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Dale Messick and Brenda Starr featured at Society of Illustrators gallery

brenda-starr

The Art of Dale Messick – the Brenda Starr cartoonist, will be on display at the Society of Illustrators in NY from January 3 to March 23, 2019.

I won’t be in NY during this period, but would have loved to see the work up close. As a kid, I would read all of the comics in the NY Daily News, including Brenda Starr. I used to like the way it was drawn as well as the stories.

The Society of Illustrators is a small gallery/museum at 128 East 63rd Street, a great place but easy to miss.

The first time I went, I was meeting my cousin there, it was raining and I knew the general area, but couldn’t find the museum. I stood under a red awning to get out of the rain and was looking around the area, wondering, “Where is this place?” only to turn around and realize the awning I was standing under was the awning to the Society of Illustrators entrance!

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Celebrating the King Mango Strut

We have a parade in our little village each year called the King Mango Strut. The last Sunday of each year the town comes out and we parody everything that’s gone on during the year – local things, politics, etc. I write the daily news for our town called the Coconut Grove Grapevine, and nine years ago, the Grapevine was one of the things parodied as the “Gripevine” – since people always felt we were constantly griping about things, here’s a little of that here.

Anyway, here is some of this past Sunday’s 37th annual King Mango Strut.

Trina as RBG with Regina

Trump and another RBG

That’s me on right with friends.

Start of the Strut

Trina and AnnaMaria

We don’t like Rick Scott.

A trip through New England with Weekends With Yankee

I wrote about Annabel Langbein as having one of my favorite Saturday morning tv shows but I have another, it’s Weekends With Yankee, a half hour show that takes you through the back roads of New England. Yankee is a magazine and Weekends With Yankee is the tv show.

I usually hit the gym early on weekends – 7 am or so and I grab breakfast on the way home and settle in for these comfortable Saturday morning shows.

I think in another life I lived in New England, because I’m always drawn to it; I feel the same about Arizona and New Mexico, so maybe in a second other life, I lived there.

I’m always considering moving to Southern Connecticut. I like it’s location between New York City and Boston, and I like the small villages along the water on the Long Island Sound.

Anyway, back to Weekends With Yankee; what’s great about the show is there are three or four segments where they go all over New England. One segment may be a visit to a lighthouse, another might be a visit to a small bread factory in a small Vermont town, another might be lobster diving in Maine. You just want to be there as you watch.

It’s homey and informational and I want to be immersed in it all.

Trimming our trees

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Our trees needed a haircut. One palm had too many coconuts and they were quite heavy so we had to get them cut down. These tree trimmers we use walk up the tree using these sharp clamps on their shoes, they dig into the trunk and up they go.

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Usually this is done before hurricane season in May or June but we ended up doing this after the season was over, which was a mild season this year.

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The coconut water is delicious, these are young coconuts so the water is sweet, the young coconuts is what coconut water comes from, older, more ripe coconuts produce the water/milk and the meat. I remember when I was a kid, I would take fallen coconuts on the beach, break them open and rub the water on my body as sort of a coconut oil, used to get a tan. Not a good idea, but I did it.

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My neighbor Carl enjoying the coconut water. It looks like he’s blowing a shofar or a conch shell, doesn’t it?

Godspeed, Laverne

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When some famous people die, it’s like a family member passed. I don’t know why, but they are such a big part of our lives, it feels like that. That’s how it is with Penny Marshall. She was a part of the family.

From what I see on tv, on social media and from friends, I can see many people felt the same. Chuck Todd on Meet the Press Daily, quoted a few lines from the “Schlemiel! Schlimazel! Hasenpfeffer Incorporated,” theme yesterday. He didn’t say what they were, he just used them in sentences. He said, “Give us any chance – we’ll take it Read us any rule – we’ll break it,” and that was it. Later on he said, “There is nothing we won’t try.” He just fit it into a sentence. It was his way of paying tribute, because it meant something to him.

