Nadine Williams

Cheryl’s works pure exotica

The exotic home of artist designer Cheryl BridgArt is the ideal venue for exhibiting her “unfinished Journey” exhibition as part of  SALA Festival of Art Lovers 2012 event (South Australian Living Artists).

All wall spaces of Beltana House are hung with an extraordinary collection of 50 of her artworks.  The opening is a special night for Cheryl because she is showing to her Adelaidean fans the works she created on her Australia-wide solo tour  in Sydney, Canberra, Perth, Launceston and Melbourne this year.

At each venue she demonstrated her innovative technique of freehand machine embroidery on paper to more than 200,000 people.

The house itself is a showpiece, being historic converted stables, once used by Pikes Brewery’s drafthorses, who carted beer to town and who needed to rest overnight before returning to Oakbank.

It is an exciting unconventional living environment and immediately opens up into a large open space with red brick walls and a pitched timber-lined high ceiling line.
A permanent not-for-sale item is a full-sized black and white zebra at the entrance and Cheryl has mischievously plonked one of her zany hats onto its long ears. It begs a touch.

The crowd mingles in the huge courtyard or move throughout the two side wings of the house where much of the artworks are displayed.

The opening is also a celebration of what has been an exceptional year for Cheryl since she won a competition by decorating a small sewing machine.  She won art appearances and demonstrations of her works in all capital cities.
And we Adelaideans are the lucky ones to view the whole collection of dynamic, vibrant acrylics on canvas, or linen and her flambuoyant fashion items, such as the “Lorikeet Song” Coat and Hat.

Cheryl’s own hand-made fashion garments and her stylish, unique hats, which she always wears, are a feast for the eye, too.

However, when she steps onto the stage, which displays her fashion items, she tells us about her fine art freehand machine embroidery and explains that the price tags which range from $7,500 – $9000 reflect the time she spends at her machine sewing her magic. She uses no computers, no cameras, no photographs and no paint.  She begins by machine embroidering freehand on fine paper and spends about 300 hours twisting and turning her work until mass stitching creates mainly faces of human beings and animals intermingling to reflect her dreams for harmony between humanity and the animal kingdom. They are stunning works of unusual art.

Small pieces – such as Beltana, Platypus and Merry-Merry are less expensive, at $350 each, being freehand machine embroidery in black thread on white paper.Her FAFME works are truly unique art created with thread only – and her beloved sewing machine.

Cheryl’s path to international fame  continues because she has been chosen as one in 12 Sala artists (from 4000) to feature in a documentary to be used as advertising in Australia – and China.

 

 

 

 

Brown’s long magazine life a “Sex-cess”

Long-time editor of Cosmopolitan, Helen Gurley Brown, whose  magazine mantra metamorphised the sex lives of modern women, has died in a New York hospital after a short illness. She was aged 90.

The author of 1962 best-seller Sex and the Single Girl reckoned if women weren’t sex objects, they were in trouble and while good girls went to heaven, bad girls got to go everywhere!.

It sold a million copies and women world-wide took to heart her advice, opinions and tid bits on why being single didn’t mean celibacy and that sleeping around with men – even the boss if it took your fancy – was what a gal could now do.

“I’ve never worked anywhere without being sexually involved with somebody in the office,’’ she told New York magazine in 1982.

When she was asked if that included the boss, she quipped: “Why discriminate against him?’’

The iconic magazine pioneer was the first woman who declared that women could “have it all,” including a career, marriage and great sex.

Gurley Brown ran Cosmopolitan for four decades, transforming it in the 1960s with a sexually frank tone from a financial turkey to a songbird with a circulation soaring from 800,000 readers to 3million in 1983.

She retired from Cosmo in 1997, but she continued to make an appearance in her pink corner office at Hearst nearly every day until her death.

Bonnie Fuller, the celebrity editor who succeeded Brown at Cosmopolitan that year hailed Brown as a visionary, who used her “pulpit plaything’’ – the Cosmo mag – to preach the gospel of man-hunting and conquest.  Her blatant message was that women were also the winners in the sexual revolution and don’t save it for the wedding night.

Helen Gurley was born February 18, 1922 in Green Forest, Arkansas and always admitted she wasn’t blessed with good looks. Her father died when she was 10 and her mother, a teacher, moved the family to Los Angeles where Helen graduated as valedictorian of John H Francis Poloytechynic High School in 1939.  Skilled with typing and shorthand skills, Brown went through a series of secretarial jobs until 1948, when she was finally given a chance at writing ad copy at the Foote, Cone & Belding advertising agency.  At 37, she married the twice-divorced David Brown, a former Cosmopolitan managing editor-turned-movie producer, whose credits would include The Sting and Jaws. The couple chose not to have any children.

