Picking My Battles

Katy-the-Wonder-Dog’s bladder still hasn’t learned to wake up an hour later on Saturday morning to let me sleep in one day a week, but today that was okay.  I was trying to sneak out for an early morning writing session at my favorite cafe and was running around the house like a silent thief as I popped my iPad into my purse full of glasses (a pair for reading, a pair for driving, a pair for drawing).   And there, as I as ready to sneak out, was Katy, wagging her tail, letting me know she was crossing her legs and that there were deer in the meadow across the way that needed barking at.

I set down my bag and got a good hold on her collar before opening the door and trotting out to her line.  Katy wagged her tail when she heard the  clicking sound of the clip and looked up at me for a quick neck rub.  I petted and rubbed while she wagged and slobbered for a minute, and then I remembered I needed a sketch pad.  

“I’ll be back in a few minutes,” I told her and went back into the house, wiping doggie slobber off of what I just realized was my bare leg.  

I wish I could say this was my first streaking adventure, but when we first moved to Vermont (a full decade before Google Earth came along), we quickly learned to appreciate certain aspects of country life. The solitude.  The privacy.  The freedom to make a mad dash to the laundry line for the work shirt you forgot to bring in the night before and only remembered after you were “ready” to step in the shower.  We’ve even taken advantage of a good rainstorm to get a ‘natural’ shower or two.

The proliferation of the knowledge that “we are being watched” by the tech gods in the sky – all the time – has tempered my high-velocity nudism, but sometimes it’s too easy to bask in convenience and imagined privacy.  Sometimes I just want to enjoy the privileges that come with being surrounded by acres of forest.  Even if it means risking a broken lense on a satellite camera.

 Now,two feet from the door, in the almost-altogether (I’d remembered to pull on my sweats earlier apparently), I raised my eyes to the heavens, silently imploring Google Satellite to stick to its policy of blurring details on the ground in order to spare America the image of an inadvertent exercise privacy run amok.  

I was already so late for the potluck that my contribution had required a stop at the grocery store for a deli-made salad (that looked better than anything I would have made) and a disposable pot-luck container to cover my tracks, so I felt more than a little guilty about even being tempted to stop.  But ye without sin can cast the first salad tong.

In my defense, there was a six foot banner hanging from the extended arm of the utility truck’s cherry picker advertising the sale, so there was no way I would be able to pass it twice without stopping. I restrained myself on the way out, but as the banner came into view on the way home, I decided it was a sign (a pretty good one too – there was no way you could miss it).  What happened next is a blur. I pulled over to park at the end of a line of cars.

The garage sale was a garage sale in name only.  In reality it was a three-barns-full-of-pretty-cool-stuff-I-aboslutely-didn’t-need-sale. My palms began to sweat as I walked up the driveway lined with furniture in reasonably good condition.

Now, our house needs more furniture like it needs a pet-door for our house-mouse population, but that didn’t keep my bargain antennae from quivering as I noticed a breakfast table and chairs for an outrageously good price (cherry or something like that, 4 chairs and pedestal table for $150 – not bad, right).   Obviously we have a perfectly good breakfast table, but I knew a reasonably-priced something-we-might-need-if-our-concrete-house was about to pop up on my radar.

And there it was – a sinful red velveteen loveseat for my studio (Virginia never mentioned how calling that room of your own a studio could cause you to go mad with power).  It had kind of a bohemian look that would completely clash with the rest of the room, and I loved it.  I began trying to figure out how to get it on top of my car without collapsing the ceiling and then I remembered help would be needed at the end and how happy the Big Guy was the last time I rolled down the driveway with a two-ton ten-dollar tag sale find that only needed a little TLC (stripping, sanding and staining) strapped to the top of my newly-dented minivan.  The couch would be as big a hit as a new puppy.

