By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

A sign declaring him a sesquipedalianist adorned his office door. How like him, the lover of one-and-a-half foot long words, to proclaim his eccentricity so proudly and chuckle at it with the same enthusiasm. He ushered me in, showed me his computer, the Mobius strip I’d sculpted for him proudly displayed on a shelf, a mounted segment of sharkproof fiber-optics cable — his latest delight. It was my first visit as an adult to the place that consumed my father’s focus, second only to his church. I looked for clues to reveal his character, to teach me who was this man I’d known only as a father.

Returning briefly from another life, the opposite coast, his prodigal daughter, I was presented to his colleagues, had lunch in the executive dining room — and worried that he had designed a chance encounter with one of the bearded young PhDs. But the tensile strength of such an unlikely coupling was not to be tested, for I knew better: “Never marry an engineer,” my mother said, “They’re a humorless lot, too anal-retentive, your father excepted, of course.”

As we traveled the broad halls of Bell Labs, I saw a man in love with the potential of the human mind to realize a vision. A man honored by his peers and humbly delighted with their affections.

But still, I did not know him, this man who rolled up his sleeves but left his tie in place to putter in the yard after work. The weekend warrior who spoke not a word of the broken bodies he flew home from Vietnam. The same man who taught me to ride a bicycle, to catch and cradle a lacrosse ball without flinching, to search for answers not his own, to embrace the written word, to dream of fairy tales while digging life’s ditches.

There were many visits after that, one or the other of us leaping the bounds of human mobility to soar into the other’s living room and reminisce, dance around discussions of religion, gossip of absent family members, dine on ice cream and other sweet succor.

And as we aged together, my Great White Father slowly gained human proportions. He suffered a dose of cancer with discomfort and graceful humor, sobbed at a loved one’s addiction, lamented his failure to produce a hellfire of fundamentalists.

In his retirement, he built a boat in which to scour the seas for adventure. While it sat in his yard, never quite finished, he rigged a chair on deck and enjoyed his morning coffee — not too hot and just shy two-thirds of a teaspoon of sugar — at one with his horizon.

And I, at last, began to know him, this man who wanted me to be happy but was afraid to ask if I were. A man who reveled in sharing tales of the women he met during the last Great War, of the love letters he saved for fifty years. The man who drew lush pictures of my mother reclining nude and handed them down to those who drew their own. The man who danced with the feet of youth and cupped the ears of an old fogey to catch and cradle my words.

Later, he talked fondly of lost war buddies regained. He remembered the dying highway commuter he held, whose last words of love Father carried to the man’s wife. He bemoaned the foolishness and brash decisions of his youth, his failures as a father, his walk with a God unknown to me. And he laughed at escapades survived, disappointments endured, offspring playing the fool.

At times, when we met halfway across the country, I struggled to feel comfortable alone with my father, uncertain intimates in an uncommon place. No meal preparation for distraction, no siblings to bicker over bridge or charades. Just the amorphous relationship between us.

And then I watched him sleep, curled as a child, and I saw the vast years spread over him: seventy-three years, more than half of which we shared. There were a few I spent determined to hate him, but now I rue that we share them no more, for Father is long dead. But he surely soared to rest in the succulent hues of an Aubrey Beardsley landscape, his boat set to sail, for his is the soul of an artist, a fearful, brilliant artist turned to Christianity to sooth his passions and direct his life.

He was an aesthete, he was a genius, he was a holder of patents and a builder of sailing ships, he was one of the truly faithful and he was forgiven. Though he was not at peace with his progeny, he was loved and adored by us as only a good and kind man could be. And I am grateful to whatever God guided him that the Colonel Father Sir was mine.

He once said to me, “I am a dilettante; don’t follow in my footsteps.”

So tell me: How can I help but become him? Why would I want anything else?

Love,
K-B

©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Anonymous: I have more drama in my family than resides in the racks of an Amazon distribution center.

Davis Sedaris, on his forthcoming book, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary, a collection of animal fables: Why animals? Because it’s easier to write — everyone knows what a rabbit looks like.

At Fallbrook Art Center: I hate his paintings so much they make my soul cry.

