Stephanie Joyce Cole
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Widowhood 102, week 6:  Taking on the terror of Haute Couture

7/18/2016

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In an early scene in the movie Pretty Woman, Julia Roberts’ character enters an exclusive clothing store on Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles.  She’s a down-on-her-luck hooker.  Richard Gere’s character, an extraordinarily rich businessman, has handed her a wad of cash and told her to buy an outfit for the evening, but the store’s two saleswomen refuse to wait on her.  They pretty much throw her out of the store, telling her that she doesn’t belong there.  It’s painful to watch.  (Happily, there’s payback later in the movie.)

Roberts’ character enters the store oblivious to the scorn she’s about to engender.  But for some of us, visiting an establishment that markets pricey couture clothing is nothing short of terrifying.  I know, I know, you may have no idea what I’m talking about.  But class distinctions still shadow some of us.  I grew up in an immigrant family, with parents who turned frugality into an art form.  My mother had lived through World War II in England, and the deprivations of that time marked her.  (She would squirrel away leftover pats of butter in her purse on our rare visits to a restaurant.)  We were clothed from thrift store gleanings, long before it was in any way fashionable to forage for the vintage.  

The trappings of the well-off were foreign to me, and frightening.  I had no training in how to act in situations where wealth and advantage were taken for granted.  Nowadays, my life is very different, but my history remains intact.  As comfortable as I may be with my life now, I cringe a little at my belief that I’d still be horribly out of place in the halls of the rich and famous, sticking out like the proverbial sore thumb.

And so, this week, I put myself to the task of entering a couture studio and having a significant interaction.  For years I’ve walked past the Luly Yang couture store in the graceful Fairmont Hotel in downtown Seattle.  In the picture windows, formal gowns ranging from the demure to the outrageous face the street.  These gowns are amazing.  Up to now, I’ve admired them from afar but I’ve never entered the store.  One of Luly Yang’s signature creations is in this store:  the Monarch Butterfly dress, a couture formal silk corset and petaled skirt that clearly evokes the butterfly.  It’s theatrical and magnificent.  I decided I would go to the store and ask to try on the dress.

Again, I know, some of you will think that this isn’t much of a new adventure.  But like trees, we bear the marks of our years inside us, no matter what our exteriors now show.  If you cut a tree in half, you can tell the years that the tree suffered from lack of water or environmental stress from the size and quality of the growth rings for those years.  Those rings never go away, even though they may be covered up with new robust growth.  Like trees, our past is always inside of us, always with us.  For me, walking into that store was just plain scary.  

The store is compact and quiet, with pale beige carpet and small glass tables.  One of the two saleswomen, both clothed head to toe in black, asked if she could help me.  I’m just here to look at your lovely dresses, I said.  She smiled and told me to let her know if I needed any help.

I wandered through the store.  Half the store is devoted to exquisite wedding dresses.  The other half is primarily for evening wear, of the very showy kind:  lots of satin.  I glanced at a few price tags.  Each piece I looked at was priced at thousands of dollars.

The original butterfly dress rests there, the central showpiece of the collection.  I chatted with the saleswoman about it.  She was friendly and charming, not frightening at all.  She told me that the they could customize a new gown like it for me, but that the original could also be rented.  In the end, I didn’t ask to try it on. I just didn’t want to, after all.

When I got home, I found I was curious about renting the butterfly gown—a purely theoretical curiosity, since I certainly had nowhere to wear it—so I emailed the store about what it cost to rent.  They responded that they had made a mistake and the dress was not in fact now available for rental, but that I could buy it for $25,000.  

Well, as you may guess, I’m not buying the butterfly dress.  ​

The whole experience, though, was remarkably empowering.  Analytically, I know that there is absolutely no reason why the salespeople would be cold or rude to me.  I looked perfectly respectable.  But inside I am still carrying that uncertain fearful girl in thrift store duds, devoid of  self-confidence, the girl who got picked on because of her funny accent and her bad clothes.  She’ll always be in there, a ring in my tree that’s a little shriveled and puckered, but today she has a hint of a smile.  





























