Point Made

  Dancing Girl by Dion with Mark Knopfler on guitar. The Song There may be nothing quite as beautiful as a woman dancing. And there is no doubt having Dion's muse dancing to the song she inspired was genius. but when I heard this song, it made me think of my Dancing Girl I bought this painting from Appleton Painter, Lenny Nagler, and named it Dancing Girl . Lenny s a prolific producer of fine landscapes in oils and acrylics. He does this, he told me, "because paintings of people don't sell."  Yet, I have a number of his paintings dealing with human beings as subjects. In my opinion, Dancing Girl is the best painting he's ever produced, and I'm proud of the others I own. When I first took a serious look at this piece, I noticed his treatment of her figure and his decision to depict her from the back. The maturity of her body and the playfulness of her pose lends me to believe that she is happy, self-confident, and carefree. I also wish she would turn around, b...

 I'm hoping that all of us enjoy this holiday season in many ways it can be observed. While the gatherings of friends and families may be slightly bigger than 2020 because many of us have been vaccinated and are more comfortable with small groups, conditions don't allow us to throw care to the wind. I'm adding to this sketch I created. I don't know about you, but I will never take hugging the people I care about for granted again. From Camp Jeff from the shores of the Inland Sea.

 It's  2021, and it's going to be my third no-family holiday. The last one I celebrated was in 2018. Then, I was home for what turned out to be a brief time that I wasn't in rehab for my long battle with an infection in my left leg, which required removing my knee replacement and gallons of intravenous antibiotics. That year was a landmark year for a lot of reasons. First, Maria and I moved into a home she bought. It was the fourth move in four years. We moved from Milwaukee to Mandeville, Louisiana, back to Fox Crossing, Wisconsin, crosstown to Appleton, and uptown to the house on Mason St. Cruising into 2019, I found out my first bout of rehab did not produce the results we needed. I would go through another round of antibiotics, a third knee surgery, only discover a torn or severed tendon which required the fourth surgery. When I went home from rehab in April, I was gifted a trip to New Mexico to visit my daughter for my birthday.  Upon returning from New Mexico, I dis...

 I was treated to a Facebook posting by my Granddaughter's husband this morning. I showed Micka, my granddaughter pulling their son Brixton on one of those plastic sleds. A. J., her husband, is pulling their twins in another version of the same type of sled. They traipsing down a freshly plowed street in Minneapolis.  I looked out my window here in Milwaukee. There is no snow on the ground. We will be in the fifties for a high-temperature today. I checked the weather forecast for the next few days. We have an expected high on Thursday of sixty-five with rain. Climate change seems to be very picky on how expresses itself. The Painting is getting better. As Still Life (Acrylic) A Landscape (Oil)

 What's going on in the studio?  The studio is the table in front of the west window. The table where my computer is located. The laptop is also my streaming entertainment center and contains my current writing projects. The table is also where I eat the hearty meals I create, send and receive phone calls, sketch, and paint. As my regular readers know, I have switched my writing from long fiction to screenplay formats. I began by writing an original piece titled Two Many Wives . One man and two women decided to become married to build a family together. The story is not so much about society's acceptance of this lifestyle, but how the challenges of a domestic household are handled when there are more than two people involved. Then I took a Rom-Com I was writing as a novel,  Star Struck, and rewrote it as a screenplay. It's about a single man running a business consulting firm. His life is filled with the daily challenges of his growing business. His workplace mother ente...

 ...said the turkey, who was not amused. I applied my lessons learned over the holiday. First, when offered a free meal, a single man always says yes. Second, I'll credit my deep dive to honor women when I wrote my novel,  26 Women , men should listen more and talk less. I learned a long time ago that when Michelle Mooney invites me to any meal, I go.  The food will be good, and the conversation at least as good as the food, if not better. So the invitation was subtitled as Thanksgiving dinner for people who didn't have anywhere else to go. Michelle also mentioned they were people she knew from St. Mark's. While I'm not a member of the St. Marks Episcopal church, I knew I would know some of them, if not all of them, because I have been embedded in the congregation over the years through my friendship with Michelle and my affiliation with Common Ground. Michelle is an ambitious host of gatherings such as this. This celebration allowed her to test her new kitchen at St Jo...

