Slay Me With Your Art

Charcoal Drawing by William Fahey

What is it about artists? Why do creatives consistently capture my heart and lay me low? I invite you to explore the profound sex appeal of arty types.

Slay Me With Your Art

By now I’ve either dated, dallied with, or been in an actual relationship with an artist of one ilk or another: actor, cartoonist, cinematographer, filmmaker, lighting designer, musician, photographer, poet, stand-up comic, writer.

I’m a sucker for a right hemisphere dominant guy. But why? Why do I prize crazy-talented over all those other hyphenated adjectives which may be better predictors of long-term love—you know them: self-aware, emotionally-available, highly-empathetic, health-conscious, fiscally-responsible, mentally-stable.
Here’s why: 

Art ignites: Let’s start with the obvious: art is passionate.

Those sparks of creative expression that reach my eyes and ears kindle fires deep inside me. A love song, a sonnet, a canvas painted in gold leaf, a sweeping pan of a waterfall, a hand-colored photograph of a girl in a slip perched on the edge of a bed. Beauty, rage, anguish, despair, hope, love, oneness. These things move me, and move in me, from my head, to my heart to my hips.  And now there’s a name for what happens to me: Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response. Like a steamy washcloth, an ASMR both invigorates and relaxes at the same time. It’s the crisp scent of 99 44⁄100%  pure ivory soap bubbles in my grandmother’s bathtub, and the sensation they create as they break against my skin. It’s my scalp pulled tight as nana twines my wet hair into a turban, then it’s those follicles relaxed, blood flowing back, as I’m walked outside, unbound, and set to dry in the sunshine. Now that I’ve connected my own engagement with art to personal rapture,  I chase ASMRs any chance I get. And dating artists—as well as just hanging with artists— does set me up to experience this wellness euphoria more often.
Art excites: “God bless the child that's got his own.” Lady Day had it right. When a guy I’m seeing has something going on that lights his fire, it’s dynamic, living, forward moving. And it’s not about me. And that’s good. These men are not retired in their own minds, they’re evolving, growing. They’re dreamers, always dreaming, and  that’s dreamy. It’s a creative mindset that I’m drawn to wherever I encounter it, and not just on dating sites, but on the subway platform, in a steel drummer whose lost in the concave surface of his drum, oblivious to trains arriving and departing. Or in a painter friend’s apartment, watching her at the canvas, a brush in her right hand applying Naples yellow, and six more brushes in the left, jutting out at all angles like a star burst. She’s lost too. Gone! Wholly unaware of me, just five feet away.  If someone I’m seeing is not sometimes lost pursuing his passion, I find I’m not falling that hard. Shallow? Maybe. But my heart likes what it likes. 

Is it also shallow to admit that I’m sometimes the dreamer too, imagining the person I’m with enjoying a splash of celebrity, where I get to throw on a little black dress and hang on his arm at a screening, or an opening, or I dance my ass off to his bright brassy notes on Lincoln Center Plaza, barefoot and wet in fountain spray? It’s sexy to me. It’s also embarrassing to confess to this not liberated mid-twentieth century fantasy of displaced female ambition. (Even while I dream of seeing my own name added to the masthead of P.S. I Love You.)

But honestly, while my collection of little black dresses hang mostly unworn, the reality of my experience dating artists has been pretty great. It’s been enough to just witness someone’s process up close, and sometimes, to even be thrown into their mix of muses, singing back up to their Terpsichores and Calliopes. To experience someone’s art in the making, in the mistaking, and then in the actualization. Well that sends tingles up my fishnets. 
Art challenges: I’m a literal thinker, a literal writer, and a planner. My google calendar is color-coded by family member. I come from a line of women who don’t flake and don’t tolerate “fart brains.” I cut to the chase and break things down into understandable parts. Sometimes this is good. But often not. When it comes to appreciating art, I often miss that point. I try to force meaning in an unappreciative way. Art is a barbed-wire enigma, not to scale recklessly with mock heroics or to throw yourself against, like an inflatable bouncy castle. Dating artists has taught me that. To be fair, artists I haven’t dated have also expanded my thinking here. In my youth into my forties, if I didn’t get a painting or a poem, I just gave up. Walked away.  But knowing more artists has challenged my approach. Sylvia Plath may elude me to the grave, but I’m doing a better job of letting all that’s non-figurative and freely-versed just wash over me. I’m giving meaning-making a rest. And by extension—I’m letting more things in life float by me,  unscheduled and unresolved. And Lord it’s easier. 

