The Glass Slipper

Ballerina.

Dame Margot Fonteyn was perhaps the worlds best known and certainly most loved ballerina.  She revitalized ballet in post World War II Europe and brought it into the American mainstream in the 1950's.  She was a master of the classical vocabulary, and set the bar to which prima ballerinas are still judged. She performed into her late sixties.  She did this in spite of the fact that she was a homely child, plump, and lacking the the long neck and legs desired of ballerinas.  She was ambitious and unstoppable, she dyed her hair, got a nose job, and trained with an unprecedented diligence and fortitude.  She was a remarkable, astonishing dancer, with the ability to make almost anything look effortless.  She stands as one of the great beautys of her time. 

But by all accounts, in spite of her success and legions of adoring fans, she was lonely, isolated, unhappy, and largely taken advantage of throughout her life.  She was childless, unmarried, and without close friends.  She died penniless, alone, and nearly unable to walk.

I wonder about the sacrifices we make.  I am curious about ambition, envy, and ego and where they intersect with discipline and the pursuit of greatness.  I look at the choices people make, the trade offs, bargains, and business deals, the ways in which we get the things we want.  I think that work is good for us and I believe that sacrifice, of time, energy, leisure, is a part of work. I want to understand the tipping point, where desire becomes study, becomes lifestyle, becomes success, and how it can consume some people and nourish others. What are the things you want in life?  What are you willing to do for them?  Will you work, sweat, and fight for it?  Will you lie, cheat or steal?  Will it be worth it?

References/Images:

http://www.myspace.com/joke-joanne/photos/

A First Lady

Birdie.

Ladybird Johnson was a reluctant and unexpected first lady.  She was unsure of her abilities as a public speaker, and aware of her place well within the shadow of Jacqueline Kennedy.  She had an unpopular husband known best for ushering us into the Vietnam era and she stepped into her role as first lady under a cloud of public grief that would mark the beginning of decades of disillusionment and social change.  She was commonly referred to as  "wife in capital letters".  She wore a lot of yellow.

But. She also played an important role in the formation and implementation of the Headstart program, which today services more than 22 million children nationwide and was essential to the formation of the Redwoods National Park.   

We assume we know people, what they stand for, what they do, and what's important to them.  That Ladybird Johnson was one of the nation's early environmentalists may surprise us speaks to our tendency to pigeonhole people, and judge them based on their most public selves.  That she so quietly accomplished so much speaks to her ability to remain true to herself, regardless of her public obligations and personal challenges.

Do what you love.  Do what's important. You never know what you might accomplish.

References/Links:

To visit the Ladybird Johnson Wildflower Center Website:

 http://www.wildflower.org/ladybird/

Image:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Bird_Johnson

The PBS Biography of Ladybird:

http://www.pbs.org/ladybird/

Head Start:

http://www.nhsa.org/

Joyce Carol Vincent

Lost.

In 2006 Joyce Carol Vincent was found dead in her London flat.  The cause of death was not determined due to the advanced state of decomposition of her body.  Joyce was 38 years old when she died.  Her body had lain undisturbed in her flat for nearly three years.  The story of Joyce, what there is to know and tell has been documented in the film Dreams of a Life.  

Joyce was not a shut-in, had no history of mental illness of drug abuse, and had three living sisters.  She was widely described as beautiful , vibrant, and successful.  By all accounts from those that knew her, it is as though the Joyce they knew simply slipped away; they seemed unable to reconcile the woman in the flat with the person they had known.  Contrary to the image of a recluse she was found surrounded by freshly wrapped Christmas presents; there must have been people in her life.

While there is something morbidly compelling about the unresolved cause of her death and the grim tableau of how she was found, the more disturbing element of this story is the three year wait before her discovery.  Where were family, friends, and coworkers?  Where were the neighbors or the mailman? Where, even, were the bill collectors? In the end, it took even the landlords three years to come and clear her out for unpaid rent.  

I think that the we learn more about ourselves in Joyce's story than we learn about her.  When she died in 2003 we were pre-Facebook and post nuclear-family.  2003 was right in the transition point between the constant connections of the social media age and the isolation and lack of community of the end of the 20th Century.  Three years? How can this be? It is not hard for me to imagine friends of mine disappearing and not being noticed for three or four months.  The free spirits, wanderers, or troubled souls, but three years? There is no one I know or have ever known that was in any way functional that could disappear from all things for three years and not have someone ring the bell.  

What are we to think of this?   Is Joyce some kind of social canary warning us of the dangers of our modernity? Is it an isolated case; one sad woman's quiet decline?  Is it possible that we have reached a place where people can live out their lives with no real connections?  How acceptable is distance between family members?  How important is the building of community? How long do you want to wait before someone finds you? 

This terrifies me.  Joyce's story tapped into some deeply rooted fears about mortality and loneliness.  I think that we all have these fears.  It's why we bother to call up old friends, love and lose and love again, and hassle our way through the holidays to spend time with family; so that when things go awry, someone is there to help us.  Somewhere along the line either Joyce stopped bothering, or everyone else did.  Probably a little of both.  I think a consequence of contemporary culture may be the devaluing of substantive connections with other people.  I think that we are all not so far away from being Joyce as we might like to believe.

Like what you are reading?  Then support the Kickstarter for my book Girl Gone Wild- On Being a Woman in the Wilderness.  Thanks!

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1731666363/girl-gone-wild-a-guide-to-being-a-woman-outside?ref=city

References/Works Cited:

Dreams of a Life:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/movie/144079/dreams-of-a-life

Photo:

http://images.popmatters.com/misc_art/f/film-dreamslife-splsh.jpg

A Portrait of the Artist

chameleon.

The art of self portraiture has a long and varied history. It's practice is well documented primarily as a technical tool and lesser form of realism from early Chinese history before it was revitalized by the likes of Van Gogh and Frida Kahlo. Samuel Fosso, the Cameroon-born photographer, takes it a step further. Fosso creates portraits of other, often famous, people from the context of his own self portrait. To put it another way, he takes pictures of other people by taking pictures of himself. He presents himself as Nelson Mandela, Malcom X, Angela Davis. It's uncanny. A beautiful manipulation. His art takes on renewed potency when viewed in light of the current socioeconomic situation. A lot of people, by choice or not, are scrutinizing themselves and looking for a way to be reinvented as someone altogether new. Fosso's work presents us with a tangible representation of this metamorphosis and begs the question, who might you become?

sources:

http://thedreamhunter.blogspot.com/
www.cccb.org

New York Times