Doris and Kandinsky

I wrote this piece nearly five years ago for my mother, and it was originally published in the Story Circle Network newsletter. When I gave it to her, she loved it, but she couldn't resist reminding me that I "forgot about the matching hairbands." Some of you have seen it, but it's still one of my favorites. Today is my beautiful mother's 86th birthday, so Mom, this one's for you . . . again.

DORIS AND KANDINSKY

The way I see it, he might have just been mental, or a Roaring Twenties avant garde blowhard, merely claiming to hear sounds when he saw colors. But the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky swore by his synesthesia. For him, yellow was the high brass, all trumpets and fanfares. Crimson red, a drum-roll, or the horns. Violet, a bagpipe. Orange, the middle bells of the church or a strong contralto voice. Every canvas also a choir.

Kandinsky's colors were always singing, and I half believe him today, walking down this island street with its brightly painted row houses in full chorus. They're a tropical marimba of heliotrope, orchid, pomegranate, mustard and mango, sage green with magenta trim, clotted cream and colonial blue and spicy shrimp creole all cobbled together in an eye-boggling cascade of the happiest dwellings I've ever seen. The ones facing the ocean are upscale, of course--pristine and promiscuous at the same time, parading themselves before the monochrome sea and the cloud-pocked sky with French doll house façades, fancy-work doors, and second-story gardens in flagrant bloom. Farther into the city, the houses are dingy--patched and peeling; it's a sadder song there, about life in a different key.

I think of my mother, Doris, born in 1922, the year Kandinsky began painting his Bauhaus series, Kleine Welte (Small World). She would be a beautiful woman, with dark hair and blue-gray eyes and luminous skin, but her tall frame and big feet embarrassed even a family of farmers. Her teen-age years coincided with the Great Depression, and in her high school pictures, she's wearing homemade dresses and too-small shoes. In that faded time, she hoarded her gifts--a voice always hungry for music, and a color memory so accurate, she could match something precisely months or even years later, after having seen it only once.

In a fairer world, she could have turned either one of her talents into a million bucks. Instead, she spent them on me. An older friend made her learn to sew when I was a baby, and from that moment on, I was her anti-Depression billboard. We were always looking for, in her words, "something a little more unusual."

Instead of the gray suede penny loafers I wanted--just like everybody else's--she bought me robin's egg blue, spool-heeled leather shoes, with cutwork and grosgrain ribbon ties. They matched the linen A-line Easter dress she designed when I was a sophomore in high school. Hand crafted, not homemade. My junior year, it was an avocado silk blouse with black polka dots, a black raw silk jumper, and matching hat, a Mr. John Jr. straw roller. To the football games, I wore hand-pleated plaid wool skirts with perfectly coordinated sweaters and high heels. I had the same custom-made dress as all the other girls in my vocal group, but my edge was underwear, royal blue, dyed to match. I was my mother's Barbie, her ikebana, her work of art.

Today, if you walked out of your house in this rich port town, my mother could pick you out a pair of pumps the exact shade of the flowers spilling off your balcony. Later, when you looked out over the railing in the early evening light to call down to your friend in the street below, wearing your new shoes and leaning way over to the side so the bougainvillea wouldn't scratch you, with your forearms resting on the balcony rail and all your weight on your right leg, your left leg cocked a little flirtatiously behind, and the fuschia shoe half off and dangling from your left foot like a decorative counterweight--at that moment, it would appear to any passerby that you and the shoe and the flowers had been painted by the same hand, by Kandinsky, the man who could hear purple, or by my mother, who could match it tone for tone.

Cheap Motel Neon

EYE CANDY: Outside my kitchen window last week, the sky was Egyptian faience blue behind a pack of ridiculous poodle clouds hurrying by. My neighbor's tin roof, jewelry-quality silver after a brief shower, sported a single gem--a lime green chameleon puffing out his bright red throat sac.

Today I set up shop at my first doll show in more than a decade. It was a fascinating experience, but successful only because my faithful friends showed up to offer support in countless ways. I am grateful to all of them for continuing to encourage me in this new adventure.

It's impossible to be in a great space filled with dolls and doll lovers without thinking about why dolls are so important to us. A recent New York Times article talked about how we are fascinated with anything that looks like us, and the author of that article would have had a field day where I was. Innate narcissism, I guess. But it's more than that, I think, given the hyper-realistic baby dolls that so many girls and women were cooing over and cradling in their arms. I couldn't help thinking of my niece and a good friend, each of whom is expecting her first child. One's in her twenties and the other's in her forties, and that's completely irrelevant.

Mother Nature is gorgeous, but she's not terribly subtle. That chameleon with his cheap motel neon neck is just a reminder that every spring, we're all getting the same text message from the universe: "make more, make more, make more." For some of us, the response is new babies. For others, it's dolls.

Stay tuned here for what's new at my house.

Beginnings

I didn't always color outside the lines. As a kid, I was a careful artist. Meticulous. Persnickity, even. Those were the old days when color names were just colors, not pop culture icons. If you were looking for something exotic, and you had the big box of crayons, you'd go for burnt umber or raw sienna or periwinkle. We had serious colors, and they meant something.

While I got all kinds of art-type encouragement from my family, I think it was my Granny May who really started me down the "color outside the lines" path. She'd started painting late in her life, and she flung her lifetime of "can'ts, shouldn'ts, and don'ts" at those hapless canvasses. She never progressed beyond "primitive," but she told me something I'll never forget: it takes a lot of skill even to make a bad painting.

We used to watch the John Nagy art show on the little black-and-white TV in her apartment, and one Christmas she bought me his special art kit. I was undone. I now owned an official sketchpad, charcoal, an instructional book, a paper stump for blending the charcoal on the paper, a sandpaper board for sharpening the pencils, and--the most incredible thing of all--a kneaded eraser. I'd venture to say that I was probably the only person in our little town of Crosbyton, Texas, all 2000 of us, who had both a blending stump and a kneaded eraser in the 1950s.

I like to think that our shared art gave Granny and me a bit of distance from the small town mindset. Eventually I moved on, with Granny's backing, to making oil paintings, too, and, like hers, mine weren't ever destined to hang in the Louvre. In retrospect, though, I think the most important things I learned from her were that it's never too late to start something you're passionate about and that it's okay, in fact it's necessary, to color outside the lines if you ever want to do anything new.

I have a birthday every year at the beginning of January, but this year's was important. The big Six-O, kick-off for a decade. I celebrated with my family and friends, had way too many treats, went to Vegas to see the Cirque de Soleil, and will make my first trip to Italy in June with my daughter, Kate. But, to me, the most amazing thing about this year is what, at the dawning of this late-ish period in my life, I find myself having the opportunity to do. Already in these few months of 2008, I've launched a new enterprise as a doll maker. My husband Juan Miranda and my daughter and friends are indulging me, as always, in my current obsession. My good friends Donna and Kirk, owners of Bazzirk, and their designer Kyle are building me a totally cool website that will launch within a few days. And I, confirmed luddite, am blogging!

I refuse to be anything but optimistic in the face of such reckless encouragement. And if my Granny May were with us today, she'd recognize herself here, sailing into uncharted waters at sixty, harvesting the fruit of all those seeds she planted in me half a century ago and every single day joyfully, blissfully, with abandon, coloring outside the lines.