Did You Know . . .

The illustrator/photographer/graphic designer Jorge Colombo created the cover of this week’s New Yorker (June 1, 2009 issue) by drawing with his finger on his iPhone. Brilliant first. Neat trick. Wish I’d thought of it first. But on the other hand, I don’t even own an iPhone. (Click image for a larger view.)

Copyright © 2009 Jim Sizemore.

The Lady in the Red Dress

By Jake Jakubuwski

Her name was Velma and she rented one of the apartments in the same building in which my family lived. Calling it an apartment is being generous. It was a kitchen, living room and bedroom all-in-one. Like the rest of us, Velma shared the bathroom facilities at the end of the second floor hallway. Each floor had two apartments like Velma’s and one like ours. Ours was a two-room apartment. No bathroom, but we did have a kitchen-style sink, stove and icebox. Note: I said icebox, not refrigerator. The landlord had his place on the first floor which was also two rooms, but he had his own bathroom. I remember seeing it one time and thought it quite marvelous to be able to walk to the toilet without going down a dark, cluttered hallway to find that someone else was already in residence. I have no clear memories of the folks that lived on the third floor; or for that matter, those with whom the landlord shared the first floor.

Anyway, I seldom saw Velma—or, as I came to think of her, “The Lady in The Red Dress,” at least not during the day. But in the evenings, just about suppertime, Velma could be heard, her high heels clicking down the stairs. If I was real lucky, I might catch a glimpse of her shoulder-length blond hair and clinging red dress through the banister railing as she went out the front door. I only knew two things for certain about Velma. She was from West Virginia, and—this was important—she was a divorcée. According to the superior intellect of my eleven and twelve year old male friends, divorcées “did it” and they were “easy.” The fact that Velma was divorced and had her own place—and didn’t seem to have a day-job—made her an object of lust and lasciviousness for the guys in my small neighborhood. And not just the boys. Judging from the looks I’d see on the faces of some of the family men when they saw Velma walk down the street I knew—even at the tender age of ten—those men weren’t thinking about church socials and good deeds, either.

Few males were immune to Velma’s charms. I remember one time when my mother found my father and her lingering a bit too long at the bathroom door. That evening there was much shouting and door slamming in our apartment. The door slamming was a real feat since there was only one interior door and four or five cupboard doors in the entire apartment. The slamming doors were accented with shouted words like “slut”, “whore” and “no good tramp.”

On a rare occasion, I would run into Velma during the day. She might be coming home from shopping or the hairdressers or—from who knows where. She always smiled at me and called me by name. Velma knew my name! Once, when we ran into each other in the local drug store, she bought me an ice-cream soda. None of my buddies believed me when I told them about it. After that I knew for sure that I was in love with Velma. In my mind she was some sort of a goddess.

It was during my tenth summer that “doing it” took on a full new meaning and I somehow quickly figured out why boys and girls were anatomically different. The backyard gatherings and closed-shed sex education classes among peers had begun to make sense. At that point my goddess feelings about Velma didn’t change—but my imagery of her and I together certainly did. I now could envision us in situations that did not just include shared ice cream sodas or holding hands up on the roof in the moonlight. Beyond that, I still wasn’t completely clear about the exact activities involved, but speculating about various possibilities certainly spiced up my days. Lust and lasciviousness had come to roost in my soul and I only knew that I felt different—really different—about Velma. I was no longer satisfied just being an admirer, a dumb-struck recipient of Velma’s occasional smiles or winks. I wanted to take my place beside her as the one and only object of her affections.

And I was convinced that Velma felt the same about me. She had to. Fate decreed it—Cupid, after all, was not stupid. He was just doing his job to bring we two yearning souls together. Together, our souls were fated to fulfill a destiny that was determined before I was born. Don’t misunderstand, in 1948 I didn’t think about it exactly in those terms, but I knew with certainty that a seminal event was about to take place in my life, and Velma—my Velma—was going to be at the epicenter of that whatever it might be.

On Saturday’s I was up early to take my week’s “pickin’s” to the junk yard. I could sell old newspapers, magazines, metal and other junk I’d scavenged during the week. I never made much, usually just enough for movies and candy. As I turned up the alley where we lived, I saw Velma sitting on the front steps, still dressed in her red dress. When I got close enough, I mumbled a “Hi, Velma” and she looked up at me. “Hey, sweetie,” she said. She was smiling but I could tell she’d been crying. The very thought of Velma crying over anything made me want to cry too. I stood at the bottom of the steps trying not to look up to where her dress sort of drooped down and I could see one the garters that held her nylons up. I looked higher still and saw soft white flesh tinted rose from sunlight burning through the red fabric of her dress. I wanted to see more, see whatever there was to see, but felt guilty each time my eyes strayed to the roll of nylon wrapped around her garter. Finally I moved up a step, where I could no longer see Velma’s half-hidden treasures. Instead, I looked at her puffy eyes and red-splotched face—and somehow stammered out a query about what was so terribly wrong that it made her cry.

