SherryArt: Paintings by Sherry Miller Sausalito Artist

Letter to Annie I

My dear old friend since 1978, Annie, lives in Rockland, Maine. She's a writer and a painter like me and says I write best in emails. Here's my latest to her as she approaches an atrial fibrilation heart surgery procedure that terrifies me.

Dear Annie:

Well you've got balls and I expect your procedure will be fine.  Boy it only takes a threat on your life to get you doing your creative stuff again.  Sounds like a great collaboration you're having with your artist friend.   I just saw a movie called Painters Painting from 1973.  All the Abstract Expressionists talk about their work and just one woman is included, Helen Frankenthaler.  I told the people afterwards (it was shown in my studio building) that when I was young and went to the Cedar Bar or to Monhegan, all the women artists were wives (i.e. servants) of these famous artists, bowing and serving and scraping.  I would never even go out with one of them. The movie is interesting - from Netflicks if you do that.

I've been writing things on my computer and on Facebook and on the Internet for six weeks while it's been raining.  The sun was out for five days but now it's dark again.  I'm also making a huge succulent garden.  The first step is separating and repotting all the succulents I already have; they've been surviving all crunched together.  Everyday tiny offshoots of the old plants appear in their new little homes.  I know absolutely nothing about any of this so it's interesting.

Potato Peel Pie, Drug Runners and Serial Killers

After many robust years our writing group floundered. We lost our beloved host and source, a woman gifted in the art of writing; a German intellectual with a German temperament; a union organizer who Marxsicized sonnets; and a beautiful California heiress with precision metaphors. Happily we are reconstituted with nine members who, no doubt, will appear in these columns from time to time. As I was accidentally reading The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a book left in my car by my friend on the way to the airport, I began to feel a special thrill and loyalty for my own newly enriched writing group.

For the first time I began to understand how people can read book after book; it says right there that one story stimulates your imagination and that leads you to another book and another and so on. The same process is what drove me to wrestle with, create and enjoy the world wide web since its inception – one thing leading to another, endlessly. I wanted to email my group and make sure they had all read this book so that it would also enhance their own commitment to our writing group.

But I hesitated. At the first meeting of the 'new' group, the three members of the old group read selections. One of these was mine: "Grandmother Serial Killer" about just that. At the second meeting of the new group, a new member who already has an agent – a fact which made us super-anxious to hear her writing – read a story about a drug dealer and his Lesbian accomplices. When the group began commenting on the work, it was immediately apparent that the three original members all knew drug dealers and compared the writer's character to the dealers they had known in real life. The new members were now all looking at us sideways. Was this a 'writing' group or a front for a ring of as yet unidentified criminals?  Stay tuned for the future of this local Potato Peel Pie group.

Nebraska Matchmaking

An email to my friend Annie in Maine:
I'm in Nebraska.  My daughter Juliana has a large lovely house with many places to sit. It's quiet and comfortable even when there are people here. It's an East Coast kind of house with a center hall and living room on the left and dining room on the right and a kitchen, sitting room and sunporch in the back. There are windows everywhere and I can see through from one side of the house to the other. Outside are beautiful trees and her garden. It is so different from the buzzed, populated, strange-energy house where I live in California.

After two whole days of sitting in my wing back chair and writing on my computer, I decide to look for a man here in Nebraska. Here's one I found. What do you think? Maybe I should live here and go away one week a month all year long.

FROM MATCH.COM
About my life and what I'm looking for:

I'm not handsome but I'm not ugly either. I'm young for my age and don't really want to grow up. I am interested in meeting disabled ladies especially single leg amputees. Race creed weight looks don't matter as much as what's inside.

Did he mean inside the prosthesis?

Annie's response:
call him.  you can pretend to have a fake leg.  just limp.  wear a brace.  i mean compared to other things men want, this one is simple.  it's when they want someone sweet, honest, faithful, thin, gorgeous that we're lost.  the leg business is a piece of cake.

Elaine's response:
Takes less room in bed with 1 less leg! 

Best Art Sale Ever?

And the prize for the greatest art sale story of the month goes to Elaine Gentile, one of the 100 artists in the ICB Building in Sausalito.

Sherry Got Married?

On the eve of a trip to Geneva in September, a male friend said, "Maybe you'll meet a rich industrialist and get married." What shocked me about his statement was the realization that I myself would never have thought of such a thing. Maybe that's why I'm not married. Anyway, I did meet some fellows in England and Switzerland and Italy. Pick the winner!

FBI ENTERTAINMENT INC.

Once upon a time two humorous senior citizens, Stanley and Sherry, were too lazy to record their fabulous philosophical world-shaking conversations – or to make their laugh-out-loud video, or that over-stimulating radio tape. They were their own Tex and Jinx but without ambition. But one day they hit on the perfect scheme. They figured that with a little stimulation, they could get the FBI to record all their conversations for free. And this is how they broke out of the FBI underground into national television.

Nebraska for Dummies

In 1991 I stepped off the plane in Omaha Nebraska and saw an urban skyline with tall buildings and a spreading city going west from the banks of the Missouri River. I was no longer the world-wide sophisticated traveler I imagined myself to be. I realized in that first glimpse of Omaha that most of us from the East Coast and the West Coast had NO idea about life in the middle of the country.

Return of the Oldest Woman on the Web

For years I wrote a column called Oldest Woman on the Web. Like everything we did online, this was a blog before there were blogs. Under pressure from my friends, pressure from my now aging body, pressure to continue something cutting edge that I did while co-hosting Neofiles with the famous RU Sirius, I'm starting this blog. The subjects may be art, technology as it applies to normal humans, reconcilling our dark sides with a drive to survive, messages from other planets, death (get over it), and humor.