Another Sunday arranging my “home office” pausing for memories,
looking at pictures, and dreaming of new projects.
This is one of my favorite times, all alone with myself,
when the future and past sometimes get pleasantly confused in my thinking.
I happened to see in a book a picture by Cecil Beaton,
a photographer I always enjoy spending time with.
Who was she? So great and stylish?
I did not recognize Ruth Gordon, what a change!
I came to know about her in the 70’s when the movie Harold and Maude
became un unexpected part of my life.
Ruth Gordon was a great actress and also a writer,
but she started her career as a beauty.
Here she poses as Serena Blandish where Ruth played the role of the ingenue,
a defenseless woman exploited by men who never married her.
Cecil Beaton took this great picture of her for Vanity Fair in 1929 ,
posing with calla lilies, long before her beloved sunflowers became her favorite flower.
Just for pure fun, of course, I did a quiz, “which flower are you”,
now everything can be done and supposedly there is an answer for everything…
so following the test I am a Lily… calm and a little shy…
but with soothing effects on others… Uhmm… Why Maude wanted to be a sunflower?
The dark humored existentialist drama focused on Harold’s obsession with death,
is in fact a serious essay about life.
It is beautifully and romantically expressed in a flower,
when Ruth says “they grow and bloom, and fade, and die,
and some change into something else.
Ah life! I should like to change into a sunflower most of all”.
“Don’t be shy let your feelings roll on by…”
Cat Stevens wrote these songs specifically for the movie Harold and Maude:
great lyrics and melodies. Unforgettable to sing along… if only I could sing…
“And if you want to be me, be me! And if you want to be you, be you…”
I have always collected Edward S. Curtis photogravures from portfolios and volumes.
He was a photographer and ethnologist of the native American people.
This picture of Zuni women carrying pottery on their heads
and heavy black blankets is a beauty.
They are part of the Peublo people
who live by the Zuni river (New Mexico) for over 1300 years.
And lots of sunflowers grow there…
This drawing of a snake with flowers by Kris: what a sweet combination.
It is a fact that the simple, beautiful sunflowers can save a life from snake venom.
Apparently the Native American tribes
(including the Zuni People) chew the fresh
or dried roots of sunflowers before sucking venom from a snakebite
and applying a poultice of the root to the wound… the magic of Sunflowers!