The tears began to roll down her cheeks again. She told me her mother was sick and needed her at home. My heart broke—Velma was going to leave me! She went on to say that the night before she told her date about the problem and asked him for money—money that he owed her—and he got mad and took what little she had in her purse and ran off. Now, she had nothing to buy a train ticket home. I quickly realized that this was my opportunity to impress Velma and win her gratitude—perhaps even her undying love. I asked Velma how much she needed for the ticket. “Ten dollars, sweetie.” A fortune! So I reached in my pocket and gave her all of my junk earnings. I told her maybe my dad would loan her the rest. She said no, because if he did and my mother found out, it would only cause problems. I told her to wait, I’d be right back.

My mother was sleeping (she usually got home from her bar tending job around three in the morning and slept until noon). I went to the jelly jar where she kept her tip money and removed almost two dollars and fifty cents in change, not too much so it would look like anything had been taken. My father’s “junk” drawer yielded a dollar and forty-eight cents. My personal piggy bank gave up thirty-nine cents. In the kitchen Momma’s “butter money” yielded a dollar thirty-five. Along with what I had already given Velma, she was now up to a grand total of six dollars and ninety-two cents. I ran back to Velma and gave her the money, and cried over the fact that it wasn’t enough—just the best I could do. She told me “not to worry,” that maybe she could get her brother to send the rest.

Then Velma did the most amazing thing. She reached out, gently clasped my cheeks in her soft hands and kissed me right on the lips! Not like some adult kissing a kid, but like an adult kissing an adult. I could feel the tip of her tongue against my teeth and her lips covered mine in a soft but urgent manner that made me dizzy. Before I could figure out that I should respond in kind, the moment was over. She still held my cheeks in her hands, but now she was looking into my eyes and promising that as soon as she “got settled” she’d let me know where she was and maybe I could come visit her. Visit? All she had to do was tell me where and when. I would swim deep oceans and climb high mountains to get another kiss from Velma! And I would gladly wait for her to reach out to me and tell me she was ready to fulfill our destiny—the fate determined for us by deities unknown, or long forgotten—to consummate a love the likes of which had never been experienced before by mere mortals!

I was thinking all of that (on a ten year-old level of course) as Velma told me she had to go or she’d miss her train. As I watched her stand, smooth the red dress over her voluptuous body, and begin walking down the alley toward the corner where the streetcar stopped, I thought of our future bliss together. I watched her board the streetcar. I watched some tall stranger take her valise and Velma show her appreciation by smiling brightly at him. Then she turned and looked my way. She puckered her lips and blew me a kiss and gave a sad little wave and turned away. I watched as The Lady In The Red Dress left my life forever. She left with six-dollars and ninety-two cents that I would never see again. I watched as the streetcar carried my first love away forever—off into my bitter-sweet long-term memory.

Copyright © 2009 Jake Jakubuwski.

Jake Jakubuwski spent nearly two decades as an active locksmith and door service technician. He has been writing physical security related articles since 1991. Seventeen years ago, Jake wrote his first article for the National Locksmith Magazine and has been their technical editor for fifteen years. Pure Jake Learning Seminars©, his nationally conducted classes, are designed for locksmiths and professional door and hardware installers. For more information, click the “Pure Jake” link in the sidebar blogroll and under the “business” label.

Jake contacted me after reading some of my growing-up-in- South-Baltimore-in-the-1950s posts. It turns out that we have a lot in common—some of our experiences eerily similar but at the same time different in the details. For instance, my first lustful crush—when I was fifteen—was on a woman old enough to be my mother. (In fact, she was a friend of my mother’s and the same age. I know, I know—what would Freud say?!) But I never saw my mother’s friend in a sexy red dress. As far as I could tell she only wore cheap print house dresses—and, like a certain movie star named Marilyn—whom she resembled—my mother’s friend disliked wearing underwear. Ah, memory!

Quilt Doodle #25

Copyright © 2009 Jim Sizemore.

Speedball

An Ink-Stained Memory

The cover of my copy of the 17th edition of Speedball Text Book by Ross F. George, published by the C. Howard Hunt Pen Company in 1956, has my last name scrawled in the big yellow letter “S” in the title — proof of ownership by a much younger me. The 6″ x 9″ booklet cover is dog-eared by use and abuse over time and, at the bottom of the subtitle text, there is what appears to be spilled India ink on the words “Poster Design for Pen and Brush.” (Click images once or twice for larger views.)