 

He encouraged her to write a book. When Sex and the Single Girl became a top seller, they moved to New York. A movie version of the book ensued, with Natalie Wood playing a character named Helen Gurley Brown who had no resemblance to the original. According to Hearst, Sex and the Single Girl has been translated into 16 languages and published in 28 countries.

Brown and her husband pitched a women’s magazine idea at Hearst, which turned it down, but hired her to run Cosmopolitan instead, where she made her indelible mark for 32 years on the languishing mag. At her retirement, circulation had levelled off to 2.5 million readers in 1997.

Her message, from the outset was to tell a reader “how to get everything out of life — the money, recognition, success, men, prestige, authority, dignity — whatever she is looking at through the glass her nose is pressed against”.

“It was a terrific magazine,” she said, looking back when she retired from the US edition in 1997. “I would want my legacy to be, ‘She created something that helped people.’ My reader, I always felt, was someone who needed to come into her own”.

Brown was a tiny, almost frail-looking petite woman, the antithesis of the tall, voluptuous, deep-cleavaged beauties on the magazine’s cover, which carried teaser titles like “Nothing Fails Like Sex-cess.”

Male centerfolds arrived during the 1970s — actor Burt Reynolds’ (modestly) nude pose in 1972 created a sensation — but departed by the ’90s.

Her influence rippled across the world.  “Hers has been a liberating message for women in other countries, too,” said Kate White, current editor of Cosmopolitan. “It’s about choice — choosing the life you want, and not worrying about what people think.”

And, well, having fun — in the bedroom, to be precise. After all, why should sex be fun only for men? Brown’s motto was emblazoned on a pillow in her office, says White: “Good girls go to heaven,” it said. “Bad girls go everywhere.”

But Brown and Cosmo didn’t please some feminists. “The stuff on pleasing men hit the wrong note for some women,” said White. “I don’t think the feminists recognized that her message was one of empowerment.”

Her theme of sex continued in 1976 when she hosted a TV talk show Outrageous Opinions, which featured celebrities willing to be quizzed about their sex lives.

“My own philosophy is if you’re not having sex, you’re finished. It separates the girls from the old people,’’ said Brown who also had a long-playing record album, Lessons in Love and six other books.

Her mantra continued into older age:  “You can’t be sexual at 60 if you’re fat,” she observed on her 60th birthday. Or wrinkled, apparently: She spoke freely of her own multiple cosmetic surgeries, including a nose job, facelifts and silicone injections.

Despite decades of sexual innuendoes, she also came out with some classic common sense for women. “What you have to do is work with the raw material you have, namely you, and never let up.’’

Which aptly sums up her life work – breaking up the sexual taboos which restricted women’s sex lives.  Vale Helen.

 

Zany Joan breaks boundaries

On and off-camera behaviour of zany comedian Joan Rivers invariably borders on the ridiculous, but news that she handcuffed herself to a shopping trolley sets up a new shock.

A snippet of news from the United States reports that Joan was outraged when she discovered that a Costco store in a Los Angeles suburb refused to sell her latest book, I Hate Everything … Starting With Me.  And she protested in a highly visible way by handcuffing herself to one of their shopping trolleys.

The 79-year-old Fashion Police host could well have also been aware of the publicity possibilities because she was being filmed by a camera crew as she made her point in the store in Burbank,
California.

Of course, Police were called in by the store. Don’t you love the way Joanie has created her own “news’’ thereby jacking up her chances of a best-seller.

 

Candles in cathedrals lit for Olivier

 

Our life-long friends, Rob and Chris Nicholls had a wonderful lunch (with French wine) with Olivier and myself at our Belair home when they visited from Queensland on Sunday 6th May (see photo). We talked about their upcoming visit to France in June and Olivier showed them his books and maps of our own visits to France and in particular in Brittany where he lived in La Baule.  Olivier had bravely voted in the French Presidential elections and became tired. However, Olivier had that sparkle in his eye when telling them about Brittany and they promised to visit Vannes, which had been very special for us in 2005 and they light a candle in the cathedral there.  Here Rob recalls how he and Chris visited cathedrals along their travels and lit candles for Olivier.

 

“We were saddened to learn that Olivier passed away a few short days after we visited him and Chris and I determined to light a candle in a cathedral while in Brittany for Olivier– and Nadine.

On Friday 1st June we lit the first candle for Olivier Foubert in the historic Brittany town of Vannes as we had promised – in the Cathedrale Saint-Pierre (St Peter Cathedral). Vannes is a wonderful old city with many wooden buildings reminding us of “The Shambles” in York England–the definite British influence in Brittany. The walled town is in excellent example of a medieval town. Harbour side is a wonderful marina of yachts and motor craft which are only 1.6Ks to the Gulf of Morbihan. The waterway goes right up to the old main gate entrance to the town ( Porte Saint Vincent-Ferrier). Around this area is a gourmet selection of great restaurants, cafes and people watching outside seating. We know Olivier and Nadine shared a wonderful meal and time here in Vannes–a must visit in Brittany and France.