I remember the first episode of Laverne and Shirley. I was a kid, it was 1976 and I was on the floor of our family room on our orange shag carpet. Just as the show was starting, on a Tuesday night after Happy Days at 8:30 pm, my father entered the house with my grandparents who he had just picked up from the airport, they had come down for a visit – they entered just as the show theme song started! I’m not sure what happened after that. Did I ignore them to watch Laverne and Shirley? Probably not, but talk about the worst timing.

Last Train Home

My favorite all time Publix commercial.

This commercial ran for a few years from 1987 to 1996 and every time it came on, I would stop what I was doing and watch. It’s part of my Christmas memories of my youth and it’s just one of those things – a song, just like a smell, that brings you back to another time.

The music in Last Train Home is from Still Life Talking an album by Pat Metheny Group, released in 1987.

To this day, when Pat Metheny is performing, he’ll refer to the song as, “The Publix song.”

Saturday at Art Miami

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Went to Art Miami on Saturday with a friend, one of the Art Basel satellite shows on the Miami side of the causeway – Basel is on the other side, in Miami Beach.

Saw lots of people we knew, it’s a big community affair and it’s usually that way.

Lots of famous people attend, but the only one I spotted was Nicole Scherzinger, all dolled up in a fluffy fur coat, just as you would expect to see her.

A Charlie Brown Christmas

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I was watching “A Charlie Brown Christmas” last night and as I watched, I scrolled through social media and I could see so many others watching, too. It’s amazing how this 1965 cartoon is Christmas.

I’m sure we know all the words by heart. My two favorite parts are where they are dancing on the stage and the end where they sing “Hark the Herald Angels Sing.” I love the way Charlie Brown jumps back when he sees the tree.

It’s comforting knowing millions of people are watching the show along with me and enjoying it and making it part of their holiday season.

Charlie-Brown-Christmas-Peanuts-dance

Jane Pauley interviews Garry Trudeau

Jane Pauley interviewed Garry Trudeau, here husband, and Doonesbury creator on CBS Sunday morning today. Doonesbury is celebrating 50 years.

You can read it and see some strips here.

I want to be Ray Donovan

I’m into Ray Donovan these days. Big time.

My cousin – actually many people – have been telling me about the show for years, but I never watched. I’m not sure why because I used to watch all those Sunday night shows at that time period over the years – True Blood, The Sopranos, Boardwalk Empire ….

ray-donovan1 Anyway, I started watching season 6 this year when the new season started. I didn’t really know the characters, but I was following the story. Well, my cousin had a conniption fit. “You have to start from season 1, episode 1, how can you just start watching at season 6?” he asked.

I told him I didn’t know, but I was enjoying it. He insisted that I had to stop watching the new episodes and start from the beginning. So I did that.

When I got back to Miami from NY, I started watching the episodes from scratch on demand and I stopped watching the new episodes on Sunday nights. I had a plan to watch one a week, sort of like as if it was a fresh show being shown weekly, or maybe even every night, watch one episode at 7 pm nightly, but I’m too hooked now. I’ve been binge watching a bunch of shows at a time. I am so hooked. I want to be Ray Donovan!

I did this with Breaking Bad. For some reason, I never watched the first run shows but one day I was flipping channels and as fate would have it, I caught episode one, number one coming on at that very moment. So I watched from the beginning. And I was hooked after 10 minutes!

The shows were on demand and I watched all of them in order and when AMC tv does a marathon, I watch those, too. Now I watch them in any order whenever I catch them. My two favorite episodes is when Fring gets his at the nursing home and the train one – where they are stealing the meth. They are the two most memorable to me.

I want to visit Albuquerque now, thanks to Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul – yup, I watch that now, too. Another cousin of mine didn’t realize that Better Call Saul is the prequel to Breaking Bad. He mentioned that to me on Thanksgiving. I’m not sure what he thought of all the same characters from Breaking Bad being on the show or that they were in the same location, but now he knows.

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