In 1956 I was 19 years old and serving the second year of a three-year enlistment in the U. S. Army. I doubt that I owned the booklet then, but once I left the military — in 1957 — I became a serious art student with the help of the Korean G. I. Bill. Despite having been an avid doodler and tracer of comic book panels and Sunday newspaper comic strips as a kid, I had had few formal art classes in elementary school. Instead of going to high school I attended two years of “commercial art” training in a city vocational school, to which I was sent after failing the eighth grade. In those days “problem” students — very much me at the time — were given the option of repeating the failed grade, learning a trade or — in a case like mine, because of some problems with the law — going to reform school. For me, the study of art of any kind was very seductive, so it was an easy choice. Later, though, I would discover that what I had signed on for was really a sort of “bait and switch” scheme. (More on that later.)

“Tools for Lettering,” on page 1 of the “Speedball” text, provides a clue as to when I may have acquired the booklet. If you look closely at the “Style C” pen point section you’ll see my faded rubber stamp running vertically up the page — another ownership tag. My address at the time, 3811 Mayberry Avenue, was where my new wife and I lived in the early 1960s. During those years I became something of a “speedball” myself, over-committed in life and in art, trying to make up for lost time and a truncated education. (I had completed high school by scoring well on the General Educational Development test while in the service.) In the span of only a few years I became the father of two sons, was working full time as a clerk for the Social Security Administration and also doing part-time seasonal work in the mail order department of Montgomery Ward (stocking shelves in the toy section). I was also attending evening art classes at the Maryland Institute of Art. And, as if that wasn’t enough, during the same period I signed up for a course in “Editorial and Commercial Cartooning” offered by a correspondence school. It was around this time that I began to collect a modest library of “how-to” art books, with which I planned to master the mysteries of what I hoped would somehow become a career. My simple and — as it turned out — unrealistic, dream was to quickly make big bucks as some sort of artist, in the same way many of my male relatives had become master carpenters and managed to support their families. From the very beginning I figured that art was something I could do, perhaps the only thing I was suited for, and at which I just might be able to make a living.

The Speedball booklet impressed me because of the mix of visuals and beautifully hand-lettered copy. One example of the practical quality of the illustrated craft tips is on page 2, where “Three Points of Contact” of the pen or brush hand in the proper lettering position is demonstrated with a photograph (brush) and in a line drawing (pen). Until I owned the booklet I didn’t know from “Roman,” “Gothic,” and “Text” lettering styles (see page 3). Or that Roman letters could best be made using “C” or “D” Speedball pen points, etc. And that in all lettering, to quote the copy, “Time and effort will be minimized by using the size and style of pen or brush which will form the different letters of any given alphabet without subsequent remodeling of the strokes.”

Now back to what I termed the “bait and switch” of vocational school. The four semesters of half-days I had spent there consisted of the endless practice of basic “show-card” brush strokes (the other half-day devoted to “social studies” and other “academic” subjects). Show cards are those hand-lettered broadsides you still see in the windows of small neighborhood grocery stores, announcing the current sale price of milk and eggs. They were training me to become a sign painter! We students used water-based black or red poster paint and practiced the simple letter segments using old newspapers turned on their sides so that the print columns became uniform guidelines. The exercise was much like the illustration of basic pen strokes shown on page 6 of the Speedball Text Book.

Meanwhile, on page 20 of the booklet, illustrations of pen points were shown stroking Roman letters. Simple, all you had to do to master the basic letter forms was to allow your eyes to follow the direction of the tiny numbered arrows. (There were even microscopic arrows showing where you should “twirl” the point to make a curved section.) As good as those illustrations were, and despite my hours of practice, I never became much good with a speedball pen or red sable lettering brush. I quickly realized that I’d have to develop other skills if I hoped to make a living at a drawing table. It seemed that because of my bipolar-like low boredom threshold and short attention span, and my rush of ambition, I simply didn’t have the patience to practice lettering. Anyway, I was more attracted to what the Speedball booklet taught me about the arty “moods” letter styles convey (see page 36); layout theory (pages 80 to 82); and how something as simple as line direction could convey important information to a viewer (page 83). The beauty part was I came to understand that many of these lettering “rules” also applied to drawing cartoons, a subject that holds my interest to this day.