 If there is a humbling moment in the pursuit of trying to express yourself with paint, it's that moment when you're honest with yourself and admit, "This is hopeless." I'm not ready to give my watercolors away yet, but I'm close. So I ordered a minimal amount of acrylic paint. I've found a U tube video on the basics of painting with acrylics and completed the tutorial painting. Was it the uh-huh moment I had when Pam Frautchi mentioned that I might be trying to write screen or stage plays instead of novels? Not really, but let's just say that I'm not going to frame my first effort, but I'm not going to throw it away either. My problem with watercolors seen to stem from two things. First, no matter how you mix, blend or apply watercolors, they always look different when they dry. It's frustrating.  Second, with the transparency of watercolor paint, you always have to paint the lightest of colors first and layer up to the darkest. For some r...

 Premier League One of the things I've been doing lately is watching Premier League Football on weekends. Because of the time difference between Britain and Midwestern USA, the games are featured in the morning. It takes about two hours to play the game. And you really can (excuse the pun) count on that time.  When they play soccer, the clock, ticking off the two forty-five-minute halves, does not stop. It doesn't stop because the ball goes out of bounds. It doesn't stop because a player is hurt. It doesn't even stop when players are substituted. It doesn't stop when players celebrate a goal score. It's true; referees can add time to the ends of halves called stoppage time, but it amounts to a few minutes. I'm learning to watch the game, as I did when I learned to watch baseball and football.  I've learned a lot from the commentators. It's more complicated with what the rest of the world calls football, and we call soccer, because the commentators ca...

 As I write this, it's Saturday morning. I'm watching a Premier League soccer game.  It has been twenty-four hours since I rolled into the recovery area of the hospital operation theater. Dr. Meyer and his pit crew, like beave of nurses and technicians, have repaired my hernia. By the way, one of the nurses referred to the nurses gathering around me, hooking me up to various contraptions and aiding the doctor in setting up his equipment as 'the pit crew.' These people are talented, professional, and damn it, just plain nice. I asked my room nurse Tracy about the morale since COVID is beginning to slow down. She explained that they didn't see COVID patients in their department. ( I had to take a COVID test to be operated on.) But it was apparent that many elective surgeries were being delayed by patients not wanting to go to the hospital for fear of contracting the virus. Tracy also pointed out they were getting an above-average amount of referrals from the ER. Unfor...

 Of course, there are all of those cliche indications that fall is upon us. The leaves falling. The NFL now is in its seventh week. They tell me that the NBA schedule has started. I'd add that hockey and soccer are in progress, but they are the games that never stop. But pleasantly, the significant indicator hasn't shown its ugly face yet. We've unseasonably warm weather almost through October. And while it's still the case, two events happened last week that have to be considered benchmarks. First, mainly because the overnight temperatures were getting cooler, I pulled my window fan out to close the window. The following day I woke to a smell that made me think I had left something on the stove with the heat on. It turned out to be the radiators that were cooking the dust off of themselves. The building's heating system was on. For late October, it is still comfortable. Even with the nighttime temps along the Shore of the Inland Sea reaching down into the forties, ...

It was a bit overwhelming last week. I had five columns to write for Urban Milwaukee and my commitment to Two Many Wives' screenplay. All writing and no play make Jeff a confused old man.  The columns for Urban Milwaukee are all previews of Plays opening up in Milwaukee regional theater this fall. Not only were companies touting their opening shot at live in-person theater but announcing their season selections. I don't care if you're looking for edgy drama or a frothy musical; Milwaukee has some great stuff coming.  I addition to writing, I took my pencil in hand and resumed my sketch-a-day habit. Primarily gleaning my subjects from posting on Instagram.  This leads me to another subject. That is the daily emergence of myself into the evil empire of social media. It got me thinking about my use of Facebook, Google, Instagram & WhatsApp.  I know my comments will sound like the people who blame the opiate-addicted instead of the big Pharma and their marketing for ...