At Fallbrook’s Writers Read creative writing workshops — a two-sentence plot: He sat rocking back and forth, the accident covering his thoughts like pus. Liquor it was, the goddamned liquor.

– Lillian Lelito

Read more Fallbrookisms…

At Café des Artistes

My daughter was in 4-H in Fallbrook — until she learned they eat the animals.

Born-again virgin: I don’t have an artistic bone in my body.
Artist: Would you like one?

Patron 1: I’ve been a serial monogamist for almost twenty-five years.
Patron 2: Why have you done that?
Patron 1: Safety in numbers.

Michael: Some crazy person punched in one of the front windows last night.
Bob: This is California. The lawyer will say the window shouldn’t have been there.

On art exhibits: If you get them drunk and horny, they’ll buy art.

Read more Fallbrookisms…

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Have you ever contemplated one of those modern paintings, the kind with an angry splotch of color in the middle of a stark canvas or a confusion of scrawls resembling either Einstein or a toddler’s doodles? You know, the type of art that elicits comments such as “Oh, the stunning textural voids!” or “What an explosive discharge of coloristic energy!” or “The work is imbued with such somber expressivity.” I always figured that sort of art must have some crucial message — if only I were sophisticated enough to receive it. But inevitably it leaves me mournfully resigned to “I don’t get it.”

I used to ponder such art when I’d cut school, escaping the bovine roadblocks surrounding Long Valley, New Jersey, and take the Erie Lackawanna into Manhattan to meet guys in museums. I’d sit there in my hiking boots, ankle-length skirt with appliquéd mirrors and Indian gauze blouse, trying to look somberly expressive and hoping some gorgeous man, preferably a starving artist from Greenwich Village — Hoboken, if all else failed — would notice that I appreciated the stuff.

Hours of wanton staring at Jackson Pollocks and Cy Twomblys left me with the same derelict of understanding — no epiphany for me — and produced not a hunk to seduce me into his garret and boxer shorts (briefs were of course déclassé). I invariably turned homeward to merely imagine the dramatic effect art’s message would have had on my suburban teenage life and the debauchery, on my burgeoning womanhood.

I finally gave up on modern art and tried the Metropolitan Museum. The pickings seemed better — more guys with accents. It was there that the unrequited itch of my museum window-shopping ended one bright afternoon while I was stoop-setting at the Met with a hot pretzel. I had decided to pose for likely prospects on the museum’s steps in hope of catching one’s glance on the way in. Instead, I caught a scoop of steamy pigeon poop on the shoulder of my Indian gauze blouse. It was the type of guano that results from supping on the rotting bowels of a city: an explosive discharge of coloristic caca. With tortured vanity, I cut a quick path to Penn Station, determined never to return to my truant haunts.

Funny, as it turned out, my youthful failure to fathom the essence of abstract expressionism did not after all leave a stunning void in my intimate affairs. I discovered other ways to meet men, indifference proving the most effective. It sent them into a frenzy from coast to coast.

In the mid80s, I had one such encounter with a victim of my nonchalance in front of a David Hockney in Los Angeles. Now, Hockney I can enjoy. For him a tree is a tree, albeit a bit surreal.

Well, I suppose I had lapsed into a mood of indifference, and the fellow was on the scent — like Jack Nicholson on a comely female. I could not shake the guy. He trailed me throughout the museum, the legs of his leather pants slapping with every step. Why anyone would wear leather during July in LA is one of those mysteries Woody Allen would have resolved with a good joke, had he not taken to boinking his stepdaughter. But then, he couldn’t be bothered with California.

I, in contrast, took California very seriously. It was a place to which I wanted to belong. I’d escaped my roots and a husband here. In California, I felt on the verge of titillating independence. No obligations or affiliations to define me. No significant other to say, “She’s with me.” Indeed, I could for once be with no one. I had only to figure out the place. I needed first, though, to get past the East Coast thing. It was like a scarlet letter emblazoned across my chest, an unyielding fetter restricting my words and deeds to those of my socio-geographic heritage. People at work would say, “You’re from the East Coast, right? Yeah, I can, like, tell.”