Art collaborates: For years, I teased hair and applied false lashes on models for my ex-husband’s photo shoots. Before marriage, I’d held microphones on long poles, revised scripts, dressed sets, and stood perfectly still while a director of photography tinkered with clamp lights. And post-divorce, a conceptual artist had me look over what he drafted to run alongside his latest work. I felt privileged. I’d only blogged about dead pets and consolidating breakfast cereals in my pantry. I knew zilch about attaching words to visual art, much less to those  less “accessible” artworks. But here I now was, curled on his Indonesian daybed in my tag-sale kimono with my red pen, up inside his head—thinking about his art, then with him on the page, holding his words like thin-shelled eggs, those chosen words, pregnant with meaning, pointing them with crimson arrows to paragraphs above and below. Very cool, and, very sexy. Stretched my thinking and opened me up to new experiences with non-figurative art.  Maybe grew my own writing too?

Art gets at truth: Great art isn’t phony. Even artists who play with illusion are going for something real below the gesso surface. And it’s that truth that touches some spot beneath my solar plexus. It’s the thrill that kills me every time. The artists I have known in the screening room as well as the bedroom have shone bright stars that light the way to something pure, beyond description, but deeply felt.  

When it ends, am I upset? Devastated.  Our light goes out. But then it flickers and flares up into a parting gift: a song, a poem, a painting, a photograph. A memento to mark the commonalities that we shared. The truth of their art remains, as does our connection. I mattered to them, then and now, as they did, and still do to me. And their art matters to me, it’s on my wall, or in my playlist or on my bookshelf, or on a scrap in my bedside table. The art that artists and I have experienced together—as givers, receivers, collaborators—it lives on. And that’s killer.

Surfing Love Sites as a Single Mom

courtesy of rockawave.com

For a few tide changes now, I’ve been a girl on the curl, surfing online dating sites for that one Starkist Tuna. Sorry Charlie, to make you tread water until I drift into your current, but while we wait, know that I’m sharing the waves with some terrific tunas who are teaching me to be no Chicken of the Sea, and to enjoy riding this one long wave to you… Read how I’ve been handling the board while balancing work and home. Thanks for the read.

Surfing Love Sites as a Single Mom

Disclaimer: Why write another “How To” on charting the choppy waters of online dating? Especially tips targeted to single moms, who may already feel judgy eyes on them when it comes to how they enjoy their shards of time not spent at a desk, in the produce aisle, or on the soccer, softball or football field? That’s the last thing unattached moms need—a faceless freelancer telling them how to date. 

So why bother? Well, because this writer is in the same boat—single parenting while trawling dating sites, off and on, for a few years now. She’s made mistakes and she’s also made friends. 

“A wise person learns from other people’s mistakes,” my mother likes to say. If true, then at fifty-four I’m still dumb. With the help of a smart therapist however, and gal pals who continue to pry my fingers off the IG accounts of hopeless causes, I am starting to learn from my own mistakes. 

Here are some takeaways from time spent dropping my line on Plenty of Fish, OK Cupid and, say, Episcopaldating.com (the weirdest by far.)

Be discrete

I get it now, but I didn’t at first. It matters who I invite over to dip into the popcorn bowl on family movie night. One ex-boyfriend met my kids right away and two didn’t. Guess which break-up was messier than the other two?  As I see it, it’s a lose-lose set-up for Mr. Maybe to meet my sons before I know he’s Right-on. If the guy is kind of jerky towards mom, kids see that, or if he’s a keeper, but for whatever reason doesn’t keep, then kids—and boyfriends—experience that. Messy. For now I don’t have the head space or the counter space for that blender model. I’m sticking to the every-other-weekend man plan, until I get the internal memo from heartquarters to move forward. 