 First, let me share a sketch I did, using as a model, a painting by Bill Haas, a Milwaukee-born internationally known artist. I swiped it from his Instagram posting. This young lady has a bit of attitude that I liked. The image also challenged me to practice drawing hands. If there are areas of portrait drawing, I need to work on drawing ears, noses, and hands. My hunch is she is a handful to raise. (Pun intended.)   Here's a short video that might make your day a better one. Via My classmate and friend Dave Nitz The next step is working from another image I harvested from Instagram. If this pose looks familiar, it's because it evokes the same kind of mystery as The Dancing Girl, which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago.  If you don't admit you are curious about her and hoping she'll turn around, you aren't looking hard enough. This is from a photo collection the features children around the world. The copy beneath this image told me that she is an Asian girl.  My...

 As I mentioned in my last blog post, theater season is here and that means I will be writing previews for Urban Milwaukee.com. I will be sending out the links to my articles for the few of you who don't read the most informative online news about Milwaukee written and edited by people who live in Milwaukee. I have turned the pilot for my series Two Many Wives to a distribution service in LA, Talefilck. This screenplay is a story about people adjusting to being married, having children, and living under a microscope because they are in a polygamous marriage. Or as I explain it, it's Three is Company, with benefits. My characters learn that marriage isn't all moonlight and roses but it beats being single. Their challenges are, among many, defending their lifestyle choice. Parents that don't understand. Past romances that bubble up out of the blue. And for good measure, whose going to get up and tend to the babies. The three of them want the babies but post-partum depre...

 I am one of those people with their noses against the glass separating us from the partitioners when it comes to art. My association with artists leaves me in that realm of knowing enough to be dangerous. On the other hand, I've been close enough to many of them so that I've learned something, but not everything, about their process. I have concluded that there is much similarity between how a painter and an actor go about producing what they do.  What is your Process? That is an embarrassing cliche question I've heard at so many author appearances when I worked at a bookstore? I sometimes thought the question was a reader's attempt to say, "Look, I know something about how you guys work, so fill me in." Or maybe it's showing off for the uninitiated part of the audience. "Oh my God, if you don't know about the process, what are you doing here?" I learned about The Process by trying to be a creative person. The Process is simply the steps one...

 As we reviewed the 120 days of possible good weather in Wisconsin, one thing stands out. The season was sweltering.  As I post this, we've had over twenty days where the temperature exceeded 90 degrees. The average is seven. While this is a startling number, let's take some solace in the fact that it's one thing for which we can't blame COVID. Another fact, Milwaukee had over thirty inches of perception in 2020. We are now at a little over ten inches. It will take a lot of rain or snow between now and New Year to match last year's production. I'm already pulling back on my modular air cooling system. Adding the various parts to it begins in the spring. The first thing I do is open my bathroom window. The window faces north. It's on the second floor of my building and is mere feet from the building next door. Because of this, I get a breeze through the window almost every day regardless of the wind direction. The wind wraps around the buildings and flows int...

The Dancing Girl Although often just in passing. I have written more than once about  The Dancing Girl.  I never have nicknamed her “The Girl” or refer to her by the acronym TDG. It’s always  The Dancing Girl . I’m not positive, but I believe I gave her that name, her creator might disagree. She was painted by Lenny Nagler, a popular and talented artist who lives in Appleton, Wisconsin. His work resides in the collections of many private buyers, businesses, and institutions. While most of Lenny’s work is landscape art, I happen to own four pieces of his depictions of human activity. Nagler is a retired Middle School teacher. He has told most anybody that asks that he enjoyed teaching middle school. It always reminds me of a Johnny Carson joke. Who would answer a question like that by saying it was his second favorite thing. His first favorite thing was lighting his hair on fire and putting it out with a small hammer.  It’s no wonder when people talk about all of the ...