The beautiful line drawing on page 92 of the booklet, “Early Morning in the Snow,” done with a “C-6” pen point by Charles Stoner, is an example of the aesthetic versatility of at least some of the Speedball products. For many years my personal preference was the “B-6,” with which I did balloon lettering and my rather crude cartoons. The stick figure examples shown on page 94 are close to my drawing style at the time, and they cleverly demonstrate the human body when in a balanced position. The booklet text explains: “Notice also that the supporting foot is directly under the center of gravity.” Other pictures demo the off-balance body, showing a figure actively attempting a broad jump. On other pages in the booklet I learned about the use of basic shapes (circles, triangles, rectangles, squares, etc.) with which to begin designing layouts and drawings, along with strategic placement of blacks to direct the viewer’s eye movement left to right, top to bottom through the panels and the pages. Again, these tips have great value for executing all levels and kinds of art, “commercial” and “fine,” not just the lettering on posters and show cards.

Overall, what did I take from my study of the Speedball booklet and similar texts so many years ago — I mean beyond the useful tips and exercises? Well, most importantly I think, I came to reluctantly accept the idea that given my late start in the graphics game I would likely never be able to do any of it at the “master” level. What I did get from “Speedball” and other similar texts, though, was enough new knowledge about the craft and business of lettering and cartooning with which to earn a modest living, something for which I’ve been very grateful. So here I am after all these years, still hard at it, still learning new things every day. And still laughing at myself and my false starts and outright failures. Still trying, despite the odds, to become really good at something.

Copyright © 2009 Jim Sizemore.

To mark this first year anniversary of DoodleMeister.com (initial post published May 7, 2008), I wanted to post something to which fellow cartoonists’ and other commercial-type ink-slingers of a certain age might relate. And lo, the other day I happened upon my well-thumbed copy of Speedball Textbook. Perfect.

Fred-Ho

By Shirley Lupton

I can’t help wondering what my manicurist thinks as he bows his head close over my hands. They retain a scent of garlic and onions from the preparation of a stew I left to walk over to this new salon in my neighborhood. He examines them with Asian solemnity and without discernible judgment brings a bowl of hot suds and guides both hands into it. Then with a dancer’s swing he dips under the table to remove his tools from the sterilizer. With the clank of metal on his tray my mind flashes back to the preparation for surgery ten years earlier and the chemotherapy that destroyed my nails. The smell of yellow flesh and fresh gauze comes, but leaves fast, a hit of angst in one intake of breath. Then back to onion and garlic worry as I exhale.

We proceed. Our right hands are locked as he files and pares in silence. Pinned on his shirt pocket is a small metal plate with an improbable name, Fred-Ho. He is small, under a hundred pounds, so delicate and young, with intermittent black fuzz around his chin and upper lip and his black hair is slicked back Alec Baldwin style. His hands are strong as he gives me a hand massage, the mid-point ritual. He hurts me. He presses on arthritis points I forget I have. I practice my own inscrutability and study the empty chairs.

Suddenly his face lights up from an internal jolt and he speaks in that lyrical Vietnamese sing- song trill and somewhere in the salon, like a parrot in the jungle, another manicurist answers in the same trill to share a joke. Then he cues me to leave him to wash my hands of the flaky material used in the massage. I pad over to the customer sink against a far wall, set about with soaps and dried flower scent baskets. I see him in the mirror talking on his cell phone, smiling – no – laughing – free of me. As I wash away the crusty stuff I feel like a hostage. I look like one too, distress all over my face. Why so tense? You don’t have to re-write Atonement. It’s a simple manicure -not a massacre. I imagine us as in a musical where I return to him dancing and singing, all the manicurists rising from their stations bursting into a chorus and we high kick past the pedicure island happy and united.

“Fred-Ho?” I ask, as he paints my nails in quick strokes, a colorless gloss with a hint of frost – my choice. I bring my own Chanel, White Satin. “Is that your real name?” “My name Ho,” he answers, “my Vietnam name Ho.” He frowns and signals for the other hand I offer. I want to ask him why did he leave Vietnam? I want to apologize to him for the war – to tell I did protest marches and sit-ins and leave out the parts about sex, drugs and the Stones at Altamont. But I say nothing.

Ho leads me to the nail-drying bin – a long chin-high table with UV blue light glowing in a slot for hands just under the top. Without the use of my hands there is nothing to do but think. Ho’s grandfather or uncle could have been the child who begged on the side of the road and blew away the GI who handed him a chocolate. Or, maybe some Marines, while passing through a hamlet on the way to nowhere and for no defensive reason, gunned Ho’s cousins down. But Ho was born ten years after the choppers lifted cringing Americans off the embassy roof in Saigon. If I believe what I read about his generation, he knows or cares little of the war. It was your government – not you, they say. Even the older people there say that.

At the cashier I watch Ho sitting on a stool bent over the bare feet of a young redhead in a pedicure chair. As he scrubs her pink heels she is reading Newsweek. The cover shows a man in a black turban and the caption says War Escalates in Afghanistan.

Copyright © 2009 Shirley Lupton.

Today’s Gag

Copyright © 2009 Jim Sizemore.

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