Enjoy meeting people

Five years post-divorce and surfing the riptides of online dating with a better feel for the board, I’m starting to have real fun with it. It began when I chose to ride that wave of gratitude. Think about it, how else would an over-fifty single working mom in the bowels of Brooklyn, meet eligible bachelors? I don’t even drink anymore, not that meeting males in bars ever worked out that well (except I did get fourteen good years, a set of Wedgewood, and two shining sons out of that last pick-up.) Where else, but within the glowing rectangle on my palm, could I be thrown into conversation with an accomplished man who can teach me a thing or two about some cool profession or unusual past time? In the small talk which comes before pillow talk, I’ve learned how to scramble a super fluffy egg and new strategies for experiencing conceptual art. I now know who Ram Dass is, where Cyprus is, and how to light a menorah. I know how to crash a Christie’s auction and act nonchalant as bids spike over a Basquiat. I’ve discovered a weather app I like more than the default that came with my iPhone. 

It’s not a popularity contest 

When I bemoan an empty inbox, my shrink reminds me, “You’re going for quality over quantity,” then drops his not-so-scorching term: “life partner material.” Last December, my friend met who-she-thought-was-a player, on what-she-thought-was-a-hook-up, and wound up joining the June brides at the altar. She likes to point out that “it only takes one.” So I’ve learned to be less afraid of the ones that fall off. I no longer noodle why some threads—despite batting my lashes with my best banter—break free anyway. After my autopsy on a dead thread comes back clean, I move on. 

Limit It

I hop on about eleven, and I’m off before midnight. 

It’s the last thing I do before smoothing on that face oil and reaching for the bedside light switch. Late night works for me. Because getting into it on my lunch hour with a Redwood timber tycoon—who may not turn out to be a Redwood timber tycoon—didn’t. 

Get clear on what you want. 

If I’ve learned anything riding the high seas of romance on the world wide web it’s this: people want different things. Setting aside the crazies, who can’t weave words into sentences that make sense, most folk will tell you where they’re at—if you bother to ask.

I no longer assume everyone is on the same long board when it comes to friendship, love and sex. This goes for female surfers too. My gal pals surprise me all the time. It’s taken lots of doggy paddling and a couple of wipe-outs to drift closer to how I really feel about things. News flash: people, however they may self-identify, have different attitudes and priorities, which can change over time. Just how long ago the ex rolled off the California King and moved out of the house is a question worth asking. I’m pretty clear now that I’m looking to make friends first, people who value my company, no matter the outcome, as I value theirs.  Eventually, I hope to ride that one long wave into shore... 

Find a Surfing Buddy

I have two gal pals jumping the waves with me right now. Looks like one may have found a real starfish, but even if she disables her account and shimmies off into the sand bar with him, she’ll still want me to float my prospects by her. Which is good. When it comes to the hapless heart, reality checks from real friends help filter the silt out. 

Keep Doing You 

“Patience is the key to paradise…” or so the Turkish proverb goes. If you’re at the point where you’re trawling deeper waters for this “life partner material” (who is still super hot in his own way) then this could take a while. Or not. (like the friend who married “the one” only seven months after they met on that innocent hook-up.) 

It takes what it takes to lure true love, so for now, after I check off childcare, chores and chasing at-risk teens back into their classrooms as a teacher’s aide, I’m buoying my bark during the long trawl by making time for what that matters to me. Like putting up pots of squash soup, and bending that morning bod with perky mid-life Aussie Amazons on YouTube. And with all the waves I’ve made over the years to keep bad romances afloat, instead of funneling that energy into my own writing, well, I could have written my debut novel, its prequel, and six sequels. Today I’m writing daily.

So until I catch the same current with that big-hearted sailor whose got both oars in the water, and who causes me to bite my wrist involuntarily at the sight of him in a full-length leather coat—you know the type— the one for whom I find myself doing Crest white strips before every date, while I’m  just treading water, waiting for that one to join me in the jet stream, I’ll just keep doing me. 

When I Knew I Was a Writer

Some people seem born into their callings: priests, doctors, fire fighters, social workers. From the time they can form words, they can tell you what they want to be when they grow up, and how they’re going to help out around planet Earth. That was never me, until now. But hey, better at 54 than never! Here’s an inspirational read for all late-bloomers.

