december fotoplay : gallery 6

While I am far from happy about it, I am going to openly admit the following: I have very few friends of color. When I was younger, I lived in cities (like New York and San Francisco) with wonderfully diverse populations. But for the past fifteen years, I’ve lived in Belfast, Maine, and diverse, it is not. So thank goodness for my African American friend Grace. Grace and I met when I worked as a graphic designer for the City of San Francisco in 1991. I was grossly under-qualified for that position, and Grace, who worked in the office next to mine, knew right away that I was having trouble faking it. Grace helped me in a million ways, and we became fast friends. Grace sent me the card above with this note: This one’s for you MJ. So if something happens to me, you’ll always have a colored friend. 🙂 Thank you Grace!

I received the card above from my friend Heather. We share a love for Natalie Goldberg’s ideas about “writing practice” (see Goldberg’s brilliant book, Writing Down the Bones, which I wrote about here) so I was excited when this card arrived in my inbox. Heather writes every night before she goes to sleep, and she writes without any plan or goal. The daily practice and the open-ended process give birth to the ideas that she often uses to write short stories…

The work above was created by a new friend, Janet, who I met through this blog. Janet and her daughter, six year old Katie, worked together to create this vibrant, sweet, but also mysterious piece. I love how they turned the whole card into a scratchboard using only crayon.

The card above was sent to me by the second friend who requested anonymity. But she sent me an explanation of the card, and encouraged me to post that:  Hi Marcie. Here’s my card, which I made using my thumbprint in a bunch of colors. When I got the card, I immediately knew I would use my thumbprint right in the center of the face. I thought I’d leave it there and be done with it, but when I saw the print, I realized where I needed to go with the whole thing. I knew I needed to surround the odd, unclear face with a bunch of faces/prints, each one expressive and unique. So the meaning is probably pretty obvious to you, because you know me. I’m the green face in the middle, unsure of who I am and what I feel. And I’m surrounded by tons of people, all who know who they are and what they feel.