two things...

first we have a tableau in black and white with fuchsia that is composed of

• a truly amazing figurine created by katy and sarah (my two favorite frauleins) in honour of Das Rheingold's opening and of course portraying my gal Freia
• a mini canvas with a gaff tape eye that was done by Achim Freyer during a fitting with the singer who wears/lugs around the Freia costume case(he decided that the apples should have eyes)
• a milk glass puddin' cup that i got at salvation army this weekend...plus two mystery seed pods picked up at the garden
• a framed papercut that i did a month or so ago(more on that another time)
• a cheapo cut milk glass looking vase w/fading camellia
• a signed charcoal drawing that Achim Freyer gifted me with in thanks for my hard work(instinctually, i think that it is Freia, but i dunno...i love it!!!)
  

nextly, this was my delicious dinner of cheese risotto, roasted butternut squash and a poached egg...yolky goodness and don't forget the parmesan and freshly ground black pepper.

a teaser...

also...lucky me to have such a sweet friend no matter the miles or the years...

it was a sweet end to a crabby day last tuesday when i came home from work to find a box chock full o' sea shells and necklaces(also that most excellent news photo of coach bobby bowden used to stuff the box was hot) . thank you meagan, you made my week and i am so happy to have you back in my life. and...i really really wish i could come have some soup. earlier that evening at rehearsal, i was also given a super cute 5o's cardigan with an abstract print of flowes and leaves. this was totally unexpected and came from someone who barely knows me, but knows that i love vintage. thanks mary!!!! you are a doll!!!

a visit to my new "backyard"

i have become a member of the huntington library and gardens. this was a big decision for me as it is a little pricey to join(well just over a hundred dollars) and nowadays i am trying to crack down on errant money fumbles...but this is so worth it and just a bike ride away!
so today, even with the grey gloom, i wandered around for a bit and sat on a bench by the lily pond(pictured above) and tried to read my darwin biography. i couldn't concentrate though and it was a bit chilly so i walked around and found loads of cherry blossoms and beautiful dried up pomegranite bushes...and then, i remembered the "beautiful science" exhibit in the library. so instead of reading about darwin, i was able to examine some of his and other naturalists of that eras(and before) work. i love the self~portrait of me looking at hand blown glass bulbs that are AGES old and kept in a special box that allows them to be hooked up to electricity but will not drain them of their oldey timey juice. it looks like i am wearing a crown of stars...

valentine my valentine...

this morning i woke up at kind of a normalish 7 am(normal for work days) Greg was up and when he saw me he got kind of bothered and wanted to know why i was up and suggested that i go back to bed for an extended saturday sleep. i should mention that Greg had not been to sleep yet as he and i are on totally different schedules. anyway, forced back to bed for another hour or three i awoke to banging and clanking in the kitchen mixed with the faint aroma of sizzling pork fat. YUMMY...within minutes the bedroom door was opened and in walked my sweetheart with a tray full of breakfast goodness and one long stemmed beautiful red rose. i don't really put much emphasis on this day of hearts and flowers. i like it for the kitsch factor, but i don't demand(only demurely yearn) sweet cupid's excesses. but breakfast in bed!!!! yes please! pancakes, eggs over medium, sausage and orange juice(with a fizzy emergen-cee bomb). sweet sweet boy...

sweetest valentine...

gloomy beautiful sunday...

bless grey days in southern california. without them i think that i could well go off my head. they make me wax nostalgic on my time as a girl growing up in the rural countryside of pennsylvania. on grey spring days i would run through our back field pretending to be jane eyre traipsing across the moors. all i ever wanted to do was move to england. i tried to convince my mom that i should be enrolled in the study abroad/student exchange program. she refused on the basis that she just knew that i would be absolutely positively miserable. FIE on that...
today was also a day for retail thrift therapy. after hitting anthropologie yesterday and being in love/hate with everything(LOVE the aesthetic/HATE the price tag especially when i know what it costs to make these things...), i heard the soft psychic tug of st. vincent's beckoning.
i always have to heed the call. love ya st. vinny's.

sigh...

this looks dreamy!

le buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

i love bees. i mean really, i love them. i don't shoosh them away when they dip into my personal space. i want them to live and i want them to thrive. it is a dream of mine to someday become a bee charmer. it would be a cherished relationship founded on respect and a mutual love for flowers and honey. i should share that at around the age of 10 i was involved in an unfortunate mishap involving me, two friends and a swarm. we were playing superheros in the woods and had found an old dead tree to push and pummel. i still remember the way that dark cloud looked as it funneled out of the tree. but, those were yellow jackets and not bees.
save the honeybee. save the world.

wrapping up my girl...

i just had to follow up with some finished pictures of Freia. i actually got a little misty when the singer came for the fitting yesterday. it's kinda silly, but such an emotional release to have something work and to have the singer happy and the designer give you a big hug and say in broken english what a good job you've done and acknowledge how hard you've been busting patootie to get his vision right(not just on this particular project, i don't even want to get into the dwarves).