When I Knew I Was a Write

for Julie Martino, CPA

Some people start writing with seashells in the sand at age four, or in secret journals with padlocks at about twelve. Some people just seem to know from day minus one that they want to be writers when they grow up.  But that’s not me. It actually didn’t hit me until I was 53. You’d think a strong personal essay that bumped me off the wait list and into my freshman class at college would have clued me in. Or the B-movie screenplay I wrote in my twenties. (That actually convinced me I couldn’t write.) Or maybe when I went for that Masters in creative writing, because something was missing in my thirty-something soul, and discounted degrees were a perk of working for a nonprofit. But that second diploma didn’t stamp “WRITER” on my forehead either. And in my forties, when I started mommy blogging at night because I just had to spill about head lice and classroom pets that died under my watch over summer break, did I see myself as anything more than a sleepy parent and animal killer then? NO. And not when I found my little story on the cobbler from Uzbekistan in print in the local paper either. Not even when my tips for surviving heartbreak sober were published in a nationwide recovery journal. The comments on that story were encouraging. And by now I had a fan base of friends and family who didn’t unsubscribe to my monthly newsletter.  Nope, none of this helped me buy into my writer status.  

Instead, I have a phone call from my accountant to thank for moving “freelance writer” up to the first line under my job description on LinkedIn. Last March, while preparing my tax return, she called to ask me about a 1099 for six hundred dollars that she’d pulled out of a clasp envelope, along with my W-2 from the City, for working as a teacher’s aide in a high school. “That was for a story I wrote for Bklyner on Marine Florists,” I explained, “plus a piece on a muscle parlor in Flatbush and one on a CrossFit in Red Hook.” “Did you drive to those interviews?” she asked. “Yes? Why?” I asked back. “About how much would you estimate you spent on gas?” “Gas? I dunno. Maybe five bucks?” She went on to ask about my expenses for electricity, wi-fi, print outs, pens and paper. She was treating my writing seriously, like a business, and me like a writer. Of course I was never serious. 

But now I am. And here’s how: 

I’ve gotten an agent. I asked my poet friend and former editor to be my agent. I started calling her by her surname and promised her a fat dinner out for the next piece published. We’re having fun with it, meeting weekly to edit, strategize and eat everything bagels, for which I keep the receipts. 

I write any chance I get. Whenever I can steal a moment during the day, I’m in a google doc on my phone, or jotting a story idea on a paper cup, pressed against the steering wheel at a stop light. At night I’m on the comp, with my eighties YouTube hip-hop and iced 7-11. Or hot Lipton. Or both. 

And since I’ve gotten serious, the universe has been meeting me halfway. And here’s how:

• I found a great book in the lobby of my building called “How to become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead.”

• The pet lizard has crawled into the role of muse and cuddles on my collarbone over the keyboard all night.

• I discovered a wonderful community of self-published writers on Medium.

Mind you, I’m not quitting the day job. Not now. Maybe never. I actually love the day job; those teens supply open-ended inspiration. But I’m also committed to writing daily, and nightly, and saying those three words out loud: “I’m a writer,” and not just into the bathroom mirror, but to friends and strangers alike. The kitchen floor hasn’t been mopped in a month, but I’ve never been happier. 

You Win Some, You Lose Some

Read my homage to the Brooklyn Dodgers, a team I never knew...

When the Dodgers broke their bat on Brooklyn’s heart and deserted New York for better weather, prettier people and oranges in the backyard, I wasn’t even born, but I ache.  And I’m not alone.  Robert Moses wanted to move the team to Queens, but owner Walter O’Malley had an even more dastardly plan: move them out entirely.  Sports columnist Jack Newfield was right when he fingered the three most evil men of the 20th century:  “Hitler, Stalin, and Walter O’Malley”.  Looping around a Los Angeles freeway once, I passed a turnoff for Dodgers Stadium.  A sign framed by Pasadena palms  rubbed it in: Dodgers’ Stadium, the Home of the Los Angeles Dodgers.