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Widowhood 102, week 5:  The siren song of glass, and the price of beginning anew

7/11/2016

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    The photograph in the marketing material for the class hooked me:  a lineup of gleaming tiny glass goblets, each delicate and unique, some with swaying stems.
 

    Glass.  There is something magical about glass.  It’s a lovely material.  I’ve been working in clay for years now, but clay, after all, is just mud.  You can make something wonderful with it, but the big lumpy bags that await you in the studio are just heavy hunks of earth.  But glass promises beauty from its very beginning.

    So I made the jump and enrolled in the weekend flameworking introductory workshop, two days of 9-to-5 working with borosilicate glass at a local art school.  

    I didn’t know anything about flameworking.  I know enough about glassblowing to know that it isn’t for me.  I tried glassblowing once, for an afternoon, and it was like spending time in hell.  The workspace was horrendously hot, the air scorched by the open fiery furnaces flowing with molten glass, glowing the brilliant orange of a volcanic eruption.  The metal pipes that glassblowers use to gather the molten material from the furnaces are heavy and awkward.  To collect the glass, you must get very close to the open maw of the furnace, so close that your fingers feel like they’re burning.  The process isn’t comfortable or measured; once you begin, you fight against the clock to form your piece before it hardens. I know there are women glassblowers, many more these days, but historically this has been a very male-dominated, macho business, and it feels that way. 

    Flameworking (also called lampworking) suggested a gentler approach to glass. 
 

    There were four of us in the class:  two young men who looked like high school students, a young woman in her thirties, and me.  The other three had previous glass experience, so I was the only newbie.  We were issued our tools and directed to set up our stations.  We clamped our propane torches onto the metal table and immediately I had misgivings.  It wasn’t an open furnace, but it was FIRE—fire that spurted freely from the torch in an impressive tapered blue flame.  The list of cautionary “don’t” didn’t help:  Never reach through your torch flame, wear your didymium glasses whenever anyone at the table was working with glass to protect your eyes from explosions, always turn on the propane knob on the torch before turning on the oxygen, always pick up your glasswork with pliers because you can’t visually distinguish the hot glass from the cold, spin your glass continuously to make sure the heat is evenly distributed on its surface.  So many ways to screw up.  

    At this point, honestly, my instinct was to cut and run.  I absolutely cringed when I lit my torch, but I stayed.

    Cheryl, our instructor, walked us through our first project:  icicles.  We heated our glass rods with our propane torches until they were pliable, and then twisted them into coiled shapes, finishing by pulling off one end and fashioning a hook.  Sounds simple, doesn’t it?  Well, it wasn’t.  The glass cools quickly and becomes immobile, so heating a baton-shaped hunk of glass and twisting it evenly is a feat in itself.  And the hook…slowly disengage from one end of your icicle, gracefully and slowly pulling the end of your pontil in a slow circle to form a loop, while the glass cools and hardens.  My icicle looked like I’d strangled it.  Cheryl, in her oh-so-kind instructor voice, told me that some people like that look, because it reminds them of vintage distressed glass.  Right.

    On top of the physical scariness of the whole process, a whole new vocabulary was in play:  annealing, coefficient of thermal expansion, compatibility of glasses, frit, gathering, maria (not part of a prayer, but rather the blob that’s formed when you push two hot glass rods or tubes together), pontil, punt, strain point, stringers…my brain was in full-on overdrive.  

    There was so much to learn.  The torch heat had to be modulated depending upon the part of the process you were engaged in; the rods had to be positioned in, out, above or below the flame depending upon the heat of the glass and what you were doing.

    The icicle was only the first project, and all I could focus on was that I was going to set my hair on fire.

