Women quilting in Arizona, 1965. Photo: Wikipedia.
Wow!
We’re really making tracks on this whole “nominate a quilter for a Google Doodle” thing. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, check out yesterday’s post.) We’ll hit 1,000 votes before long, and that’s a good showing in such a short time.
However … to really get Google’s attention, I’d like to see us at least double the number of voters. What does that mean for you? One of two things:
IF YOU HAVE VOTED — Click here for the Quilt Scout post, then copy the URL to share it with your pals on social media/email/carrier pigeon. Then your friends will go vote and we’ll get our community represented by the people who decide what history is important. *You could just send your friends straight to the form, but going to the original post first seems sensible. But do what you want; I just want us to get those numbers up!
Right now, Nancy Zieman is in the lead, followed by Cuesta. Then … Well, there are a number of write-ins gaining ground and one person nominated me and my mom, which was very nice. I’ll keep updating on Facebook and when the time comes to do the official nomination, you’ll obviously be the first to know which quilter — sorry, which first of many quilters — will get Google’s attention.
I know it’s early in the year, but I’m going to say it: If you read one Quilt Scout column in 2018, read the one I’m linking down below.
Over the past month or so, I’ve been noodling on how to go about petitioning Google to make a “Google Doodle” about a famous, important, special quilter. I’ve figured out the way, and the time is now — and I need you. We need you. There’s never been a Google Doodle about a quilter, ever. Ever! What’s up with that?
Questions you have may include: “What’s up with that?” and “What’s a Google Doodle?” and “Wait, what do I have to do?” and “Mary Fonswhat is even happening please explain.”
That last one is not a question but there’s no time! This is all very easy: Head over to the Quilt Scout, read all about it, then vote. Let’s make sure the internet (read: world) never forgets how important quilters are and how much we contribute to society, art, and human beans everywhere. A Google Doodle is a legit way to do that, so let’s circle the wagons, people. Filling out the form will be your good deed for the day — well, unless you’ve done other good deeds today. Considering the people who make up my readership, it is highly likely you’ve amassed a number of good deeds already. That’s okay.
There are plenty of fun and exciting things going on in the great city of Chicago this weekend. I won’t see any of it, though, which sounds sad but it’s okay.
My weekend will be spent polishing my QuiltCon 2018 lecture slides and rehearsing everything 90,000 times before the big show next week. I assure you: There’s nothing else I want to be doing this weekend. I care deeply about this work: Besides, debut lectures at QuiltCon don’t come along every day. In fact, they only come along once a year, which makes them sort of like Christmas or my birthday, except that I don’t get presents and I spend months and months researching and writing and then dozens of hours making great slides for my slideshow and then I get in front of a huge crowd of people and talk to them and hope I don’t screw up and ruin my reputation and never get asked back to any show, ever. In this way, making and debuting two new lectures is not like Christmas or my birthday. At all.
As I was thinking through everything I need to get right, every detail I must lock down, I realized that there is one thing I am not at all concerned about: I am not concerned with freaking out up there once I’m onstage. Certainly, part of the reason I won’t lose my nerves or have a full-on panic attack is because I have nearly two decades of professional experience doing things onstage. But it’s also because in college, I actually studied how to be in front of people.
Yes, my master’s in writing gets all the attention these days, but I have a bachelor’s degree from the University of Iowa (’01) — and that degree is in Theater Arts. During those four, heady years taking Meisner I & II, rehearsing the next show, communicating with directors, and writing short pieces of my own, I learned a lot more than my lines.
I learned how to work closely with people. Like, really closely. Making a play — which typically goes from the table read to opening night in matter of weeks — is an incredibly intense, focused experience. Many of you know this from your own theater-making experience. You do hard work in small spaces, either with a tiny ensemble or a huge one, both of which come with their own challenges. You put in long hours. You must be professional, on time, courteous. There are long periods of tedium punctuated with periods of intense activity; your problem-solving skills are harnessed in all kinds of unexpected ways, I assure you.
And you have to memorize a script. (Some monologues are about as long as this post, for example.) You have to memorize your blocking. Then, once the play opens, you have to hope people come to see what you’ve made! Sometimes they don’t come and this is devastating, so you have to grow into a person who can accept that. Of course, sometimes the people do come and then you’ve really got to bring the juice. Can you? Will you? You’ll find out when the curtain goes up, honey. Break a leg.
So this is just a shout-out to all my theater people out there. Graduation is coming (!) and there are plenty of parents and grandparents out there who have a theater major in the family who is about to get their degree. Y’all might be worried about the kid, right? What she’ll do with a degree in theater for Lord’s sake??
I promise you: She’ll use it.
She’ll use it when she meets a new person and gives them a “Hello!” and a confident handshake. She’ll use it when she’s giving a presentation at work. She’s going to use her theater degree when she’s faced with a problem with her spouse and recalls what she learned about body language and tone of voice and maybe she can respond more thoughtfully to what she was trained to observe in this person she loves so much. She’ll use it when she reads a wonderful quote in a magazine that she wants to remember it forever. She’ll use her memorization skills and then she’ll have it forever.
She’ll probably use it (however subconsciously) when she throws parties, too. I’m serious. Go to the theater people’s parties. We have the party bone, take it from me.
A handyman on break, c. 1975, Georgia. Image: Wikipedia, via the US National Archives and Records Administration.
My friend Nick did a good job with Valentine’s Day yesterday. He paid me awfully nice compliments in a card (I am evidently brilliant, gorgeous, funny, and sexy!) and he brought a heart-shaped pizza for us to have for dinner. That’s right, a heart-shaped pizza. That pizza is going to get its own post, but not tonight.