 My days are full lately. I have three writing projects going. As you are witness, I still write my weekly blog. My three characters Jeremy, Nicole, and Leslie, along with their lovely daughters, assorted friends, and enemies, are livng in my mind as their story grows in my screenplay Two Many Wives.   I'm also working on a drama that came to me during a restless night of sleeplessness. In this screenplay, we find a female defense attorney is hired to convince a witness to turn over documents that will expose a major criminal operation. Unfortunately, the witness, who is in a state of questionable protective custody, is resisting cooperation because he feels that all the prosecutors want is the money. In addition, he wants revenge for the murder of his wife and daughter. Upon meeting the attorney, he decides to convince her to negotiate a compromise solution that will satisfy all parties. As this onion is peeled, we discover that the entities are not the usual subjects. The at...

 All Saints Cathedral Used Book sale took in over $27,000.00. The proceeds will go to fight hunger in the area. I'm so proud of my compadres in this venture. We handled a record number of books by performing a record number of volunteer person-hours. Oriental Theater I attended one of the welcome to the renovated Oriental Theater programs. While some of the work, including a badly needed renovated balcony, is still in progress. The repaired walls,  new seating,  carpeting, and LED lighting are obvious improvements. In addition, the projection room, new bathrooms, the lady's room on the main floor, the concession stand, and the sound engineering will make things better for everyone. Hats off to the board and staff at Milwaukee Film. Well done. Hazah! Diversity in Fim As part f the reintroduction of the theater space. Milwaukee film is promoting their annual Cultures and Community Film Festival. Beginning with an appearance by actress vocalist and film star Michelle William...

 ...they pull me back in.." Paraphrasing Sonny from the Godfather series. He was lamenting his need to run the family business. His family is a branch of the American Mafia. Our plight is the COVID pandemic. Three weeks ago, I sadly predicted the increased danger of COVID cases spiking as Milwaukee fans jammed into the "Deer District" and millions of other people went on vacation. Many, if not a more significant percentage, of these folks, were vaccinated. Yet cases of Covid increased across the county. Mainly because of the Delta Variant's more remarkable ability to infect and spread. This coupled with many adults refusing to vaccinate and Delta's attacks on young adults and children. I am deeply concerned about sending kids back to school. In particular, in cases where parents claim their children's rights not to use safe practices like social distancing and masks. In addition, the fact that some teachers are refusing to be vaccinated doubly concerns their ...

 How passionately we love to disagree. I read a quote from an article from  The Atlantic . Paraphrasing the quote, a nurse from a COVID burdened hospital said that unvaccinated patients were going to their death, maintaining that the pandemic was hoax. That's like St Joan of Arc saying that the fire isn't what distressed her; it was the lack of a view from the direction she was facing. BooK Sale: I'm going to post early this week. I want to give everyone a chance to enhance their library of books, DVDs, and Music CDs for what amounts to give away prizes at the All Saints Cathedral Hunger Book Sale. We're located at the corner of Juneau and Marshall. We'll be open from 11:00am until 6:00pm, until Tuesday of this next week. Clearance prices start on Sunday. If you're are into fiction we've got like-new hardcover copies of recently published well-known authors for five dollars and less.  They are going fast, but there's a delightful collection of children...

 My goodness, it was hot. Fortunately, the dew points were only in the uncomfortable range for part of the five days of 90 degree plus temperatures. The high humidity sticky feeling is the reason the atmosphere sucks the energy out of us. I got mildly dehydrated for one of the days. I was feeling lethargic and slightly nauseated. It was only after drinking a lot of water and taking a rather long nap that I began to recover. It was a typical attack. The saying is, "if you are feeling bad and thirsty, it's too late your already dehydrated." If you can afford the co-pay, an easy way to get better fast is to go to the ER and have a saline drip. A cheaper way is to consume some Gatorade-type drink. It contains electrolytes that take care of business rather quickly.  I worked as a volunteer at the Western Open in Chicago. The tournament took place in July and was notorious for the hot weather. We were advised to drink a large bottle of Gatorade before we got to the event. On to...