Then I remembered what I really needed was an easel – something that was clearly absent from this garage sale to end all garage sales.  And, oh yeah, I was late. Getting my heart palpitations under control, I stuffed my hands in my pockets and sauntered to the car feeling slightly less out-of-control, my rooftop clear and my conscience only slightly dented.

The size is different this year, but I’m basically repeating the same motions as last year, hoping for a better outcome than before.  It’s not something radically different that I want – looking for a completely altered ending from the same story would be the definition of insanity – a condition I know well.

But hopefully repeating the steps improves skill enough to make the end of the story a little happier each year.  That is the definition of gardening.

Thing1 is on record as detesting visits to art musuem.  Most of them don’t involve Skyping about the latest fart joke, so, to  a thirteen-year-old they are of little interest.  That’s why we decided to spend one of the Saturdays he was away at summer camp trolling the Bennington Museum with Thing2.

Thing2 is showing the first signs of intellectual independence, but, so far, he’s still happy to be dragged through an art exhibit, copying pictures and writing blog posts in his journal as he goes.  Sunday’s journey through the Grandma Moses wing of the museum was no different.  Once a resident of neighboring Hoosick Falls, Grandma Moses’s depictions of rural life at the turn of the last century captivated Thing2.  Some of the landmarks were familiar as were some of the rituals of haying and sugaring off, and, for him they were as relevant as if they had been photographs of last weekends hay wagons.

The relevance of the paintings were captivating for me as well but for other reasons in addition to their color and life.  Even though we’re both self-taught/directed in our art education and each of our styles could be considered primitive, I don’t identify with Grandma Moses.

She was a tireless worker (i.e., good at the work of housework while learning to see), and my house looks like it’s auditioning for a season of hoarders).  We’re both artists, but (as we learned from a bio-pic play and the introductory blurb at the musuem) she never seemed to worry if she was good enough to be painting.  She just painted Washington County, NY as she saw and felt it.

It’s a style that’s often imitated, often with great skill, and until Saturday, I had thought of trying to copy that style to legitimize my own amateur technique.  It was only as we studied the colors and brush strokes of the Sugaring Off painting that I realized that what makes her style impossible to imitate is that no artist can true to Grandma’s vision.  They can only be true to their own, even if they have to stumble through most of their journey.

 

It’s not often that an entire town comes out to celebrate one person.  But that’s what’s happening in Cambridge, NY this weekend. July 4th weekend 2014 isn’t just a national holiday, it’s a weekend to celebrate the magic of Benjie White, the person responsible for this cauldron of creativity in upstate New York.

A granter of wishes we didn’t even know we had, Benjie has given the community access to world-class theater, dance and opera, he’s introduced countless kids to a world of art and music, and revived the creative spark in many of their parents, including the two parents in the cool cave at Minister Hill.

Without that magic spell, I would still be scribbling my epiphanies into a notebook that would end up in a drawer.  I would NOT be drawing again, and I would NOT be living with Lenny of Of Mice and Men (he somehow manages not to strangle me).  The magic we found at Benjie’s infected us with opportunities and connecting us with a congregation of other spell-bound members of the community – people we might never even have met otherwise.

Two years after my first brush with this magical place, I’m now heavily involved in the Ministry of Encouragement –  a cult formed by another Hubbard Hall mentor extraordinaire, bestselling author Jon Katz, and it would never have happened without that first visit to the church of possibility in the middle of Cambridge. It would never have happened without Hubbard Hall and especially without it’s instigator, Benjie White.

UPDATE –   Check out the new schedule and find season tickets here:  2012-2013 Season

 

Original Post:

There’s something magical in Cambridge, and while this post may seem like a shameless plug for the place that’s making it happen, I’m actually hoping that the writing will be like the rubbing of a genie’s lamp.

 

My husband was lured to the Hubbard Hall’s Theatre Company by another actor from Arlington. The invitation came at just the right time – he had engaged in a protracted battle with partial blindness that ended in stalemate – and at first he thought they had found the wrong man for the part. It turned out that the part – playing a slow-witted monk in a medieval monastary – was exactly what he needed and at exactly the right time.