Our candle lighting and prayers in Vannes and Dinan (both Brittany) and St David’s Cathedral in Wales for Olivier, a fine French-Australian man and a gentleman, and for Nadine was a special time for us. Rest in Peace Olivier–God bless Nadine.”

Their note brought vivid memories of the night Olivier and I  dined at a two-star Michelin restaurant on the harbour-side of the marina right in the heart of Vannes. Afterwards, we, too, drove 1.6Ks to the Gulf of Morbihan where we stayed in a delightful boutique hotel dedicated to the French artist Paul Gaugin.

 

 

 

Police attend Joan’s protest

On and off-camera behaviour of zany comedian Joan Rivers invariably borders on the ridiculous, but news that she handcuffed herself to a shopping trolley sets new heights.

A snippet of news from the United States reports that Joan was outraged when she discovered that a Costco store in a Los Angeles suburb refused to sell her latest book, I Hate Everything … Starting With Me.  And she protested in a highly visible way by handcuffing herself to one of their shopping trolleys.

The 79-year-old Fashion Police host could well have also been aware of the publicity possibilities because she was being filmed by a camera crew as she made her point in the store in Burbank,  California.

Of course, Police were called in by the store. Don’t you love the way Joanie has created her own “news’’ thereby jacking up her chances of a best-seller.  (And I loved the fab headline in The Advertiser.)

 

Grief, joy, a strange emotional mix

 

What a strange juxtaposition of emotions my life has become.  Husband’s death has plunged me into excruciating grief and now a beautiful new grand-daughter has been born lighting up my life like the floodlights at the AAMI stadium.

I have swung like the big dipper from the sheer joy of handling the newborn to the depths of despair at the loneliness of my life.

 

My life also hovers between the need for friends and family to support me and the need for solitude to grieve.

 

Somewhere as I have groped along the grieving path, I have rediscovered reading as a way to stave off the sadness which has seeped into my soul.  What better choice than the “heartbreaking and compelling’’ Tete-a-Tete by Hazel Rowley on the lives and loves of famous French literary couple, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. It had sat in my bookshelf for at least five years since it was published six years ago without my attention.

 

Yet, nightly – and each morning – as I read of their outrageous life, I discover passages relevant to my own journey.  Here – as a full moon shines its rays into my bedroom thanks to Olivier’s insistence on a high, long window – I discover a passage of Simone de Beauvoir’s own distressing take on grief, which aptly captures my own state of being.

 

“I am trying to interest myself in my past….I have got to kill time somehow….Didn’t sleep much…. I am so tense I have been taking Sarpagan….after the tension, depression… I am too down to write…I slept badly and woke up with my nerves in knots…I am always seized by panic just before I wake up…tonight once more, life sinks its teeth into my heart.’’

 

She wrote of suffering one of many heartbreaks, while I am suffering the loss of my soul mate.  My  agony of a shattering emotional emptiness through the finality of death, surely is worse that her broken heart, which, my the next reading session, had been replaced with yet another affair in “the Beaver’s’’ life.

 

However do you heal? For my healing, I am trying to build an imaginary stepladder of “doing’’ things, the first and last being to reach for my book in bed.  In between, it remains a struggle to fend off sadness and engage once more in “quotidien”” (dailiness).

 

So let me share my days, which begin with a new routine.

 

I wake. I lie there and gauge the time by the varying dawn-time silhouettes of the huge gums outside my window. I don’t want to move, but nature calls.

 

I crawl back into bed and read. Oscar whines and scratches at the laundry door. I rise to let him into the hallway. His morning antics make me laugh;  I grab a glass of water before switching on the gas wall heater.  This is my precious meditation time, a TM practice which has kept me more or less sane for 40 years.   I harness Oscar and walk into the early morning mist for 20 minutes, picking up the newspaper on my return.  Make pot of tea, prepare breakfast. Read morning paper. Consult diary.

 

Each day includes an “engagement’’ for coffee or lunch or I plot a visit to the nursery to buy herbs, or a visit to the library reading room. I book a French lesson once more after missing two weeks and note that tomorrow I have my grief group. Each week I buy flowers and cut foliage from my own garden to create a floral arrangement for the home.

 

Olivier and I rarely watched television. Now I follow the Olympics and have begun eating simple meals again – in front of the telly. (He would be shocked as we always met at the kitchen bench to eat together until his last days.)

 

Now I have the added pleasure of driving to the western suburbs to visit the new parents and my infant grand-daughter. To hold her in my arms (after cleaning up a shocking, smelly, pooey nappy) is pure bliss.

 

Somehow time passes and the fear of facing life alone without Olivier is easing.