 Like many of us older people, I'm self encouraged to make arrangements for "that day." I'm saving enough money to prepay for my cremation. I have a list of small items I'd like to pass on to specific people, mostly grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. And I'm arranging for my other stuff to be taking out of wherever I live and disposed of. What I want to pass on is my creative work. Some of my photography is from what I call the wet film age. What's left is in some amazingly heavy albums. My digital photography work and collection of family photography taken by other family members and me is on the cloud. A lot of my writing is parked out in the ether, such as my stories, plays, and blogs also, but there are some things in my logbooks and notebooks that I've kept. I have no idea how many pieces I will have published, but the files will be on the cloud. Then there are my sketches and my vain attempt to watercolor paint. That is all going to New Mexi...

 To do or not to do is the question. I have some strange options on my desk. My daily tasks are easily scheduled. I peruse my email, look through Instagram and Facebook, and read Urban Milwaukee, the Guardian, and BBC. I work on whatever sketch is on the top of the pad. This is not the greatest scan of one of my most recent pieces. It does not pick up the detailed shading.  I call this  Girl with a Hijab. Most of my models are screenshots from Instagram or movies I watch. Then I work on my latest creative writing effort,  a screenplay entitled  Two Many Wives.  I've submitted a one-hour pilot to Taleflix for evaluation and possible production. I' have completed the first season of the one-hour pilot and ten half-hour episodes, and I'm working on the second season.  My friend Gail and other more professional writers would ask, why keep writing until you get the green light? As the title indicates, this is about a much more Modern Family.  So think ...

 I'm volunteering at one of my neighborhood churches for their annual used book sale. The proceeds from this effort a directed to feed the hungry. My job is to sort books into some rather broad categories.  We separate fiction from nonfiction in two piles, hardcover and softcover.  There is a special designation for Religious/Philosophy/Self Hel p, Children's , Blank, and the junk drawer of book sorting, Poetry, Plays, and Music . (This category includes mostly picture books of almost any subject, travel books that describe destinations of interest, not hotels and restaurant guides, and humor books There is a category that is custom sorted by a specialist called Reference. This pile contains dictionaries, thesaurus, grammar, and quotations. We sorters have the discretion to discard books into a recycle box. Books are deemed unsaleable because they are damaged, old, out of date, or foreign language. Frequently discarded books in good condition are computer or compute...

 Having lunch with a friend these days will bring up the question, "How did you get through COVID?" We traded tales from not giving up meeting people until outside dining inevitably became impossible in Wisconsin to the cold dark days of late November to the surprisingly warm days of late winter. My latest companion has a young family that undoubtedly became closer during the isolation periods. Working from home was a new experience for many. To some it was liberation. To others it was desperation. As a society, it seems we have divided opinions on this. When I was walking home from our meeting, I was examining my path. I write a lot of fiction. My process is to imagine my characters in certain situations and see how they will react. I do not start out with what facet of the human condition this tale demonstrates. I find that thematic gem when my characters find it and most certainly they will. or the manuscript goes on the cyber junkpile My characters become my friends and a...

 Everybody that was looking for more rain got their wish this week. I'm sure those folks whose water bills were climbing higher than the length of women's skirts in the '60s were glad. Anyone that watered their lawn was just foolish, in my opinion. This last week, I heard a discussion on racism in the Criminal Justice system. Many of us have no doubt that this attitude exists, and the statistics back this up. First, it's a fact that more blacks and other people of color are involved in the system. Several problems make the situation worse for these folks than it does for white people. Bail money is often more difficult to raise for poor people of color; therefore, they sit in jail awaiting court proceedings. Many lose their jobs because of this, and then if they are allowed to go free after their hearing, they have no job, and it will be difficult for them to find one.  If they are a single parent, it is problematic for them to find someone responsible for taking care o...