Sunday in DC

Brookland Metro station view changed dramatically when this new 5 story building with the name was built in what used to be a green field edged with white pine trees. 

 We decided to go downtown to the National Gallery of Art for an art history lecture at 2 PM and have lunch and see the installation of "one million bones" on the mall next to the gallery. I noticed the news of this anti genocide project via face book friend who works at the gallery and posted photos of the boxes of bones being unpacked last Thursday. He had this link describing the project which is traveling around to draw support to stop genocide. http://www.onemillionbones.org/

 I wanted to see it all spread out myself and get some photos. It was strangely unmoving for me and we quickly lost interest and went towards the Gay Pride street festival... and then decided that funnel cakes and rock music wasn't all that appealing and ducked into NGA's east wing to see what was happening before our lecture began.

Much to my delight and surprise the Washington Ballet was there performing in the atrium of the East wing for a free concert of dance to illuminate and complement the current exhibition of

Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, 1909–1929: When Art Danced with Music

We also ran into a friend who had ducked in to see the last day of Albrecht Dürer's prints watercolors and drawings. He scurried away commenting about the big crowds... and there was one gathered around the gallery watching the dancers. I rushed over to see what we could see of the dancing. There was a gathering of many standing guests behind a number of rows of seated people. We had to bob back and forth to see the dancers over tall and short heads. It was lovely anyway. I snapped a few photos of them dancing a piece to music by Philip Glass wrote for the film The Hours a 11 years ago in a 20 minute dance called Wonderland. 

The corps of men danced in nude colored costumes that showed off their amazing muscular development which is what brought my camera out. 

couples rolled over and under each other in near perfect unison The center couple was doing different movement not out of sync. 

Final tableau forming for the end of the dance. 

Once the dancers finished it was time to go to the Art history lecture. It turned out to be just as wonderful. Ross King was there to tell us all about his best selling book of stories that illuminate the painting of Leonardo Di Vinci's Last Supper the accidental master piece painted near Milan Italy in 1494-7 it was the painting that made him a famous artist and he was in his late life years for a  Renaissance era man he had just passed his 40th birthday! The fresco began to disintegrate before he died in 1519 because he didn't do it in the right way but painted on top of the raw plaster. Anyway it was a fun day that finished in the garden cafe for late lunch then a walk through the lovely Smithsonian butterfly garden near by. Days downtown at the National gallery and other museums of art are one of my very favorite things about living in Washington DC. 

Arboretum Dance

Japanese roof iris has a great story where that name came from follow the link to read about it in a brief article.

new miniature hosta Little Miss Moffet!

my new mini hosta "little miss moffet" set in place with three potted up last year counter clockwise named:"blue mouse ears", "cracker crumbs" and "stiletto"

our new bloodroot already planted on the north face in a woodland like setting

5 new bare root day lilies ready to plant and enjoy for only 25 dollars I went hunting the net and found images of them all from other growers and linked the names to the images on their web pages...

red volunteer, bright red

seductor red with green throat & scented

chesapeake crablegs orange spider type day lily,

firestorm another spider type red orange yellow,

royal trumpeter a coral orange with red zones

May pole dance with concertina accompanists danced at the Arboretum plant sale!

Today while at the annual Friends of the National Arboretum Plant sale we were lightly entertained by the maypole dancers and a few squeeze box musicians while shopping for delightful plants to add to our garden. Videos only visible on the Orange Explains it All blog page.

I got a new mini hosta for my growing collection and 5 new daylily from the growers who all had great stories to tell and lots of tips for growing. The advantage of buying from a enthusiastic grower rather than a superstore nursery like Lowe's, Walmart or Home Depot. I found strong bold red daylily and lots of spider petal versions in red,orange,brown, yellow, white and pink to choose from but it was a hard choice. In the end I just went with my gut and grabbed the ones that excited me most. They will go from bare root bundles into pots this year until they show me how they grow and maybe how they bloom.

Keith found some wonderful native plants and exotic Japanese specimens he can use in his ikebana arrangements and delight in the uniqueness of the exotic, hopefully not invasive hybrids. We brought home a woodland native flower called bloodroot which has a white flower that oozes orange liquid when picked in the early spring. My grand mother showed me the first one in the forest as a kid and I never forgot how I was amazed by that bright orange color fluid.

I have to say I am having trouble finishing this post about the garden because we have so much work to do and the images are flowing in fast and furiously beautiful. Fresh greens on the hostas, beautiful blues of our iris and now the clematis is beginning to open. Oh the most beautiful time of year when you have a garden is spring....

