Sunday Scribblings - Yes

YESterday at Barnes & Noble, while racking my brains over whether to buy Dwell or InStyle and eventually deciding to spend my money instead on a caramel brulee frappuccino, I watched an older woman browsing the art magazines. You know the type: mid-50s, dark hair with reddish highlights, obviously dyed, lipstick a little too dark, eyeliner a little too heavy, some kind of red wool jacket with those cutesy buttons -- Laurel Burch? giraffes? cats? Anyway. She picks up one of the magazines with a huge splash headline, The Best of Drawing! One of those issues that promises to yield up the mystery of great art to the common person, to reveal that secrets that will transform your stiff & stodgy still lifes (?) of vases of flowers into fluid renderings expressing love, anguish, and desire, earthshaking beauty. I see her flipping the pages, pausing to read some, flipping past others. Thinking. Hoping. It won't work, I want to tell her. That magazine won't change your life. If you want to draw, you have to practice looking. Just look, draw, look again, and keep on trying. Or at least I'm pretty sure that magazine won't work any better than buying Dwell or Instyle will transform my fluorescent-lit apartment or my dowdy wardrobe into anything more glamorous than it really is.

She doesn't pay any more attention to my advice than I do to myself. Holds onto the magazine, keeps browsing, picks up a couple of other magazines, Somerset Studio, Cloth/Paper/Scissors, stuff like that.

A few minutes later, a few art student types come by, in black, pierced and expensively tattered: if I were still in school, I might know them; they might remember me. They are looking at Inked and Juxtapos, fantasy magazines, crap like that. Still, they are young, sure of themselves. One points to the drawing magazine, "There's one I need to get," he snickers. Not meant to be unkind. But the older woman suddenly holds her magazines closer to her chest. Hiding. Thinking that maybe this was a stupid idea. Maybe she should just return the magazine to the rack... as soon as these assholes leave, of course.

Suddenly I want something for her. Don't do it, I think, as hard as I can, while pretending to be absorbed in my caramel brulee frappuccino. Don't put it back. Keep the magazine. Hold onto your hopes. Don't stop trying.

And I am glad to see her head to the register instead.

Sunday Scribblings