    In short order, we attempted other projects.  We melted, we pulled, we smashed glass.  We pressed molten glass into simple pendants, we applied colors to clear rods and created glass seaweed, and we cut and pulled hot colored glass with needle pliers to form starfish.  My starfish was a big red blob.  Cheryl, still carefully positive, suggested that I start again.  We made marbles, which sounds SO SIMPLE but was painfully tedious.  (At least now I know how those patterns inside the marbles are made.)  At the end of the first day, I was beyond exhausted.  

    We started the second day with coral sculptures.  Mine emerged looking like the wooden terrace you’d use to tack up your tomato plants.  To add a little more terror to my experience, in addition to the fixed flaming propane torch, I was now issued a small hand held propane torch for the smaller connections.  Now I had to contend with two flames.  Every time I tried to soften the look of my poor stick-like coral, I managed to melt away its legs.  I failed coral.
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    Now, Cheryl said, we were going to progress to more difficult work. (!) We were issued rubber tubing and hollow glass rods.  We were going to blow hollow tree ornaments.  She demonstrated the process which involved about 20 delicate and skilled steps.  The three other students grabbed their materials and tubing and headed back to their stations with determined enthusiasm.  

    It was beyond me and I knew it.  When I asked Cheryl if I could practice some of the earlier work, she nodded.  Maybe you’d like to make more icicles, she suggested.

    So, after I slinked away at the end of the second day, I reflected on the experience.  Despite my abysmal performance, I learned so much about flameworking and the properties of glass.  I had been terrified by my propane-fueled flame and yet I hadn’t set myself on fire or burned myself too badly.  (I did scorch a few fingers by touching hot glass.  It was hard to remember all the rules.)  My brain had been fully engaged and challenged for two days and was absolutely fried, but a heavy-duty brain workout isn’t a terrible thing.

    I did realize, however, that I’m not very good at being a beginner.

    Here’s my takeaway:  When we were younger, we expected to be clumsy and unschooled when we tried something new.  We accepted our role as students, as humble bumblers.  We understood that a new skill required time fumbling and making mistakes.  But now, I think our experience as competent adults can work against us.  Our adult confidence makes us feel like we have to be good at what we do, even if it’s something new.  We’re not willing to stumble, to struggle, to look stupid.  We don’t want to look foolish.  We want to be an expert from the get-go.  

     When I was in class, I kept asking myself, why aren’t I better at this?  But now that I’ve stepped away and looked back, the answer is simple.  It’s hard, and it’s a skill, and I just picked this up for the first time.  It’s all new for me, from lighting the propane torch to learning the names of the tools to absorbing the feel of the molten glass, knowing when to heat it and when to pull it and when to stop.  
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    So if there was a lesson for me this week, it wasn’t about the acquisition of skills of flameworking molten glass.  Right now, I suck at that.  The lesson for me is that as I go forward, as I try new things, I’m probably going to suck at a lot of things, at first.  But it’s the price of going forward.


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Widowhood 102, A Year of New:  Week 4--Bring on the magic of chocolate

7/3/2016

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    Where are stiletto heels, fur and glitter specifically prohibited, but hair nets are required?

    It’s my birthday week, and I wanted to treat myself to something predictably wonderful for my weekly “new something.”  Milestones like birthdays are emotionally challenging.  I’m wistful remembering past birthdays when Mark was here to celebrate with me.  Since I’m on my own now, I decided to create my own birthday event, and to invoke the magical power of chocolate. 

    I’ve always enjoyed all sorts of factory tours. We know so little about most of the stuff we use and consume in our daily lives.  On a factory tour, you see the work, skill and magic that goes into making those everyday items you take for granted.  I watched metalworkers fashion delicate, intricate jewelry at the Holly Yashi factory.  At the Tillamook plant, I learned about all things cheese. (The only factory I wouldn’t visit again is the Yummy Chummies factory in Anchorage.  If you have a dog, you know Yummy Chummies are the salmon dog treats your dog loves, but as a downside your pockets exude essence of fish.   Multiply that smell a hundredfold and you’ll have a sense of what you experience if you visit the production plant.)

