Throwback Thursday: American Boyfriends Edition

Fun fact: The house in Grant Wood's American Gothic is a real place that Grant Wood happened upon in his August 1930 wanderings around Iowa. It's in the city of Eldon 120 miles southwest of Cedar Rapids, so Grant Wood had to do some serious wandering to stumble upon it. He made a sketch of the house, painted his sister and his dentist in front of it when he got home to Cedar Rapids, and got a measly $300 when he sold it to the Art Institute of Chicago after entering it in a competition there.

Other fun fact: There's a visitors' center near the house that has an array of calico dresses and overalls you can borrow for keepsake photos, but if your boyfriend at the time is a no-fun stick in the mud you have to resort to getting photos in whatever you happen to be wearing.

Other fun facts: The house is built in the Carpenter Gothic style. The curve-up-to-a-point top of the Gothic window is called an ogive. The 1930 painting (Grant Wood conceived of and completed it in a matter of weeks) is in the Modernist style. You're welcome.

Flashback Tuesday: Aging Gracefully Edition

American artist Ivan Albright painted his lurid, mildewy Picture of Dorian Gray in 1944, inspired by Oscar Wilde’s 1891 novel of the same name. It hangs just around the corner from Grant Wood’s iconic 1930 American Gothic in the Art Institute of Chicago’s American Art wing.

But the point of this post is that some stupid white-shirted jerk totally photobombed this handsome, distinguished formal portrait of me.

Three Potential Area Rugs And Some Badass Camo Cargo Shorts You WISH You Were Cool Enough To Wear: A Study In Blues

Here are two pieces of furniture that I’ve Liquid Golded to a brutal sheen and pushed back to their expertly trimmed baseboards and rich-people-blue walls

But I can't decide if the Dr. Seuss art is whimsically ironic or cluelessly age-inappropriate for a man in his dotage. The panels would fit perfectly between the mirror and the soffit (with some AP Geometry measuring to make sure they’re centered and even and level) and I have nothing else I could put there. I AM SO TORN.

#UnwantedIvanka

Choose your adventure wisely

More things I found in my storage unit yesterday

• Clear salt and pepper shakers shaped like cats that I got as a housewarming gift when I bought my first house in 1993
• A teacup from my grandmother’s Blue Willow china
• Chinese-inspired objets d’art are called chinoiserie
• You’re welcome
• An Army rubber ducky that I got from my friend Mike who's a kick-ass Army veteran
• A plaque I bought at the Museu Picasso in Barcelona with a shimmery sky-blue frame that has never gone with anything in any house I’ve ever owned
• Picasso is tacky and his stupid “art” will never catch on
• Loser
• An authentic finger bowl or flower vase or vomit bucket or who knows what the hell it’s for that I rescued when I survived the Titanic sinking
• Or maybe it’s just a reproduction that I bought at a Titanic exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago
• At my age, my memory is shot so its provenance is now lost to the ages
• So shut up
• A French sign about reading on the toilet that I bought at a Euro-charming little shop in Montmartre high above Paris
• A Norwegian kitchen witch that I cross-stitched and framed at Skogfjorden language camp in 1983
• Shut up
• It’s totally not gay
• So shut up
• A stone coaster printed with a vintage Eiffel Tower print
• Though it’s neither real stone nor authentic vintage
• But I like it so shut up

Things I unearthed in this weekend’s storage-unit excavation, from left to right:

* All those random electronics cords that the world has been searching for in our collective, almost desperate random-electronics-cords drought (sorry!)
* A rubber keychain from a Chicago marathon that I will neither ever use nor apparently throw away
* A half-used container of Body Glide that—get your minds out of the gutter—distance runners use to prevent chafing on rubby body parts and that I’ve used only as a very precautious precaution because I’ve never really had chafing issues but I’d rather not discover that I do halfway through a long, sweaty run
* Art magnets for the art-magnet collection I forgot I once started and clearly never spent much time growing
* The knee brace that got me through my first marathon (can you tell I stumbled on a big box of running stuff in my excavation?)
* A crackle-finish ceramic hand that I bought during my Decorating With Fake Body Parts Phase that if I remember correctly also included a phrenology head, a skull and a fully articulated skeleton on a fake-old-timey stand (all of which no doubt await discovery in a future excavation trip to the storage unit)
* Two souvenir Disney luggage tags that currently contain business cards from four addresses ago, but that’s about to be fixed.

I also found an unopened package of razors and a slightly crumpled box of #10 envelopes that seemed a shame to just throw away, but that’s all so unimportant that I won’t even mention them here.

One of us is wearing a plunging V-neck T-shirt. One of us is a bust.

A gay’s powers are never stronger than the morning after a fierce haircut

Do you have ANY IDEA how hard it is to take a decent helicopter selfie in a hooded sweatshirt? DO YOU?

The hood opens around you like a massive poppy in full bloom and you end up with a dinner-plate halo like you’re a minor saint in a Medieval altar triptych.

Anyway, when you stave off a bipolar episode by sleeping all day and then chug a pre-workout shake before an evening trip to the gym, you end up wide awake at 11:45 pm. But I wore red for International Women’s Day and I gave a little hug to (I think) every woman at rehearsal tonight (though we were a bit chaotic so I may have missed somebody but please know that you’re all kick-ass and I love all of you every day) and even though I always feel guilty when I miss work, I count today as good but I just REALLY want to fall asleep now.

Iowa stuff, yo

I LITERALLY JUST HAD TO PROP DOOR OPEN WITH MY LEG SO I COULD GET OUT OF MY DAMN CAR

#SparksOfJoy: A weekly post about something that makes me happy

"Sunday," Sunday in the Park with George, Stephen Sondheim: Never has a song captured me on so many levels and left me with goosebumps every time I hear it. Sunday in the Park with George is one of the first shows I ever saw on Broadway, and "Sunday" finishes Act I by bringing together all the characters we've met as individual people as they stand and relocate and adjust as a growing ensemble and ultimately form a living, singing, haunting, as-close-as-humanly-possible re-creation of Georges Seurat's defining painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. The score of the entire show is peppered with quick little notes that evoke the peppered-dot painting style of Pointillism, and the dreamy lyrics meander through the endless combinations of colors Pointillist painters used to create light and shade and depth and movement in their work. And the last sung lyrics--"... on an ordinary Sunday!"--stand in gloriously stark contrast to the shimmering, fortissimo, every-possible-note chording in the orchestra that is powerfully, thrillingly anything but normal.

Good morning! Does this Vogue-does-Disney-princesses art installation in my bedroom make me look gay?

Or does it just make Belle’s hand look like something you’d find on a Gold Lobster sampler platter?

#SparksOfJoy: A weekly post about something that makes me happy

Grant Wood: Daughters of Revolution (1932): This relentlessly horizontal painting features three dour spinstresses--one holding a teacup in my grandmother's Blue Willow china pattern--standing self-righteously in front of Emanuel Leutz's painting Washington Crossing the Delaware. The local Daughters of the Revolution chapter was furious with Grant Wood for studying the art of stained glass in Germany--the enemy!--soon after World War I as he prepared to create a massive stained-glass window commemorating the soldiers of America’s last six wars. So he painted the DAR spinsptisses standing in front of a cherished Revolutionary War painting depicting a cherished moment in American folklore ... that was painted by a German. It was a brilliant political cartoon encapsulated in a masterful Regionalist painting by Cedar Rapids’ still-celebrated native son.

Snowpacolypse!

Of all the 10-Year Challenge parodies, this one made me laugh my head off

#lookoutside

This week’s New Yorker cover art is titled “Welcome to Congress"