teeth tulips & Jerome Robins

orange & red tulips detail 

colonial  candle

mount vernon relic

mom's orange and red tulips

It is Friday, and I have a developing tooth ache. A call to my dentist took awhile to get a response but once I got Dr. Hughes on the phone and told him about the type of pain and location he was pretty quick to say " Oh, that sounds like a possible fracture." I told him how it developed while chewing on a cookie with walnuts and dates. Which was well worth this discomfort I might add. He wants me to get up early on Monday and come over to see him for an exam and X-ray, meanwhile he is calling in antibiotics and pain medication and told me to avoid hard foods and chewing on that side. I have had a fracture before and he had the broken tooth pulled out but that was a rare fracture  that could not be repaired. I will skip that story. I know just thinking about a visit to the dentist can make some people sick to their stomachs and I sure don't want to injury my readers with my stories. In addition to my toothache I woke up this morning with a serious case of dizzy! Alarmingly so that when I turned over in bed, the room kept going! Yikes, I thought what the heck is going on here. I laid still for a moment and things leveled off. Then I tested it again and whee once again the room swam uncontrollably round and round for a few seconds. I figured it had something to do with my tooth. Dr. Hughes reassured me it was not uncommon to have this sort of symptom from the pressure on nerves or inner ear parts close to that part of the mouth that control our balance. My treatments should be ready tonight at the local pharmacy and I am sure that Dr. Hughes can get to the bottom of the problem once he gets a chance to examine the unhappy tooth. The cure may be a while off but just knowing someone is going to help makes getting through this easier and I don't have to do any fast moves that might cause me to fall from lack of balance this week. 

On a lighter note, earlier this week I had the pleasure of delivering a couple bouquets of red and orange parrot tulips to my Mom out in Manassas  from Keith who brought them at the market for her when he went to get his flowers for this weeks ikebana arrangements . I visited with her and we went to the movie "He's not that into you" which we enjoyed. It was filmed  in Baltimore, Maryland. Famous the Domino's Sugar sign showed up in a few of the night time harbor views. 

At home Mom had the dinning table all decked out with new linens and the traditional candles  and the small replica of Mount Vernon for Presidents day. Mount Vernon is one of my favorite little objects in her collection and is very old, though not quite as old as me.  

On Public Television Mom and  I enjoyed a profile of the choreographer Jerome Robins a American Masters program and I was delighted to learn about him and realize his impact on my life of childhood visions of dance. He was the guy who created the deliciously theatrical play and dance about "Uncle Tom's Cabin" within "The King and I" which to this day I still have to watch to the final bow if I see it on TV. The invention in movement expression and character development  make it pure delight. He also invented the Russian Jewish folk dances in Fiddler on the Roof which had the men down on their knees doing squat kicks in the dust. Seeing it made me rush to try those squat kicks in my class room dance studios as a young teenager. I wanted to be a dancer as a kid and I tried out  a lot of the moves that I saw on TV and in the movies at home to begin with then later in my dance classes where we had some time to try out moves. I think my sister and I danced everywhere as kids. Including on the furniture and in the field out back of the house in the deep grass. Down the side walk in mock parades and in the wreck room on the linoleum tiles polished slick for good slides and turns but not so good for falls. We survived but now I find few opportunities to dance with such abandon. It was enlightening to discover on gay man had so much impact on my vision of what dance was from Fiddler to West Side Story and some ballet that I saw later in New York theaters and on TV. I never before put all that together with the name Jerome Robins sadly. Now I know and I celebrate his work today in my post. I looked for a clip of the Uncle Tom's Cabin scene on You Tube but they have none of the original movie posted  there. Subsequent High School play productions are there but lack the panache of a Robins in the original form so watch for reruns and think of him when you see poor Eliza chased by wicked King Simon Legris and his masked men dressed as scent tracking  hounds.

finally, orange and some blue

Dear readers:

Finally I have permission to share an orange story with you on a subject that got me very excited a few days ago.  Edgar Degas and ballet paintings always remind me of my youth.  In the story I read, and present for you here today, he used orange and blue as his main palette. The article is about the restoration to bring up those colors from beneath years of dust and yellowing varnish. The process and the colorful painting all thrilled me when I read it so I hope you will enjoy it too. Discovering Degas  Thanks to the Washingtonian Magazine for giving me permission to link.

I studied to be a ballet dancer from age seven. I also studied some other forms of dance after I left the ballet classes at age sixteen and learned a lot about movement and performance. One thing that spoke to me when I began studying visual art at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY was how well Degas captured the movement and shape of ballet dancers.  I wanted to be able to draw and paint like him. One of my foundation class projects was to divide a picture by a master painter into it's visual planes showing what was the front of the picture plane and the receding, middle and background planes of the space in the painting. Another famous Degas was the one I chose to work from on this project. My project Degas was of a dancer adjusting her shoe in the foreground of a ballet class studio which I got from the Metropolitan Museum of art in NYC.  

At Pratt I also studied modern and avante garde dance for PE credit. The most interesting class was with a choreographer named Laura Dean who taught us how to spin like sufi whirling dervishes. I practiced and achieved an advanced level where I could spin without stopping for 45 minutes in my home studio. It was a great way to meditate and get your heart pumping. The only draw back was  shin splints which comes from doing the same movement repeatedly. In another school project for a film class I used an orange plastic rain suit and a blue sky on the roof of my Brooklyn apartment as the subject. In this film I was spinning in the orange suit against the shockingly bright blue sky. My tribute to dancers in orange and blue circa 1977. I still have the original 8mm film but I have no idea how to make it digital. One day if I find a way to do it I will add it to the blog.