Today my beautiful lady has been filled with what I believe are gerbera daisies. Cost for flowers, about $20 @ Trader Joe’s.
I had gerberas in my wedding bouquet by necessity and not choice. Unfortunately my April wedding came to be about two weeks after the ranunculus were spent and gone. I wanted ranunculus, because they have a wind-blown look. I wanted orange, and my sister had an orange dress. We both had our dresses made by Kevin Simon, who seems to have vaporized since she once had a very pricey store on Abbott Kinney Boulevard. Kevin made everything in linen, and she was a master of sort of vintage-farm looking clothing, like late 1800s. I loved her work and could not afford any of it, so I splurged on my dress and my sister’s, assuming I was only getting married once. A regular skirt at Kevin’s was over $500. My wedding dress and my sister’s MOH dress combined were $1000. The back bottom of my dress had tulle orange flowers pinned to it. My dress was linen with a silk slip, and my sister’s was orange silk. I’ve since lost about 70 pounds, and I left the dress at Goodwill in Delaware when I moved, but I kept all the organza flowers.
In any case, I do have to say I’m not usually a gerbera girl, except when needs must. But today the yellow (which is a lot lighter in real life) on the flowers screamed, “Butter!” at me, with just a hint of orange at their centers, and so I was compelled. Mixed them with orange and some green greenery, et voila!
The little pumpkin/squash you see there I plan to eat, not carve. LOL. Roasted pumpkin in things is divine! As are these lovely gerbera. Ranunculus are actually not great cut flowers, so droopy.
It is a blessing to have flowers anywhere in the world, of any kind, and especially on my very sunny kitchen counter. Buy the flowers, hold them high, and repeat after me, “Here’s to the times we bless others, and also to the times we bless ourselves!”
Have a wonderful week~
PS. Most flowers I buy last a full two weeks! Just keep the water clean and fresh.
I love music. I love listening to it, and singing, and I love going to see live music. I think if I were a single person with no one to be responsible for but myself, in a little house all-by-my-lonesome, I would play music a lot more often, and a lot louder.
I thought I might do some posts that don’t require quite as much explication/explanation, where I would just rattle off some songs I could listen to all day on repeat.
I have been told that, as a music lover, there are some odd things about me:
#1. If I love it, I want to hear it, over and over. I once played “Magic” by Pilot, for two solid hours (a 45 I’d pilfered from my friend) on my raggedy record player while in the Temple University dorms, in the middle of the day (who has classes from noon-3?) until another student showed up (and I was bouncing up and down on my bed at the time, as if it were a trampoline) and yelled at me to turn it the fuck off. It was… embarrassing. But that is 100% me; I cannot deny it. I no longer think beds are sturdy enough for adults to bounce on, but I could get that vibe again in a second.
#2. The second thing is that I can mix seemingly disparate music together. You will be able to tell when you take a look at today’s inaugural list (which, to be fair to #1, will start with Pilot). I am the same way with food. I am currently eating stir-fried cabbage for breakfast, with a big steaming cup of coffee with cream and sugar. I like strange tastes all in the same mouthful, or, as goes with this post, earful.
#3. I will merge songs in my head: two songs will become one the way I think of them. As an example, I often will sing, “Hotel California,” to the tune of, “If You Like Pina Coladas,” and use the chorus from the second instead of the “Hotel California” chorus. Try it. It is incredible. It’s my version of Laverne’s milk and Pepsi. If you are ever around me LIP, I will perform it for you, no charge. It works really well.
#4. I prefer vinyl. I am annoyed by vinyl, because you cannot make your own greatest hits like you can with a cassette tape or digital files, but I am addicted to the snap, crackle, pops. And there’s just something beautiful about an album. Us kids from the 70s, in the pre-MTV times, used to lock ourselves away with our crappy record players and our vinyl, and play side 1, and then side 2, or side A and then side B, and just pour over the album, look at all the liner notes, read the lyrics, check out all the band photos, basically memorize the thing. I could do that all night long. I still love it.
Okay, so lemme throw up ten today, and there’ll be more to come. What do these songs have in common? I could listen to each song, on its own, for literal hours, over and over, were I left to my own devices and my own schedule and life with no one around to annoy.
MAGIC!
Oh my gosh the lead singer is cute! I’m sorry world, but 1970s singers were the hottest… except for maybe Lenny Kravitz, and Bruno Mars. I love the strings in this, and I’m ready to hear it again, dormmates be dammed!