Tell what? I had no accent, no siblings named Muffy. When I got to town I bought an old VW. I learned to eat sushi without gagging. I gave up my seasonal wardrobe. I had a fling with a Westwood shrink and got a tan. I made friends with lesbians and drank bottled water. I bought expensive running shoes, though I’d deftly avoided running since junior high. I went to an acupuncturist, a black fellow from Newark who’d had no trouble finding his niche.

So why couldn’t I? Why couldn’t I grasp the rhythm and syntax of California? Here they “took” things that back East I convened. They “did” things I was used to eating. They ate things I expected to find in fiberboard! The natives were talking to me, but I just didn’t get it.

As I pondered my failure to acclimatize to my new homeland, the leather pants caught up with me. He wanted to talk Hockney with someone who truly appreciated the artist’s pathos. He could tell from my aura that he, Hockney and I were at one. If we could just join our collectiveness in a more personal space. Perhaps we could pursue our unity at his place?

“Come home with me. I’ve got a Hockney in my al fresco salon. We’ll do some sushi, some Pellegrino. Confab on his juxtaposition of photorealism and the surreal. Babe, I’m here now. No games. I want you. Let’s have sex. Then we can hot tub.”

Now the leather was a turnoff, and his lack of connectives made for disturbingly staccato conversation. But suddenly an ethereal connection arced between us. In a blast of regional enlightenment, I realized this guy was speaking Californian — and, and I could truly hear him! I finally got it! The stunning textural voids spoke to me. The explosive discharges of coloristic energy, the somber expressivity, they all made sense. Perfect sense!

The paintings? No, I’ll never understand them. But at that moment I realized I would surely make it in California, because at long last I knew its true essence: In California, hot tub is a verb.

Love,
K-B

©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Writers

Want to submit your work to Excuse Me, I’m Writing for the sheer joy of having an audience? Email your original fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry — 2,500 words maximum — in an MS Word document or in RTF to kb@kbgressitt.com. If we publish your work, you keep all rights, including bragging.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

For John Amen and Alfred Joyce Kilmer

“When did poetry stop rhyming?” the man asked the visiting poet.

It was a sad, an angry question, a plea for succor in a world where the man’s perfectly trimmed coif and manicured nails, his gem-laden pinky ring and custom-tailored finery could not stave off age or the crashing waves of a new era, splattering his tidy life with the spindrift.

The graying woman beside him, sipping wine, the gazpacho, whatever he ordered for her, made everyone chuckle with her innocent retorts to well-worn social graces, to the poet’s verse of dark mannequins posing and Jewish Ophelias, to things only she remembered, mortifying her husband to his chill bone.

He scolded her for fiddling with her napkin. Poor thing. Poor thing.

“When I was young,” he mourned, “we learned wonderful poems, poems that rhymed. Like ‘Trees.’ Now that’s a beautiful poem. But today, I don’t know. This poetry, this poetry is weird.”

The responding silence — of looks askance, awkward sips of flavored coffees, the oblivious few waiting patiently for an answer — was barely broken by a whispered suggestion of excess Chardonnay gone awry.

And then the poet rescued them, “Oh, around the late nineteenth century through the 1920s — with Ezra Pound and T.S. Elliot, E.E. Cummings — poetry began to turn inward. Rhyme was replaced with intimacy.”

Lovely trees and schoolroom recitations, replaced with roiling innards shared in quaint cafés; with masturbatory imagery, rending sorrow, arching hope; with things that make well-trimmed folks blanch in horror and wonder what in God’s name is happening to the country, how the economic hurricane could prevail, how men could couple with men, how an African peacemonger could be elected to preside over landed gentry.

“The rhythm, though,” the poet soothed, “the rhythm remains. Like a song! Listen to the rhythm, the rhythm.”

Indeed, the poet did not hide behind pretty things, romantic notions, heroic meter and pattern like an eclipsed sun. No, he burst forth naked, compelling his listeners to contemplate tortured children, broken bonds, recovery, resolve — things other people simply called life.

Still, the man’s dismay seeped from the corners of his eyes. It would not be quenched with revelations of newly-beloved poets roaring through town astride freewheeling verse, rattling teacups and sensibilities. No, he wanted something else.

He yearned for her, for her to re-inhabit the body next to him. He longed for her loveliness, for her hungry mouth prest against his breast, for the intimacy of his rain dripping among her limbs.

