The writing floodgates have now opened. Spinners, knitters, dyers and the like TAKE COVER. Geesh, you'd think I was writing repressed or something. I'm frickin waking up in the middle of the night mid-paragraph. Cara, you're right. My life as it once was is over....
Some housekeeping: I'm worried that all the English majors out there reading these posts are having to slick back the hair on their necks as it rises. Now back in 8th grade I was taught grammar by Sister Joanna Mary at Guardian Angels School. Where? In Detroit, for goodness sakes. I was more than a good Do-Bee then. I was a pain-in-the-ass Do-Bee. I learned my grammar well and got straight A's in English. See my little hand shooting up with the answer to the good sister's questions? However, I'm a crammer. Yes, I crammed for tests all through my school days. Crammers do well on the day of the test but forget EVERYTHING once the pen leaves the paper. That said, my grammer stinks. I regularly screw up tenses, even in the same sentence. Alan King, the comedian in the 60's (at least that's when I used to see him on Johnny Carson), would crown me queen of using words in the wrong context - and he was a master of this! But maybe my worst offense is not knowing how to use an apostrophe properly, especially when showing possession. Do I look at "The Gregg Reference Manual," which Elizabeth correctly said I should buy? NO, I ask Chris, who's written his own avalanche of papers, and we both stand there scratching our heads. Now none of this is a problem when one has an editor(s), such as when I write for "Spin Off." But here in blogland, no such saviour. Oh, for the record, my spelling's pretty good. I won the 6th Grade, "Detroit News Spelling Competition" after all (and am still using the dictionary I won with my name imprinted in gold, alas now fading, on the cover that's fallen off - we use it as a doorstopper to keep it handy if my spelling skills waiver). Did I mention run-on-sentences......??
Since I'm writing about the past (I think), I'll finish this first post of the day with a story from the 70's. Yes, there may be more posts today (hopefully there's no bloglaw against that?!) because I want to jot down a once-a-year post showing what folks can expect in the classes I teach AND a post, that'll be periodically updated, showing where to find my more formal writing. Don't look for much that's funny in the already published pages tho' - editors tend to slash some of the good stuff when I'm supposed to be writing about technical spinning moves. I was telling Deb Menz and her buddy, Sara Lamb, about a manuscript I sent Spin-Off, featuring one of my "collaborations." If they had published it "as is", the thing would have been about 20 pages long. Deb said something like, "And here we have the Jenny Bakriges' Spin-Off issue..." Oh, and please do take a look at the top of the page as it's where my teaching schedule will live, for the time being.
So here goes with the story. It was first "published" on Lucy's blog, www.luluspetals.blogspot.com, as a response to the contest she ran. I re-edited it a tad. And let me thank Lucy publicly here. She's the one who said, "Spider, you should write a blog." Good thing I'm a Do-Bee.
The Blue Blazer
I happily grew up on the east side of Detroit. Yes, Dee-troit, Michigan - not Royal Oak, not Bloomfield Hills and surely not Grosse Pointe. I say this because some folks "say" they're from Detroit but they're really from the burbs. I, on the other hand, am a Detroiter through and through. Ma and dad decided to give me a full, wham-banged, action-packed, Catholic, education. This included grade school, high school and somehow, I even ended up at a Jesuit run college. My tale takes place during the high school years, which happens to be in the early 70's. I went to Regina High that was NOT in Detroit, but Harper Woods. Why? Well, they were going to bus me to Finney High had I gone to a public school since bussing was in full swing. My parents would have none of it. Actually, it could have saved me a lot of grief because my husband of 26 years had gone there during his high school years and I could have skipped all the schmucks I dated prior to him and got to the good stuff first.
Regina was an ALL GIRLS school but I figured that was o.k. since an ALL BOYS school was next door. It all worked out pretty well except when the nuns would call my parents that "Jeannine was once again between the schools, without a hat for goodness sakes, and talking to the boys." My dad told me to put a hat on.
Regina was a Catholic school and like most of that ilk, had a rather strict dress code. The get-up included saddle shoes, blue and white plaid skirt, white blouse and a blue, wool, blazer. We could wear blue sweaters if we wanted, but I, one of many non-comformists, usually got stopped by the nuns for wearing something I didn't mind being caught dead in. We also got stopped for rolling up our skirts as high as we dared, even though the nun-patrol would soon be on our tracks. It was well worth the hassle.
Now uniforms have their plusses and minuses. One great thing is you don't have to think what you're going to wear for school when your all bleary-eyed in the morning. Another plus is that the money you make with your after-school job can go into your oh-so-cool wardrobe. The big minus is that a uniform was not meant to make you look pretty, or hip, or desirable (to those guys at the Catholic school next door.)
The blue blazer incident occurred during one of those four, seemingly endless at the time, years. The memory of the actual class it took place in is so far back in my brain's caverns I couldn't begin to say what we were learning. Suffice to say a good buddy of mine, Joanie, was sitting near me. At one point during the class, one of the nuns in the office announced over the intercom that "Jeannine Belde" needs to come down to the office. This ordinarily wouldn't have caused undo alarm, but I had forgotten to wear "the blue blazer." School rules dictated that the blue blazer be worn whenever a Reginite went out into the hallway. In a quandary, I begged Joanie's blazer. She passed it over and I donned it down the hall. I don't seem to remember that there was any huge discrepancy in our body size, but apparently her blue blazer didn't fit me all too well. An eagle-eyed nun asked me who the blazer belonged to. I can't remember if I told her outright. Geesh, I hope not. There are names for people who do that! In any case it wouldn't have been hard for her to look at the class list and pinpoint my friends. Next thing you knew the voice over the intercom blared, "Joan Brusewitz, please come to the office immediately. Joanie, in a panic of her own & in a moment of pure brilliance, borrowed someone else's blazer. This went on.... and on, and on.... The final words out of the nun was, "Do I need to call the ENTIRE class down to the office?" Jeannine Belde - You're busted!!
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The photo upload troll has retreated and the Border Leicester lamb fleece has won. Here is the fleece I've been working on that came from the farm of Mary Grant in Ontario, Canada. In the foreground, are nests of the combed fiber. Pictured are Louet mini-combs, single row. The color of the fleece in person is actually much darker and richer than shown (at least on my computer.) The basket of fleece is nestled in front of my marigold bed, a favorite dye plant of mine.