GOD SAVE THE QUEENS!
This was from a previous post, and, as it was already here, I’m including it in this list. What I had said last time was, “I need something like this right now. Something that feels punk, and resistant, and full of a big fuck you to oppressors everywhere.” Yep, still me; I’m still there, and, Vienna Vienna is not from the 1970s, but is pretty cute anyway. Can an old lady still find rock stars hot? It’s another thing I can’t seem to stop doing on repeat.
GOOD TIMES BAD TIMES
This is a live version, but I wanted one that showed the band, and not just an album cover and the music. Why? Because I’m still hoping to get trapped in an elevator for 12 hours with Robert Plant. I mean, come on. The guitar, the harmonies, the Plant… you could burn your fingers on this one.
TRYIN’ TO GET THE FEELING AGAIN
Apologies for making you break down and cry. Sometimes you gotta cry. But you sing your heart out while you’re doing it. I was so lucky to see Barry at the Hollywood Bowl in… 2011? He’s amazing, and so fun, and really talented. My brother, who played in a Rolling Stones cover band most of his life, liked Barry and introduced me to him when he gave me Barry Manilow II. It had “Mandy” on it, and “Avenue C,” and I was hooked. Love songs mixed with show tunes! What’s not to love?
I WAS DOIN’ ALLRIGHT
Sadly I cannot find a performance video of this one, but damn it’s good. This whole record is freaking amazing. Get it. Play it. It’ll make you feel like you’re walking on air.
I CAN’T BELIEVE
Tony Trischka and Skyline… the fabulous Dede Wyland on lead vocals. My boyfriend at the time was heavily into playing his mandolin, so we went to a lot of Bluegrass concerts. Sometimes I think Country music, the kind I grew up on, has lost its way, but not Bluegrass. I dearly love every Skyline concert we went to, and all their songs. I wish they were still together. I mean just listen to the instrumental section in the middle, and then Dede’s voice comes soaring back in like a bird. Wow.
COMME UN AVION SANS AILES
You won’t have heard of this, because you didn’t have Corrine Soler come and stay with you for two weeks in high school, but I did. And she brought me Poemes Rock by Charlelie Couture, which remains one of my top ten albums in my collection. I love it completely and treasure it dearly. If I was rushing out of the house due to natural disaster, I hope I’d remember to grab it, because I bet it is irreplaceable. You’ve probably long-since stopped reading this post, but you should hit play on this one. It’s surprising.
FUNKY MONKS
Funnily enough, one of my favorite of their songs appears to be one they rarely perform. Good-on the kid who requested it. I freaking love it.
KISS THEM FOR ME
Thought I’d finish off with two women. Siouxsie was one of my idols when I was in college. She’s incredibly beautiful, talented, and this song… what a delightful ear worm. It feels off-the-beat to me, but what do I know, but it is that off-kilter feel that it has that I cannot get enough of.
TOM’S DINER
No controversy here. Probably the entire world likes this one. This is a live version though. Badass.
Hopefully it won’t take me this long to come back with another bunch. I’d love to hear what you think about this set.
I have this sense that sometimes I come off as a competent professional, and this post is proof that I’m faking it, just like most people on the web.
This is a photo of me in an outfit I particularly liked last spring, but, if it looks on your screen like it looks on mine, it looks warped. And I don’t know why. I have Photoshop, and mad Photoshop skills (if mad Photoshop skills means I pay for it, and noodle around and do my best, and really have no idea what I’m doing). I don’t know why I look freaking warped, but I can’t be bothered to care, mostly because I love this outfit, and I so badly want it to be chilly, even a little bit for a few hours. So, yes, I am faking any confidence (and proficiency at Photoshop) that you may feel that you see.
It’s times like these that I realize that while I absolutely consider air conditioning to be both a privilege and a blessing, what I consider even more of a privilege and a blessing is some outdoor space to call your own, and nice enough weather to enjoy it. I’m in that awkward phase of life where I am really not too good in The Heat, with capital letters, and also not too good when the temps go below freezing. I was a winter-over-summer fan from birth almost (and aren’t most very pale-skinned people?) and I still am, but not quite as cold as I age. Blech. Aging.