For her, though, there was no longer rhyme or reason. Addled by tangled neurons, sticky plaque, fading familiarity, she was not always sure he was her husband.

But she could still recite “Trees.”

He wiped her mouth, applauded the next poem, then guided her out the door, a sad, an angry parting.

And the poetry continues.

Love,
K-B

Hiding

By John Amen

for Richard

I spend the morning
looking at photographs of my dead sister,
dark mannequin posing
beside husbands, parents, siblings,
her son—people who look like extras on a movie set—
the years’ battering superimposed on her face,
reminding me of Holocaust images, olive-skinned
girls who died in showers at Auschwitz.
Even in the photo where she
wades in a nurturing Atlantic, she
reminds me of some Jewish Ophelia, her
moribund drama hemorrhaging into the spindrift,
thick shadow snuffing a nirvanic beach.

Last night a friend told me she felt
my ex-wife had not been good for me,
that I had hidden behind her like an eclipsed sun,
and I thought about how my own mother was a piranha
who each morning at the breakfast table
stripped her sons and daughter to the bones.
Years later, my father would tell me
he sacrificed his children to appease his wife,
offered us to her as if she were some pagan goddess
who needed to drink daily her own family’s blood.

We all learned to hide; it is our legacy—
my sister and I, even my brother,
skulking in the custody of his own rage.
We grew out of childhood
like houseplants in a hurricane,
domestic pets abandoned in a jungle;
floating out of body in public places;
passing like ghosts through marriages and jobs;
watching ourselves fuck spouses and greedy strangers,
naked bodies move; not recognizing ourselves, honestly
not knowing how we were going to survive the relentless invasions,
the ambushes and slow, secret military movements,

this thing other people simply called life.

Click here to read more of John Amen’s poetry.

Trees

By Alfred Joyce Kilmer

for Mrs. Henry Mills Alden

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

Click here to read more of Alfred Joyce Kilmer’s poetry.

From Fallbrook’s Writers Read

The dirtiest poem is the poem you know you need to write but don’t. … And once it’s written, it won’t be dirty anymore.    —Brandon Cesmat, featured author

Over the next few days, I committed some accidental murders.    —youthful fiction

Desperately seeking more translation of the Village News

[O]ur elementary school district in Fallbrook flaunts the whole [bilingual] idea by putting up their signs in front of the schools in Spanish. We want them to speak English! The signage this month says “Augusto,” not “August!” Shame on you.      —Gloria Seelye

Area residents can celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month at Fallbrook Library September 11 from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. … They will enjoy a mariachi concert, light snacks of pan dulce and aguas frescas.                      —article flaunting bilingualism

Art Center unveils new restroom with gallery        —headline

Read more Fallbrookisms…

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

What should we do? What should we do with the four self-described elderly claimants from the Milwaukee branch of the Christian Civil Liberties Union (CCLU)? Their complaint filed with the City of West Bend, Wisconsin, seeks to publicly burn, bury, shred or otherwise dramatically destroy Baby Be-Bop, a novel so offensive to them that they require damages of $30,000 a head to compensate for exposure to the book’s mere cover, egregiously displayed at the West Bend Community Memorial Library. CCLU reviewed Baby Be-Bop as “explicitly vulgar, racial and anti-Christian,” a “hate crime” for, among other perceived sins, use of the words “nigger” and “faggot.”

“Obviously, not one of those people even read Baby Be-Bop,” my daughter Kate said, “because if they had, they would know that it promotes love, peace and acceptance, not hate crimes and violence. What the hell are they doing sniffing around the young adult novels anyway? Shady old creepers! It’s people like this who give Christianity a bad rep for being all about violence, hatred and idiocy.”

Spoken with edgy but well-informed passion: Kate devoured Baby Be-Bop and every other book by Francesca Lia Block in print during those excruciating years that most folks manage to forget by the time they’re old enough to read to their own kids. When Kate wouldn’t speak to me, I knew she was safe in the arms of Francesca’s loving words, delivered with the candor, the sensitivity, the magic of a writer who spies the world’s beauty through the painful mire of growing into self-acceptance. “Francesca Lia Block’s stories helped me realize I could love myself for the little freak I was during a time when it seemed impossible to love myself.”