saturday afternoon at the costume shop with Freia

in the interest of personal sanity, i am going to try to avoid too much shop talk here. the exception being my efforts in our production of the Ring Cycle (known in some areas of the costume shop as the "rinse cycle"). this is opera history...it will be truly amazing. people are coming from all over the world to see this Achim Freyer production which will probably be his swan song as he turns 75 next month. i really am so thrilled to be part of this.(even if at times i just want to throw up my hands and be done with it). anyhoo, here are some pics of one of my larger projects, the goddess Freia armature. she is built from foss shape, a thermoplastic sort of felt. basically it looks like thick felt, but i heat it and shape it over a carved bead foam mold using steam and pressure and a lot of patience.i call it steam sculpting. she is about 2/3 complete with the back of her head and the rest of the apples still needing to be pulled from the mold. once those are pulled then i will attatch them to the body. she stands about 8 feet tall and only weighs about 8 pounds. when completed, the singer will stand inside and her head will come out at the center of the armatures apple tray. the singer(brave soul) carries this around a raked stage, steps out of it, throws it down at the base of the rake, picks it up and runs back upstage. it takes a lot of abuse. she will also get painted and have stems attatched to the apples.

a Marshall story...or, Marshall's first story

Kent, this is for you~
About three years ago, Greg and I had been yearning for a dog. We had certain requirements like: not a puppy, not too big(this was hard for me because I had only ever had or wanted big dogs), not a spaz. I stalked dogs on pet finder.com and we cruised the humane society for just the right piece o' tail(sorry, couldn't resist). There were definitely some cutie pie dogs, but something would always happen like someone else would adopt it before us. That happened more than once. It was really disheartening, because it was very important that we connect with the right dog, and that we were doing more of a rescue thing because obviously, we could have easily just paid 500 dollars and been proud parents. We did breed research and narrowed it down to french bulldog, boston terrier, english bulldog, and on impulse, the pug. We then found out about a local pug rescue that was having a pet adoption fair at petco. We went and it was madness! There were about thirty pugs. Some of them were seniors with grey faces and sad buggly eyes, some were mixed and kinda crazy looking(not that the pug isn't funny looking on it's own without even having something like beagle thrown into the mix). Basically, we had to write down the names of several dogs that we wanted to get some face time with. I saw Marshall who was actually named Cranston and thought he was the most beautiful little pug that I had ever seen. Greg bent over into the portable doggy pen to lift him out so that we could take him for a short chaperoned walk and he literally JUMPED into Greg's arms. It was love at first sight.
That was it, we knew that he was the one. We had to wait about a week until the Little Angel's Pug Rescue got back to us(just in case someone else had chosen him too). It was nerve wracking
and then we got the call...he was ours. We still had a home inspection to go through and a three hour training session the following Saturday, it maybe would have been easier to adopt a Russian baby we joked. But he was ours and it was like he was the missing link when we brought him home.

work...

work has been...let's say intense. definitely a push.you know, anytime i talk about what i do for a living people invariably say," wow, you are soooooo lucky to do what you do. so creative." and...they are right, but sometimes it sucks and makes my head swim. i have to be creative and dream up costume crap ooops i mean costume awesomeness and answer questions and be organized and composed and resourceful and a leader and to be quite honest i make a lot of things up while i do it. somehow it works. after six years my sham still hasn't been revealed...amazing. i'm whining i know. i AM incredibly blessed to have a full time honest to god gainfully employed career in the arts. someone out there in the cosmos has my back...but sometimes i just want to bake pies dammit(or do i mean throw pies????)!

trip to madison in october

here are some pictures from the incredible dr. evermore's scrap metal sculpture post apocalyptic blowin' my mind garden...

the sepia toned pictures are of the forevertron...it is straight out of a science fiction landscape

bringing the outside in or hobbit jars...

my terrarium collection:
i am so in love with these little micro-worlds. the large round one has been going since last june and it is literally thriving. the thing with my terrariums is that i like to have them exposed to air and not closed off in the more traditional sense. basically, that just means that i have to mist them lightly almost every day instead of once every week or so. sometimes little snails will sprout up and they are so tiny...smaller even than my pinky nail. i have an assortment of vintage bric-a-brac that i hide amidst the mini forests. i gave out three as christmas presents this year and they were really well received.

random house pics

our flat is small. although as my brother Jon pointed out when he came to visit last summer,"i thought you guys lived in some kinda tuna can by your description." actually i made the quote thing up, but he did say something to that effect. but it is small. but...it IS in pasadena. and i love pasadena. although i used to despise pasadena before i moved here because it felt like it took three hours to get here from hollywood(site of previous even smaller apartment...the original tuna can).
in fact i try to encourage my friends to move to pasadena...sweet sweet idyllic bucolic pasadena.
to this date no one has complied. suckers. so, here are some pictures of my tuna can(wow that sounds ummmmm yeah...) and one picture of Greg's sleeping feet.

obviously i have nothing better to do than this...

in the spirit of playing catch up, i am obsessively digging through my iphoto and finding more things that i want to throw into the black hole of cyberspace. side bar:so what IS(notice caps) going on with the large hadron collider these days?

CERN Rap from Will Barras on Vimeo.


anyhoo...two blurry pics. one of a VERY scenic(in the sense of theatre scenery) moonlit eve from the back porch errrrr smoking terrace errrr wooden catwalk that i wish was any one of the former.
my greg. and a vista from my favorite pasadena hike.

My masks hit the big time!!!

Mad Gregs - Safe in Sound from Small Form on Vimeo.

Happy after Christmas!!!!!!!

Marshall is the bestest most awesome little lady dog. he's definitely of the Oscar Wilde old school dandy variety.

ahhhh yes the post!

Perhaps it is only fitting that I get on board with my inner blogger and re-launch myself into the world of cyberspace the day before our new pres. takes the oath...Obama and I together.Nice...i will also have to stop typing with capital letters unless it is for emphasis. i really can't be bothered by hitting the shift key.
also...as it is now 2009 i did not feel it necessary to keep that bumper sticker on my ride. the new one tells the world that "Reading is Sexy." See? caps. add emphasis.