    Perhaps everyone in Seattle except me already knew about the Theo Chocolate Factory Tour.  “Yes, it’s great,” they said.  “And there are lots of samples.”  Hmmm…

    The Theo chocolate factory is located in Fremont, one of Seattle’s quirkiest neighborhoods.  (Within a block is a whiskey distillery that also provides tours and samples, but that’s another adventure.)  Before you enter the red brick Theo building, from about a block away, you can smell it: an unmistakable dark thick aroma of chocolate.

    When I arrived (without the prohibited stilettos, fur and glitter, of course), I donned my attractive blue hair net and ran a lint brush over my body in preparation for the tour.  Our group was ushered into the green “rain forest” room draped with paper leaf garlands.  Murals about chocolate production covered the walls. The dense chocolate atmosphere was overpowering.  We were breathing chocolate.  Essence of chocolate rolled around us and layered itself onto our skin.   As we absorbed chocolate through our pores, Katrina, our tour guide, talked to us about cocoa beans and the process of extracting and preparing the seeds that will eventually become chocolate, and also about the deplorable conditions some chocolate harvesters (including children) have to tolerate, especially in Africa.  We were told that Theo Chocolates, organic and free trade, provides a sustainable wage to its harvest and production workers.  (Theo, by the way, isn’t a person’s name.  It’s short for the Latin name for chocolate, theobroma cacao.)

    And while Katrina talked, we ate.

    Large wooden bowls of chocolate chunks were passed up and down our aisles, like church offering vessels, except of course, we were taking out and not putting in.  Katrina invited us to take as much as we liked, but she warned us that a lot of samples were coming our way.  We might want to pace ourselves.  

    Our first chocolate was an 85% dark chocolate that we were encouraged not to chew, but just to let melt slowly in our mouths.  It was delightfully bitter and left the back of my tongue tingling.  I could tell from the looks on some faces that it wasn’t universally well liked.  Not everyone is a fan of very dark chocolate.

    Katrina talked about growing and preparing cocoa beans, fermentation (chocolate is a fermented food!), and the difference between Congolese (nutty) and Peruvian (fruitier) chocolate.  (It’s all about the “terroir,” the composition of the soil.)  She circulated our second bowl of chocolate: a 70% dark chocolate with sea salt to bring forth the flavor and cut bitterness.  Smiles all around; this was better received.

    More bowls were being passed down the aisles:  a 70% dark chocolate with raspberries, and then another, this time chunks with coconut.  I was taking very small pieces, but I was already starting to get chocolate overload.  The woman sitting next to me—a somberly dressed grandmother, part of a three-generational family group—was taking a handful of chocolate from each bowl.  I love chocolate, but I am clearly a lightweight.

    We moved as a group to a glass enclosure in the middle of the factory floor.  Here, the saturated chocolate air was layered with a sharp vinegary smell, the byproduct of the production process going on around us.  Katrina explained the purpose of the various vats and machines surrounding us before we hurried through the super-heated factory area to the kitchen.

    We were corralled into a central space to avoid interference with the kitchen staff, who were whipping chocolate in stainless steel bowls and pouring mixtures into molds.  Our samples here were various confections filled with ganache (chocolate and cream mixed together, like the inside of a truffle).  

    In the end, I couldn’t do it.  I had to pass up the last sample, a piece of a toffee bar resting on a bed of dark chocolate.  I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I’d had just too much chocolate.  Yes, fellow chocolate lovers, there actually is such a state.
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    As the tour ended, Katrina led us into the factory retail store where, in our sugar-high daze, we bought more chocolate.  There I discovered the ultimate treat:  confections infused with Oban, Cragganmore, Lagavulin and Talisker.  Yep, artisan chocolate infused with single malt scotch.  Happy birthday, me.  It’s a wonderful world.    
    

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