ART

I have art in my blood.  Wait, no, that's gin.  Sometimes I get them confused.

Seriously though, I was born to not one, but two artists. 

 When my parents were living in sin in San Francisco in the mid 60's, they were very bohemian.  My mother worked at I Magnin's as a window display designer.  Well, first she was a bra saleswoman.  Later, she did window displays.  She was working to put my father through art school.  The San Francisco Art Institute, which he later graduated from with a Masters in Fine Art.

They were so bohemian that after they had their second child (my shoeaholic sister Nava), they decided that they wanted to take their budding young family and their artistic ideals out of the big city and plop them down in the middle of the whitest, most republican county in California.  And then along came baby number three.  Yep, you guessed it, me.

(I started drinking gin at a young age.)

So my parents take their kids, their art, their lives into the woods.  There in the woods, my parents did their art.  By this time, they had begun making jewlery which  would be the bulk of their livelihood until my mother passed away.  My dad also illustrated books, painted, taught art and was a general "artist about town".

I remember my dad always saying, "Art isn't a thing, it is a way of life."  I am not quite sure what that meant to him, but for me, it has become a manta of sorts.  I mean, why would I just do art?  Why not live it?  Besides, is art something that can just be done?  Is it something we just hang on a wall?  Or go to the theater to watch?  Or the symphony to listen to? Is it something that is separate from our "real lives"?

I don't think so.  I think that it is something that lives in the very essence of who we are as a people.  Isn't art a form of expression? At it's highest, a transcendence of sorts?  If so, isn't that what human beings have been striving for since the dawn of time?  

I think, and I know you are all waiting for this...I think that art isn't just out there...it's in here too.  It's in our blood.  Not just mine, but yours too.

So get out there and make some ART...dance, write, paint, cook, clean, eat, arrange flowers, light a candle, or whatever floats your boat. 

Do something that transcends.  Do some thing beautiful.

Because really,  there is an art to everything.

 Even us.

Meet this lovely lady tomorrow.