Treasure Island Resort.
Jo was dying. I think she lasted another year and it was a rough year. But the cast of Cirque du Soleil all signed a giant Get Well card for their “Queen of Props” which she cherished until the end.
And that’s where I got the idea for Flipka, the psychiatrist who ran away and joined the circus.
Every Friday I will be posting a snippet from the sequel to Flipka. If you’re interested in following along, welcome! All feedback, be it fair or foul, is welcome.
SERGEI SLEPT ON A COT in one of the prop rooms, although never the same cot and never the same prop room. Thus, finding him in that labyrinth of costumes, backdrops and props was nearly impossible but … I knew where he showered every morning.
“Flipka!” He said, emerging from the row of showers in all his hairy-as-a-Russian bear and built-like-a-Polish ox nakedness.
“Haven’t they caught you yet?” I asked as he pulled a clean towel from the bin and began drying off, armpits first.
“When it comes to the ladies, I never tell,” he winked. Sergei claimed that the male acrobats farted garlic when they showered. He didn’t mind garlic on someone’s breath but expelled via the anus was a different story. And so he had taken up the habit of showering in the dressing rooms used by the showgirls and female acrobats. Generally after all of them had left for the day. When he’d saved enough money by sleeping in the prop rooms, showering with the ladies, and eating throwaways from the all-you-can-eat buffets, Sergei planned to bring his entire family over from Moscow, and then, they were going to take over Vegas. And I believed him because he knew things about the town that no one knew, not even Hyman. He claimed that he’d stumbled upon the real plans for the Strip. The secret passageways and tunnels unknown to any city planner or building inspector. He would never say where he’d found them or where they were hidden because those plans were more valuable to him than all the “gold in the Kremlin.”
“I’ll get right to the point: I need you to get me out of here,” I said.
“I heard you meet with big man.”
“Yes. I may be a little paranoid but —”
“Last year we hear stories of his daughter’s big rescue. See pictures in newspaper. Ha!” Sergei rarely believed anything he read in the newspapers or saw on television. “You think girls in Switzerland … in mountains … yodeling? And big man pays? Ha! Fairy stories. Girls in newspaper … girls they show on television … actors.”
“I didn’t see any of the news coverage. I was —“
“And then we hear our Flipka very sick. We send get well card!” He chuckled. “Everybody sign!”
“Yes I got your card.” The news that a trio of missing teenage girls had been found in the clutches of a polygamist cult had failed to ignite the East Coast media. It was Nevada, after all. Another planet in another solar system. A place where stuff like that happened all the time. Didn’t it? “I wasn’t sick. I was deported. Someone didn’t want me around when the story broke.”
“Hyman?”
“I didn’t think so … although I’m starting to wonder…” What kind of a father would try to profit off a bogus story about his own daughter? What kind of father?
“We have to find new prop lady.” Sergei continued drying his body. After the pits, he dried his hairy arms, then his hairy legs and finally … his considerable groin sac. “I get you out of here, Flipka,” he mumbled tossing the towel into the dirty bin. “I’m thinking afterwards … steak for breakfast. At Steakhouse. With a Stoli. A bottle of Stoli.”
I handed him a couple of twenties. “I didn’t come with a lot of cash —”
“And some cigars …” He added as he pulled on grey slacks and grabbed a plaid shirt.
“You louse! After I helped with the immigration!“
He threw back his head and laughed. “I kid you, little one. You lost sense of humor?”
“Then I’ll take the twenties back …”
“Ha! I have new gaffer at eleven. We have steak at Steakhouse with Stoli then he tell me why is best person for job. Ha! Follow me. We go fast.” he said as he began walking toward one of the prop rooms. “First, we suit up!”
“Suit up?”
I may need to take next week off. We’re having work done around the house and have already had one emergency and one haggle with the contractor … those of you who live in old houses know what I mean!
A description:
Unseen in the branches of a young redwood tree.
Perhaps alone.