Block, a best-selling author who describes Baby Be-Bop as “a gay coming of age story about the healing power of love,” said of CCLU, “Of course I’m using the racist word to expose and criticize racism. But they’re making it sound [as though I used it] in a different way. Either they didn’t read the book or they’re misrepresenting it intentionally.”

And it is “intent” that makes this all curiouser and curiouser.

The CCLU complaint followed on the heels of the ad hoc West Bend Citizens for Safe Libraries (WBCFSL) campaign for a hit list of supposed “pornographic” books, including Baby Be-Bop. WBCFSL’s goal? To remove, re-label and/or physically sequester away from youthful readers anything that addresses their budding (or broiling) sexuality — hetero, homo, bi, tri or otherwise.

Like any savvy writer, Block saw some advantage in the two groups’ mischief: “My first reaction was, ‘Cool, I’m banned!” But then it sank in. “I felt it a little bit more as a direct threat, with the climate right now.” Nonetheless, Block said she has probably received more media in the last week than in the last twenty years. “That tells you something about where the world is today.”

But WBCFSL — whose acronym is as unfortunate as its attack on a hefty list of books that give the group’s instigators, West Bend grandparents Jim and Ginny Maziarka, the vapors — failed on June 2 when the library board voted 9 to 0 that the books would stay put.

All the Maziarkas and CCLU have achieved to date is eliciting some unhappy publicity for a nice little town and rousing to action West Benders with a fondness for free speech and the Library Bill of Rights (drafted in 1938 in response to “growing intolerance, suppression of free speech and censorship affecting the rights of minorities and individuals”). Of course, there’s also the probable increase in sales of the targeted books, in particular Dangerous Angels, the collection of Block’s Weetzie Bat books that includes Baby Be-Bop.

And Block is in good company: Her book joins such challenged classics as To Kill a Mocking Bird, Catcher In the Rye, Go Ask Alice and the many contemporary books that address coming of age with honesty — particularly for kids who are gay — and, consequently, bring out adults who persist in burning, or at least spurning, what scares them.

West Bent parent Maria Hanrahan saw what was happening in her town of small appliance manufacturers and happy summer reading programs, and she didn’t like it. “[WBCFSL] began by focusing on a category called Out of the Closet — lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender themed materials. They wanted that reading list removed from the library’s website. Then they wanted to move the books out of the young adult section and into the adult section. Then, when they realized that wasn’t going to work, they changed their complaint to the materials being too explicit. I said to myself, ‘Someone has to speak out against what they are trying to do.’ Well, I’m somebody. I’m a resident here. I have a right and a responsibility as a library user to speak out against this.”

So Hanrahan organized West Bend Parents for Free Speech and had a potluck.

“Then the CCLU filed their case,” Hanrahan continued. “We didn’t think it was surprising that it came on the heels of this other complaint. We haven’t been able to find too much about this CCLU. They have no website. We know from the claim there are four [claimants] — only one is local — and they’ve been involved in other similar litigation. It’s not surprising that something like this would happen following the publicity about the [WBCFSL].”

Neither would it have been surprising — and it would surely have been lovely — if WBCFSL and CCLU had simply re-shelved the books they didn’t like. Or if they had wisely counseled their offspring on what they may and may not borrow from the library and trusted in other parents to do the same. Or if they refrained from using the library as a babysitter, setting the stage for their children to gobble up any books, regardless of parental preference.

But they didn’t do the commonsensical thing, and the curious battle isn’t over.

“I’m feeling very good,” Hanrahan said,” because so many people have come together in support of the library and in support of parents being able to make these decisions for themselves. I’m almost gleeful that so many more people are signing up for programs at the library. That’s a clear indication that the community doesn’t agree with this group. But it is worrisome they are not just going to go quietly into the night. … The [Maziarkas] are prolific bloggers, and they have said the issue is not over for them. They plan to promote the library as being an unsafe place for children, although they haven’t said how they’re going to do that. But they’re not going to let it drop. … We never expected West Bend to become such a hotbed of controversy. After all this, it was, ‘Wow, West Bend is not just about slow cookers anymore!’”

And just what is it the CCLUs and WBCFSLs are about? Just what is their intent? Just what should we do with them? They seem so angry, so fearful, so uncomfortable in the world.

