Happy Valentine's Day

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My Valentine's birthday is February 15 so we always have a double celebration. I've already told the story of the bear several times so I won't repeat it but here's another Valentine story.  On February 13 a few years ago I saw a Police car parked outside Lilac, the elegant chocolate shop in my neighborhood.  The driver had hopped out of the car and run inside. I said to his partner, waiting outside,

"I hope he's getting something for you in there."

He replied, "Yes, but I have to wait until tomorrow to open it."  Love was in the air.  I hope it still is.

I'm announcing my solo debut as a curator!  

Art at First at First Presbyterian Church

Presents

7 Days: Artists View the Creation

In the Great Hall Gallery, 

12 West 12th Street at Fifth Avenue

Featuring work by


Fran Beallor, Lois Bender, Colleen Deery, Karen Fitzgerald, Barbara Hermor, 

Lori Horowitz, Donna Levinstone, Malcolm Ritter, Rob Swanson,

 Elizabeth White-Pultz, Alice Zinne

There will be an artists' reception Sunday, March 5, from Noon to Four and  a Zoom gathering and artists talk to be announced.  So mark you calendar. 

One more new start for me: I'm doing a portrait!


This will be a take off on the Pelican Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I.  You know how I feel about the Pelican soI think it's a good fit.  In the original, she's wearing a jeweled brooch in the shape of a pelican--I think I'll have a little more fun with it. So keep tuned!

You know who else has a birthday on the fifteenth?  Frederick Douglas. To celebrate him, here's a poem by Robert Hayden.

Frederick Douglass

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful

and terrible thing, needful to man as air,   

usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,   

when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,   

reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more  

than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:   

this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro   

beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world   

where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,   

this man, superb in love and logic, this man   

shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,   

not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,

but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives   

fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.

Location: 87867WCV+PC

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