Perhaps lonely.
Perhaps a mourning dove.
Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps
But hoping to be ...
unseen.
Seen,
By the lone lantern,
nearby,
as the sun sets,
and prepares for the hollow moon.
Every Friday I will be posting a snippet from the sequel to Flipka. If you’re interested in following along, welcome! All feedback, be it fair or foul, is welcome.
“Absolutely … Positively … NOT!”
Hyman shrugged and then continued digging into the one meal he allowed himself a day: Breakfast, which always consisted of (if he could be believed) a barely cooked Porterhouse steak, topped with three eggs sunny-side up and washed down with prune juice. We were in the Headliner Room on the top floor of the resort, hardly a cozy spot at seven in morning with the cleaning crew emptying ashtrays and vacuuming the debris from the night before.
“That proves it,” he said between bloody mouthfuls. ‘You’re crazy. I knew it. All shrinks are crazy.”
No wonder he likes to negotiate deals over a steak, I thought. Watching him tear into raw flesh would intimidate the hell out of anyone. “I won’t debate that point but the answer is still no.” I rose to my feet and took one last look around a room generally off-limits to mere mortals. It was smaller than I’d imagined with decadent, red leather booths and high mirrored ceilings. Perfect for intimate concerts. All of the greats played in the Headliner Room, generally to private audiences; audiences consisting of wealthy, powerful people … some had unfathomable fame while others stood in the shadows and quietly controlled Vegas. After a night of schmoozing, they’d left behind a fog of cigar smoke and costly French perfume.
“Sit Doc. You haven’t been excused. I tell you what. I’ll give you a hour to think on it.”
I slowly sat my bottom back into the chair as ordered. “How good of you but I have to catch a flight at three and I still have packages to ship…”
“I’ve already taken care of your packages. Hell, I even ordered you a limo for the airport.”
“I’ll take a cab, thanks. Last time I got into one of your limos I ended up with a new life and I kind of like the one I have now …”
He looked up from his plate. “ I overestimated you, Butters. I didn’t peg you for the kind of broad to go all Tammy Wynette on me. You know show business. Sex sells. That’s just the way it is.”
“Yeah, that’s me. Tammy Wynette. Listen Mr. Hyman, I don’t understand why you can’t produce this atrocity without me. Get another psychiatrist to act as ⏤ what was it? ⏤ technical advisor?”
“You know all that psychological mumbo-jumbo. Besides I wanna to get my hands dirty on this project.” He motioned to his lawyer who’d been sitting by the stage absorbed in a phone call. The man hung up the phone and walked over carrying a thick notebook. “Just sign the contract. You don’t have to read the damn script,” he said as the lawyer dumped the pile in front of me.
“Bullshit. You know if I put my name on some bogus script that it’ll shut me up forever. But, here’s the thing. I wasn’t planning to say anything, really … as long as the girls are okay who cares what really happened? The government sealed those mines and so their secret is … Wait a minute, you haven’t even told me how Meredith is doing.”
His hooded eyes flickered slightly. “She’s in Switzerland at that fancy psychiatric place. You ever been to that country? It’s boring as shit.”
“But is she okay?”
“Listen, you want more money? Because we can get the mother fuckers to up their offer.” He had no idea how his daughter was doing. Nor did he care. Over the past year I’d often wondered about Hyman. Why had he suddenly shown up in Ely on the day that the girls were “rescued?” And why had he footed the bill for all three girls when he hadn’t even tried to get his daughter’s drug conviction overturned? It just didn’t make sense.
He threw a pristine white napkin into the bloody mess he’d made on the table. ”Simmons!,” he bellowed at the lawyer who was standing a foot away. “Make sure you get the signed contract before she leaves the hotel!”
With that, he plowed out of the room.
Next Friday, August 23: What does Sergei know? Character Study: Sergei … at least what little is known about him.
What’s it? Something you wouldn’t want to fall into.
Saying nothing in particular 