I knew who Marjory Stoneman Douglas was! Did you?!

As a (long ago) graduate of a (different) high school in the Broward County Public School System, while I was traveling in California and then after returning to my current home in Pennsylvania, since mid-February I’ve been asking people, “Do you know who Marjory Stoneman Douglas was?”

Answers have ranged from, “No,” to “Oh, I just assumed she was some local philanthropist who gave a lot of money to that school in Florida.”

And I’ve been saying, “Well, no, and you really should check her out! She was an environmentalist and a journalist. Here’s one place you could start! (Though that’s from Florida International University, where they’ve had their own problems lately…) In her 90s she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for that amazing combination. Especially in SW PA, where Rachel Carson is so well known (whether via praise or condemnation!) for her work in the 60s, you should take note of what MSD started doing decades earlier, and continued for a much longer lifetime!”

Not even one person in my personal circle that I’ve asked recently has had any clue. The answers of my generally intellectually curious and politically savvy friends didn’t surprise me in the first few days after February 14, but as I’ve continued to ask that question in subsequent weeks, I’ve actually been surprised that not even one of them seems to have made any effort to find out, that none have seemed to have registered the occasional reference to her that has been slipped into media coverage. (And neither do they seem to remember the second-season episode of The Simpsons that referenced her! Though I’ll admit that even I had (a) seen and then (b) completely forgotten that one until I went looking for something like that “place to start” link above…) In this era where people pull out their “phones” to look up anything, are my dear friends suddenly so distracted that they cannot take a minute to question who she was? I have been truly baffled.

So, despite all the complaints circulating these days about how challenging it’s become to talk about so many topics, maybe this quotation from MSD (that I have noticed circulating online recently) will help inspire some curiosity, and some action(s):

“Be a nuisance when it counts. Do your part to inform and stimulate the public to join your action. Be depressed, discouraged, & disappointed at failure & the disheartening effects of ignorance, greed, corruption & bad politics — but never give up.” —Marjory Stoneman Douglas

If you have any thoughts on MSD, please feel free to share them in the comments for this post.

Be well.

3.14: Happy Pi Day 2018

I was trying to think about what photo to post today in honor of “Pi Day” 2018 and this one came to mind. It shows something vaguely along the lines of circles and radii, so that does fit.

The real reason I chose it is because it shows similar circles with two different areas, and Pi is all about the ratio between a circle’s radius and its area. I created these two pieces a little over four years ago, shortly after Hadar came out with her “friendly,” “one fire” clays. And I wrote about how, even though they’d started out the same size, they ended up being so different. You can check my post from early February of 2014 if you missed it then (or forgot!) and are curious now.

Or you can just use this as an inspiration for making something yourself, whether that is jewelry, or pies, or something else. If you do, please leave a comment about your creation!

Hexagonal Eighth!

I keep telling myself “Don’t Panic,” as shown in friendly yellow-on-orange letters on the button illustrated here (and in friendly orange letters, below) but I can’t believe how oblivious I recently was. Had I just come back from California sicker than I’d realized? Otherwise, how did I completely miss all the connections until this weekend?!!

I mean, there I was, on March 8 of this year, among other things in a sort of hexagonal phase, nattering on about Kepler and his various hexagons, and I totally missed another connection to them.

OK, so the hexagons were merely a side-comment on a note about planetary motion, but that means I missed connections to both hexagons and intergalactic travel for that very date, March 8, 2018: it was the 40th anniversary of the first broadcast of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy!

Even worse than that, I had missed that the BBC was celebrating their anniversary with yet another installment from the HHGTTG’s “canon” (or whatever you want to call the mix of radio, print, TV, film, and video game variations, all of which have things in common but also include huge deviations!)…

To be fair to myself, there’s no reason that exact date should mean anything specific to me: its introduction into the USA was slightly later. I don’t have the exact date of that, but I still distinctly remember the moment that I heard the very first episode: I was driving home from a Gold Circle store (miss that chain!) and just by chance caught it from the very beginning on an NPR station in my car. I mean, how improbable was that?! That drive took under 15 minutes, but I sat it my car in the garage and listened to it through to the end, then ran into the house and started calling friends to ask if they’d heard it. (I would’ve had my first ARPAnet email account by then, so I probably wrote a few colleagues, but what I remember most is calling friends from my kitchen phone.)