On hot July nights in South Brooklyn, the not-so-pretty old timers sit on their stoops in wife beaters and tune in the Mets—their team by default—on transistors.   “Ahhhcch…” Babe Ballirano, my old landlord would complain,  “They shud neva  have left!”  “We all loved Duke Snyder. He was sooo handsome!” his sister Nancy would add, grinning so her Dentyne showed. Babe hasn’t set foot in a ballpark since 1957.  1957—the year they left us, and one decade after Jackie Robinson, “the Pride of Brooklyn,” broke the color line as the first black ballplayer in the major leagues. (Well, since the 1800s anyway).  Once Babe even showed me his cup of sod, labeled like a tombstone:

Ebbets Field
1913-1957

Four years ago though, professional baseball returned to the City of Churches. After forty-four years of silence, the crack of a bat was once again as much a Brooklyn reality as Junior’s strawberry cheesecake.  Keyspan Park spans three beach blocks along Surf Avenue in Coney Island. The Brooklyn Cyclones, a single-A franchise for the New York Mets, cinched the minor league championship in their first season, and have played to a sold-out stadium ever since.  The box office reserves 200 bleacher seats to sell the day of the game, and I was banking on this when I strode up to the ticket booth one muggy June morning in the second season.  Only sixty tickets remained to the match up between the Cyclones and the Mahoning Valley Scrappers from Cleveland.   I paid fifteen bucks for me, my husband and sister-in-law  then we killed the afternoon on the Cyclone, the seventy-eight-year-old roller coaster  with the familiar first drop that relocates your stomach to the space between your shoulder blades.  

In the bleachers  for the first pitch,  I wrapped  myself in a beach blanket  against the breeze coming off the ocean.  To our left loomed the parachute jump— parachute-free since the seventies — now repainted in primary colors and landmarked, but  the Thunderbolt roller coaster, which had stood just north of the new stadium, was gone.  It had ceased to thrill in the early eighties and was covered in creeping vine until 2000, when it was demolished overnight  in a stealth maneuver by the city.   If only it could have held on like the parachute jump.  There it would be now: in sherbet colors, minor league pennants flying from its rails.

The Cyclones were playing lousy ball that night, three up three down, again and again.   Between each inning, a fuzzy mutant Muppet with obscene appendages ran onto the field and stirred up the crowd not unlike , I imagined, how  the Sym-phony orchestra  entertained Dodgers’ fans by striking up Three Blind Mice when the umps walked on the field. In the fourth there was a race between Ketchup, Mustard and Relish, three condiment heroes sponsored by Nathan’s, but the between inning diversion that scored extra bases in my heart happened when one fan’s jalopy flashed on the giant video screen: Congratulations, the owner of this Oldsmobile Delta 88 has been selected the dirtiest car in the parking lot.  Please report to the courtesy desk after the game to claim your prize: a gift certificate to Oakley’s Car Wash, the official car wash of the Brooklyn Cyclones!

After the fourth inning we moved down to the first base line in time to see a batter finally make contact and wind up on second with a standing double.  For this feat—the best Cyclones hit of the night—we were treated to a video clip of the seagull mascot having his gizzard relocated to his wing tips on the Cyclone roller coaster.    The sun finally fizzled about nine.  Floodlights, sitting atop high poles, and circled in colored neon clicked on like heavenly lollipops.  Merengue music floated up from the pier.  A real seagull flew overhead.   Nostalgia, I realized, plays a major role in this minor league seaside stadium.   The nostalgia has even worked its way into the Cyclones’ logo: a big B with a small C hooked into the design. If you look at a Cyclone’s cap from, say, about the distance of home plate to first base, all you really see is the B —  B for ‘dem Bums’ that is.

We lost, but fans filed out overjoyed, as if they’d just witnessed a walk off home run instead of what really happened--the bottom of the order was retired one, two, three.   It wasn’t about winning. Winning has never gotten Brooklyn fans anywhere.  The Dodgers finally beat the Bombers in that unforgettable subway series of 1955 and look what it it got us: The Ebbets Field Apartments.  Cyclones fans don’t hate the Staten Island Yankees the way Dodgers’ fans hated the Bronx Bombers, or even the way Mets fans hate pinstripes.  What matters to us is that a professional baseball team is home, in the bottom of Brooklyn this time. I rode the elevated F train home thinking about my team, fumbling on that field of dreams.  I thought about Carl Furillo, Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snyder and all the Boys of Summer.  I even thought about my mother as a teenager on the parachute jump, her sundress blowing up over her face.  We’re grateful, too grateful to really care who wins or loses—it’s where you play the game that counts.