My choices in life and creative efforts may not have been (or will be in the future) all right and correct but choosing is. I learned that from Stephen Sondheim who died yesterday at the age of 91.
In 2002 I went to DC to see 6 Sondheim musicals in 3 days at the Kennedy Center. I passed by him sitting alone in a booth at a restaurant and thought surely I could think of something witty wise or heartfelt to say. I could not and passed on by. I was wordless for a half hour.
The final musical was “Sunday in the Park with George” and throughout the show, the creative process was the star. The complications. The obsessions. The sacrifices. Even the humor within the not knowing what you are doing or going to do next.
The necessity to simply pick up and keep moving on was the heartbeat of the entire musical.
When the song “Moving On” was sung and half-spoken at the end, I got out my tissues and silently passed a few to the man on my left who was also struggling to keep it together.
I think of his lyrics all the time in my insulated creative lab-of-a-life. “The choice may have been a mistake. The act of choosing was not. You have to move on.” Or, also from “Sunday in the Park with George,” lyrics from “Finishing the Hat” where the painter, George Seurat, was procrastinating about getting back to work and was just trying to focus on one thing: “Finish the hat, George.”
I also say frequently, “Just Finish the damn hat, Pat, ” when I am circling a project rather than sitting down to do it. Stephen Sondheim said he was a procrastinator, too, but had collaborators who helped him, noodled him to focus.
As I wildly steer toward something else and begin the process as if I know where I am going, I think “Now, where in hell is this going, Pat?”
Then, I realize if I knew THAT, in Sondheim’s world, I’ve already gone so I might as well just keep going and see what happens. Last night when I got the news that he had died, I was trying to draw Boris Johnson, Paul Newman, Leonardo DiCaprio, Orson Welles, Greta Thunberg, Mark Zuckerberg after seeing a brilliant illustration of celebrities which to me was sheer genius. The artist’s name was Andre Carrilho.
I cannot draw similarities for the life of me. NOT. AT. All. So I just tried to follow his lines. He is so so good that even my attempts seemed on the road to be recognizable.
Turns out that copying is not so easy either. But, it is fun. Joyful, even to try. And, lucky for me, for all of us who toil the creative fields in hibernation, Sondheim’s words apply to genius art-makers as well to those of us who are simply toiling the creative fields doing god knows what. The below is “God knows what” for November 26, 2021’s daily drawing..
May Stephen Sondheim’s words and music memory be our past and future blessings.
Here’s Andre Carrilho’s brilliant illustration of Kyle Rittenhouse’s reaction to his “Not Guilty” verdict and before his visit to Mar-a-Lago. And, to correct any nausea this deluded boy who thinks “AR-15’s are cool ” and his malignant master may cause, I included his celebrity illustration below it.
PS.
It is faux fur snood sewing weather and my first step is to fix my 2020 snoods before I sew a 2021 version. I was never quite sure how to close them properly so I never tried to sell them. Today, the elastic and the button I had sewn in December 2020 broke on my silver Mongolian faux fur one. A year later and a year wiser sewing-wise, I know what to do: 24mm fashion snaps! We’ll see. They make everyone look glamorous and sometimes on a bad day during the beginning of lockdown when no one was on the horizon to visit and the only place I was going was once a week to the grocery store, I’d wear one while sewing just to make me laugh. Given the newest strain of the virus, Omnicon, I may be back to that in a few weeks.
The photo with the chartreuse clip on the snood and the dangling elastic is where the new snaps shall go. PS. I have to “brush” my snood with a hairbrush before I go out. Otherwise, in the days when I was cutting my own hair, I looked like a nest of white sparrows walking down the street.