One of the Don’t Panic buttons shown with this post came with my copy of the old IBM DOS game. But maybe I should back up a bit: I’m a huge fan but I’m definitely not a complete HHGTTG geek. (Well, those who came to my big HHGTTG Hallowe’en party back in the mid-80s may argue that point, but I know others who’ve gone far deeper into it than I ever have! For example, both the individual button and the game that included the other one shown here were gifts from folks who’d enjoyed that party.) My primary affinity has always been to the radio / audio pieces!

Those of you who’ve only known me since I started down this art jewelry tunnel may have no idea how infinitely improbable my going this direction would have seemed several decades ago. I’ve mentioned here on occasion that my “history” contains work in research on the teaching of mathematics, especially in aspects involving visualization, and how my sense of design has evolved from that rather than from a traditional arts background. And I had taken some metalsmithing classes, ones that I now realize were just terrible, but I didn’t know that at the time and had simply been so massively discouraged by them that I could not imagine continuing in that direction…

But the thing you may not know is how the HHGTTG led me to spend years and more years (nights and weekends, on top of my “day” job) ensconced in windowless rooms involved in an art form with ZERO visualization. Yep, the HHGTTG led me to a side-career in Radio Theatre, with the WYEP Radio Theatre Company!

I joined with the very first production as sound man (sic); within a year I moved on to technical director; eventually I added the roles of producer and occasional acting director too. Our half-hour shows ran on Sunday nights from somewhere in the mid 1980s through around the end of 1992. We produced both single-night shows and multi-week series. The folks at WYEP were incredibly supportive, alternating the airing of purchased shows with our series, thus giving us time to research, rehearse, record, add effects, edit, mix, and finalize our productions, all in our “spare” time!

A couple of older actors (then probably around the age I am now…), ones who had actually worked in radio theatre in the 1940s and 50s, started the group at ‘YEP. This was a few years after the HHGTTG first aired. The first call went out in December (of the month I am sure: I was supposed to be back home in Florida then but, unexpectedly, had been forced to skip that trip over a work deadline, which is the only reason I caught the call) in I think it was 1986 (which sounds right: I first volunteered at ‘YEP in 1976, where I learned and then taught production techniques to new volunteers, but I had to cut back when I started a job I held in 84-85; ‘YEP was off the air for a while then too, part of which involved a move from Cable Place to Chatham). After a year or two, for various reasons, those guys gradually moved on. There was a diehard crew from the beginning that helped keep it going, bringing in various other colleagues both to add range to our company and to help increase our flexibility in scheduling. It ended pretty much when I decided to move to California. (And a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon who taught script-writing for the drama department and provided me with a lot of moral support in addition to the occasional script decided to move to a different part of CA at the same time…) While others would have continued to participate in it, and the friend who helped me with the technical director duties would likely have continued that for at least a while longer, no one stepped up to take on the overall production management that I’d also done.

The whole thing had been a labor of love by a great team of volunteers. I tried, without success, to obtain some major grants to support our efforts. But I did manage to get the station enough money to cover our direct costs (e.g., rights, tape reels, snacks, etc.) and to provide any volunteer who wanted one with a cassette copy of a program on which they’d helped. Yeah, this was back in the dark ages of splicing recording tape with sticky tape, and distributing copies on cassettes!

Later, my reaction at the moment I first heard about Apple’s music download service, was, “If I only had a place to create Radio Theatre now, could this be a way to try to distribute and fund it?” Producing audio theatre was, for years (until I started doing this art-jewelry thing!) my alternative-career fantasy. I don’t have plans now to go into podcast production, but I am delighted that all this is continuing in one form or another. Such fun!

At last, here’s a link to the newest production in the HHGTTG universe, where on March 8, 2018, on BBC Radio 4 they aired Episode 1, titled (note the connection that started this rant…) Hexagonal Phase! It seems to be available without geographic restriction, but only for 30 days from air-date: so if you’re a fellow HHGTTG-fan, do catch it while you can!

Cranberry Artists Network Double Feature!

Kepler’s Dream	Spring Thoughts on a Gray Day

I wrote about Kepler’s Dream on Thursday. On Friday, I learned that Spring Thoughts on a Gray Day had been accepted into a second Cranberry Artists Network event, their 2018 Spring Show this year with the theme of Drip, Drizzle & Splash (DDS).