Tonight, I need to ask you all how a woman goes about hiring a handyman, because I need one, bad, and I don’t have the first clue about to get one.
“Hang on, Mary,” you say. You purse your lips and put a hand on your hip. “We’re glad to hear you’re eating heart-shaped pizzas and getting cards, but we’d be really glad if this Nick person was handy.”
I dissolve into giggles.
“Not that kind of handy! Mary! Now, seriously: What do you need fixed? Can’t Nick help you?”
I pull myself together and I thank you for your concern. One of the I like spending time with Nick is because he is extremely helpful. He’s fixed my internet, my phone, my icemaker, my computer. He always tidies the kitchen when he’s over and sometimes I go into the bathroom and something looks strange and I realize the sink is totally free of toothpaste bits and this is because Nick enjoys rinsing things. It’s wonderful.
But though he tried his dead-level best, Nick can’t fix my dishwasher, and I need that dishwasher fixed. Now.
So I need a handyman, or a fix-it guy — or girl, or marmoset for heaven’s sake. I literally do not care, as long as they/it knows about water pressure and, like, “parts.” Because a girl working full time and going to grad school full time cannot have a broken dishwasher. Cannot, cannot, cannot. The hopeless, helpless, panicked feeling I got when I opened the dishwasher for the fifth time and saw the dishes were not clean but in fact now dirtier with hardened, shellacked food and soap on them? That was a bad feeling. I can’t. I need my dishwasher to wash the dishes I put inside of it. It’s not so much to ask, right? Please?
Beyond that, I need some heavy pictures hung. I need a new faucet installed in my bathroom. I need a new medicine cabinet stuck on the wall. I need a chain on the light in the pantry. I need the vent cover thing in my closet to stop falling of the blinkin’ wall or I’m going to start throwing my body against it until it goes in its home.
Tell me how to hire someone trustworthy to help me do these things. Please?
Now, of course I know there are services online, but it’s the wild west out there. I live in a big city. It’s a shot in the dark, trying to find someone who won’t take advantage of my household fix-it ignorance. Believe me, I’ve been here before: I hired a handyman a year ago to do a few things and it was an awful experience. He did a poor job. It was so expensive. Afterward, the dumb, big corporate company kept calling me and texting me with advertisements and things. Ugh.
Angie’s List might have worked years ago but Angie sold that business awhile back and now it’s just big, corporate, plastic companies who buy space on the thing. I asked Dion, one of the maintenance guys in my building, if he knew anyone who did this kind of work; he didn’t. (And yes, my building has maintenance staff, but they do building stuff, common area stuff, water shut-offs and the like. They don’t hang pictures and they don’t do fridges, washers, dryers, etc.)
What I’m hoping is that one of you dear people has a brother in Evanston who is the best handyman in three states and you can give me his number. Or you have been using the same handyman for 20 years and why, he/she lives right down the street from me! This is what I’m hoping, because I don’t know what else to do.
Thanks, everyone. I need you. Perhaps more importantly: The dishes need you.
There was a time. A time when I bought groceries. A time when I made tasty dishes. A time when, at some point during the day, I thought, “Hm … What would be good for dinner tonight?”
There was a time. A time when I bought groceries. A time when I made tasty dishes. A time when I would be seeing someone special and the rhythm of the day was such that we would often have food together, and there was some point in the day when I made a meal (sometimes with the gentleman’s help, sometimes not), and maybe it was breakfast, or it was lunch, or it was dinner, but we ate it together and we said, “Hm! What a delicious homemade meal.”
There was a time. A time when I bought groceries. A time when I had time to buy groceries and make tasty dishes. I remember this time! And I wasn’t just doing beans n’ rice, either (though at this point, home-cooked beans and rice sounds as good as flaming rack of lamb.*) No, there was a time when I thought through ingredients, purchased them in person, took them home, and used them to make ambitious food. I made lobster bisque for crying out loud! I creped! I made a tagine. I made a fine kettle of fish. Grilled cheese!: Lord, I even made bread at one point. The bread was not my best work, but at least I loved him. Ha, ha. I mean, I at least I tried it.
These days? Groceries and homemade food? L-O-L, as the kids say.
No, I don’t make food anymore because I don’t go to the grocery store anymore. There’s no time to do that and I’m always in the Loop for work and appointments and school. Instead of eating home-cooked food, I just go to Pret-a-Manger.
Do you have Pret where you are? Pret’s like Panera, only French-ish. Also, the people who work at Pret-a-Manger are way surlier than they are at Panera. At least that’s true in my neighborhood. But what can I do? Pret has grab-n-go salads and soups and coffee and I’m a busy woman. I grab. And I go. Grab, go. Grabgo.
I’m happy to be a grabgo, I really am. It’s a wonderful thing to have a new job and it’s a marvelous thing to be very close to a master’s degree. My new job is sweet and my master’s is so close I can taste it, but a woman cannot live on fulfilling work and paper alone. A woman must have a meal.
The other night, Sophie and Luke came over for dinner. Nick joined us, and this was a gift; I did not expect him when I was making plans and making the menu, but it worked out, to my delight. Anyway, for the first time in months — months! — I made a real meal. The occasion called for it: My friends closed on their home. They bought a house! A real, live house. Of course, I had to make food for them, so I made food for them and I also made a gingerbread house for them. I decorated it and everything. They bought a house! What else can a friend do in such a situation?!
Sophie is a vegan, by the way, so the whole meal, including the gingerbread house, was vegan. It almost killed me.
But it was delicious. And I realized that a) I miss real food; and b) I could maybe be vegan, that’s how good everything was. Oh, and c) Did you know Skittles are vegan??
*Hang on: Did lamb meat literally on fire at your table ever sound good?