In any case: I bought that green blouse, I don’t remember from where, but it is long-sleeved, a bit cropped, and I love it. Over my (presumably, at the time) chilly shoulders I have an inexpensive sweater shawl/wrap I treated myself to (I think it came from Quince) when we first moved back to CA, which was insane because I probably would have gotten more use out of it on the East Coast, but maybe had less reasons to go out looking dressy enough for a shawl. Are shawls dressy? It seems to me they are. East Coast or West, hot-as-blazes or nicely cold, I have never gotten over my love of corduroy.
When I was going into sixth grade my mother gave me some money, and let me take the trolly to our local mall to buy some school clothes on my own. My mother was a very clothing-controlling mother who “knew” how children were supposed to be dressed, and that often meant clothes I didn’t especially like, like pink or pale peach, and Keds (sorry Keds) and lots of white, and no dark colors. If you got an Easter purse made of some sort of wicker every spring along with your white sweater and a hat with fake flowers on it, your mom may have been like mine. That year I don’t know what had come over her, as she also really liked seeing me try clothes on, and deciding which stores to go into, but she sent me off on my own. I went to the Levi’s store that had floor-to-ceiling bins full of denim and corduroy arranged by waist, and length, and also leg type. I cannot tell you how disappointed I was to hear that they only had straight legs, skinny, and boot cut; bell bottoms had been discontinued the prior fall, they told me. I mean I adored bell bottoms. So sad for me. But they had corduroy, and I had never had corduroy before, so I bought three pairs: one in green and one in a dark rust color, and I think the other pair was deep brown. Needless to say my mother was nonplussed. I remember feeling like middle school, where, for the first time, I would have a different teacher for each class, and move from classroom to classroom like a college student, was the big time. I was ready to learn, baby! (Of course I was. I read the encyclopedia and the atlas. I was a positively thrilling child with my consumption of plays and gothic horror romances. What sixth-grader doesn’t like gothic horror romance?) So I wanted to go to middle school looking collegiate, and for me that was corduroy and fall colors. Flash forward to this spring, and I have been lugging those green corduroy pants (from Gap or Old Navy) around for at least five years!
And, lastly, to finish off this particular ensemble, on my feet was the birthday gift I requested from Sophie and her dad for 2024: green Doc Martens. I had Doc Martens boots in college, but they have gotten so much more comfortable now. I love them. I replaced Doc’s laces with some pretty green ribbon laces, and that completed the look, in my mind.
Here’s to fall colors. I bought Dave a pumpkin spice latte the other day!
You know, one last thought, when I was a K-12 kid, all I thought about and longed for was going to college. I know I was a teensy bit of a dork, but I just cannot stand what it happening to colleges now: Cutting down on diversity (which I loved. I requested a non-white roommate on my college form because I was leaving Wonder-Bread-white Springfield, and wanted to meet some people who were not like me), cutting down on international students, controlling what teachers can teach and what books can be made available. But the most horrible thing is the absolute lie that college is neither good nor necessary. I had teachers with different morals and beliefs and ideas than me, and I liked them just as much as the ones who were more similar to me in my thinking, and I loved them all (except for that one Irish poet who refused to pass women, which I’m sure is here somewhere in a past post). And learning new things is important. You cannot do it all on your own, and you have to read to do it, and you have to care about knowing things. I tend to be a very trusting person, but I also always wanted to check the source before I changed or confirmed my thinking on a topic. I wished, so much, that I could have had time in my program to learn more languages, and to take subjects that weren’t related to my degree, and that were tough for me, like physics, which continues to fascinate me, and automotive repair (I wanted to learn how to fix car engines). September is the month of school, and fall, and new things to learn, and the circus of idiots in leadership of the federal government at the moment should have their brains washed out with soap for their absolute hatred of college. College is not easy, but it is a wonderful experience that every American child should be encouraged to pursue, and supported to pursue (use my tax dollars to pay for college please, and not to give Tesla a tax break!).
So, in the spirit of fall, and going back to school, and wishing, in vain, that it was cool enough for corduroy, and that I was young enough to be a college student all over again, here is my head-to-toe green outfit. If only the pants were bell-bottoms! If only college were life-long and free. If only we had time, and resources, to do it all. I would stay busy.
What was a class that you took in K-12 or college that you still remember fondly? I loved choir, geometry, home ec (cooking) in middle school, and still remember some of the recipes, and literary criticism, the Vietnam War (which went with a PBS series), and black and white photography in college.
Dianne Pearce Writes 