Now, to be honest, I’d wanted to submit both these pieces for consideration for DDS. Except I was in California for the second half of February. How is that relevant? The invitation to submit one piece for the International Womens Show arrived while I was in the air on my way there: ’twas the first message I saw when I turned off “airplane mode” on my phone upon landing. And that is when I saw that the deadline for submission would be the day before I’d return. So, um, I was going to have to submit for that something I’d have ready before heading home! So, as I described in my March 8 post, I decided to enter Kepler’s Dream for that show.

I could still hold onto Spring Thoughts on a Gray Day for Drip, Drizzle & Splash! (And another big “thanks!” to Hadar Jacobson for the recent workshop and also for this photo.)

The prospectus for Drip, Drizzle & Splash, which allowed us to submit two pieces for consideration, had encouraged us to consider “the emergence of new beginnings and the way our weather and environment makes this happen.” While I didn’t have another piece ready that complemented Spring Thoughts, I did have a shamrock piece from my Urban Flowers series that I’d just made in December that seemed to fit the theme. So that was my second entry. And I was delighted to learn that my Metropolitan Shamrock has also been accepted! That show will be hung on the night of March 12 and officially open on March 13.

Metropolitan Shamrock

Both shows will be on display through April 5, 2018. There will be a public reception for both of them from 6 to 8 pm on the evening of March 22. If you’re in the area, I’d love to see you there!

March 8: International Women’s Day

I call this piece Kepler’s Dream, and it’s the one I chose to enter when I was invited to participate in the Cranberry Artists Network‘s show in honor of International Women’s Day.

Now, IWD is March 8, and the show is only being “hung” that evening. The official dates of the show are March 9 through April 5.  It looks like there could be as many as 33 pieces in the show.

There will be a Public Reception from 6 to 8 pm on Thursday, March 22.

Question: Why enter a piece named after Johannes Kepler for Women’s Day?

Discussion: Well, I was in high school when I first learned of his discovery that planets moved in elliptical orbits around the sun (not the earth!) and the sun itself was not even at the center but at one of the two focal points of that ellipse.

That was also when I first heard about his conjecture from the early 17th century on the efficiency of packing spheres. That was not really proven until early in the 21st! I actually worked for a few years late in the 20th century with some folks who were involved in trying to find the proof!

Anyway, the readings I had been inspired to devour back in high school were key to opening my mind to being able to “think big” about the seemingly-mundane topics we were covering in school. Did you know, for example, that Kepler also published the first description of the hexagonal symmetry of snowflakes?! And he looked at the efficiency of hexagonal packing: think beehives! There’s more: go do some explorations of him yourself!

And so after decades of doing formal mathematics using accurate visual representations of what IS, here I am now doing artistic explorations of what COULD BE. I had no thought of Kepler as I began this piece: it would look rather different if I had! (And such a piece in this line will likely come to exist eventually.) But as I finished it, and looked at the combination of shapes I’d created (sort of oval and round), and thought about the colors I’d chosen (with their references to the skies above), and talked about it with some friends I was visiting at the time, I just began to wonder if Kepler might ever have dreamt anything like this.

Answer: So I named it Kepler’s Dream to honor him for being one of the influences (indirectly and centuries later) on this woman’s life!

Also, re technique: If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you may think that this piece doesn’t look typical of my work. And you’d be right! This piece was made using Hadar’s Low Shrinkage Steel (metal clay powder). The back is plain, with just the bail for hanging it. (I do have ideas for other designs, with my usual make-it-reversible approach, but this one was part of the experience of simply perfecting this technique, so I kept it simple!)

After firing so it would sinter, the steel was treated to help it resist rust. Then I applied three different enamel colors into the openings of the embellishments. (Yeah, the mathematician / geometer in me had fun figuring out how to space out three colors among ten spaces, when ten is not an even multiple of three.) Because of the way I applied the enamels, it was easy enough to fire several different colors at the same time; to get good coverage, on the other hand, it took multiple applications of the enamel powders, and re-firing each round, until it came to look like this. As a final step, I applied a light coat of wax which helped to even out the color of the steel and should also help to further protect its finish. I made several others at the same time which I’ll try to remember to discuss in a later post. But I am including a tag with each one warning a buyer that, because steel can rust, I recommend some common-sense precautions: don’t wear it while bathing, showering, or swimming and, if it does get wet, try to dry it thoroughly as soon as possible.

Finally, a big “thanks!” to Hadar Jacobson for the recent workshop and especially for the photo, so I’d have it in time for the show!