Working, as many Vermonters do, at a job that sees little change or opportunity for growth (but for very nice people) and depressed from numerous healthcare battles that seemed to pop out of nowhere, he suddenly found himself under the spell of a company of players who had more faith in his acting potential than he did. And, while the play was important, it was the company that was the thing. This seemingly diverse tightly-knit group opened the seams long enough to let him in, and there he has stayed. And then the magic grew, and he invited our son in.

Thing 1 is not a huge fan of art museums, so we knew taking him to something with word Shakespeare in it could end badly, but my husband was enjoying the theater so much that he decided to drag someone along, and Thing 1 happened to be handy (Thing 2 wasn’t theater-trained yet). I watched him ride away, slumped in the front seat, determined to show Dad how wrong he was about Shakespeare and theater. Three hours later they were charging back down the driveway, laughing and chatting, and Thing 1 was hooked. He hasn’t missed any of Dad’s performances since.

But the Hubbard Hall effect had just begun. As our family became friendlier with members of the theatre company, I began searching for writing classes. My harassment of Hubbard Hall’s artistic director paid off, when he announced that he had convinced Jon Katz to lead a writing workshop. The discovery that there was a screening process was a worry, but I got lucky and got in.

We kicked off the first session with nervous but friendly introductions, and I think all of us were nursing a few insecurities at the beginning of the evening. But it was clear that our esteemed (I still say fearless) leader was not willing to feed those demons or to foster any competition or back-biting. When we left, the spell was taking effect, and within the week, we were reaching out to each other from our respective corners, marveling at the impact the group and the Project was having on our psyches.

Both boys are now fully under the spell at summer workshops offered by Hubbard Hall, and my mornings are spent working at a picnic table under a tree on their green. From my vantage point I see Cambridge residents flow in and out of morning fitness and music classes and, as they stop to commune with each other, I realize that the magic in this place isn’t just about theater or art or music or writing or any of the other educational opportunities it provides. It is about the connections it creates far beyond its borders. So as I rub my lamp, my wish is for all of us who are lucky enough to be touched by this magic to take a little piece of it out into the world and let it grow again.

Signed prints of the Hubbard Hall genie, matted to fit an 11 x 14 are available on archival paper for $20 + $3 shipping, with 10% of each purchase going to Hubbard Hall.  I can take checks or send a paypal invoice.  Email me at rachel@www.pickingmybattles.com for  more information.

If the black fly is the state bug of Vermont and granite the state crop, the state snapshot has to be the green weedy field dotted with brown and black-and-white dairy cows set against purplish mountain backdrop.  This is a snapshot (minus the cows which weren’t there the last time I drove by) I see every spring morning while dropping the boys at school on one of the many days we miss the bus.

I always have the same thought as I go by my favourite snapshot, set next to the Battenkill River across from our rec park:  that would make a great painting.

And then it’s gone and the road before me fills up with my to-do list for the day.

 

I was an easy convert last year to the Ministry of Encouragement over at the Facebook Open Group for Bedlam Farm organized by bestselling author Jon Katz. I’d been fortunate enough to spend the previous year being mentored by Jon at a workshop at Hubbard Hall, a local community theater and arts center in Cambridge, NY, and moving to the group was the next logical extension.

Over the last year, I’ve renewed my faith at two other workshops, by connecting personally with other members of the Open Group, and by trying to encourage other artists to follow their dreams. I’m not extroverted by nature, but something about this group and its ministry overwhelms shyness and doubt.  It opens the door to a new relationship with the world.  It creates possibilities that may not even have been dreamt of before.

Trying to pay it back would be like trying to pay back your parents for giving you life, something this group and its ministry has given its member artists and writers..  That’s something you can only pay forward by honoring that gift in yourself and encouraging it to grow and others.