But there’s something about Baby Be-Bop they don’t seem to grasp; something about the books that encourage our children to love themselves; there’s something magical. Perhaps the WBCFSL and CCLU folks should settle in with a nice cup of tea and read the books they would ban, in whole, not the miniscule excerpts bandied about by would-be censors. Perhaps then, they would learn to love the world’s children for who they are.

If not, Harry Potter could just wave his wand and make them disappear.

Love,
K-B

©2009 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Bumper sticker at First Baptist Church

Global warming is a hoax

Bumper sticker at Fallbrook Post Office

An image of Buddha seated in the vitarka mudrā position, decorating the bumper of a BMW X5 luxury SUV, 2009 model starting at $46,000-plus

At Café des Artistes

Michael: Looks like the New York Times is going after Obama.
Bob: The New York Times is going bankrupt. Advertisers won’t use it. It’s a commie, socialist, lefty, pinko, spineless, delirious, diarrhetic verbosity.

And for a change of topic

J: I’m taking a drawing class.
K: Drawing what?
B: Conclusions.

A Santa Ana breeze sweeps across my hill, stirring up dust and a sense of changing seasons. Palm fronds rub songs like crickets’ legs and the dog lies at my feet, her licking noises distracting me from the pursuit of Percy Shelley’s essays. I need no excuse, but it is a satisfying one, for in her rhythmic canine actions there is a certain natural poetry that requires no defense from Shelley, eager though he was to offer one up for the unappreciated poets of his day.

Neither does the dog need defense for the artful pleasure of licking herself clean. For the twitch-inducing imagery of her dog dreams, for the pure joy of exposing her soul and rolling in the pungent flesh of carrion, for the haunting melodies of her late-night canine choir, she requires no argument that her art has a place in the world, no rationale to win her public funding. Of course, unlike those seeking stimulus funds for the arts, she is not asking for any.

But again of course, it is not really public funding that draws the horror of those who would decry money for the arts in the package, who would starve artists and the National Endowment for the Arts with poverty. Rather it is the virulent freedom, the profane questioning, the crushing honesty, the consummately naked beauty of art that frightens them so. And it is that fear, I suppose, against which Shelley presciently constructed so exquisite a brief for the benefit of art. If only they would read it.

But in lieu of poetic defense, it is perhaps more apropos in our era to seek out evidence that art is as natural, as intrinsic, as compellingly a part of our culture and our economy as is the dog’s inclination to pee in the dry grasses of my yard and dance with the barbecue’s smoke.

One could search for art among the cognoscenti of a community, in the garrets of those who dress with the studied air of the aesthete, who wax esoteric in offbeat salons of foreign lands, who contemplate how a certain hour’s light falls upon rotting fruit. But that would just be droll — and too damn easy.

Instead, let’s look to the folk who wouldn’t be caught dead wearing a beret.

In my own little town of Fallbrook, the proprietor of the convenience store crafts the tales of a novelist, fine enough to make you question your own perceptions. The gasoline peddler, with the subtle style of a clever essayist, serves up both fuel and succinct commentary as an erotic hint of butt-crack emerges from his pants. The child interprets her landscape with seven years of salvaged bottle caps, intuiting the perfect placement of each to create her impressionistic vision. The postal worker arranges the mail with such a studied touch as to please an intransigent bureaucracy and a grateful customer, sculpting a stack defined by time and space. The mother hums a line of love like no other. And the lover presents a performance piece of rare and potent audience participation.

In each of us, in everything around us, there is art — divine, inspired, intuitive, studied and raring to emerge in a roar of pigments, words, notes, forms. And by that art we are slowly, persistently moved toward a world of poetic beauty, of pleasure and pain and wisdom — in ways no politician could ever move us.

Shelley claimed poets — artists — as the unacknowledged legislators of the world. And artists are we all. Although the hoary anti-NEA mob would burn us at the stake of economic censorship and selective morality, really they should join us — and fund us. For, as the cave paintings of Lascaux attest, it is not our laws but our art that survives us.

Note: Click here to sign a petition in support of designating 1 percent of the stimulus package for the arts.

Love
K-B

©2009 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

(WPA Sing for Your Supper poster courtesy of the Library of Congress.)