Throwback Thursday: Lucia

Here is picture of my great grandmother Lucy, (her full name was Lucia, a common name in Sicily), taken around 1904-1906. Grandma Lucy had emigrated to the US from Sicily around 1900, in the great wave of Sicilians leaving poverty and lack of opportunity to come to America.

I met her once when I was about nine; she was learning then how to write in English well enough so she could finally take her US Citizenship test. She had been too busy raising my grandmother and her six other children to take it when she was younger.

I love her sensible shoes.

My Weekly Reader

Picture from the National Gallery of Art Exhibit

I loved this walk through of the Matisse exhibit.

"Surgery had left Matisse debilitated, basically chair- and bed-bound. Painting and sculpture had become difficult. His solution was almost child-simple. He picked up more manageable materials and tools: sheets of paper paint-washed by assistants, sturdy scissors and plain tailor pins"

Proof that you have to make your art with the tools you have, to paraphrase a famous musician.

Men care more about out fancy kitchens than women do.

Well of course they do. In this survey, they asked single women and single men. My guess would be single men would see a fancy kitchen as a trophy, and women would see it as a workspace,
Just a theory. Women don't dream of kitchens, sexist researcher people. Kitchens =work to most women. We've been stuck in there for centuries. We'd like to spend less time there, on the whole.
Just sayin'

The story behind Irving Berlin's "Always" is even more romantic than I imagined.

It snowed six inches last night, which is small potatoes compared to New England, but is a state of emergency for Virginia. Stay warm!

Proof of Time Travel

Cora Brown-Potter was a famous beauty, admired by the Prince of Wales

She looks a lot like me:

The pictures on the right are Cora. The pictures on the left are of me. These were taken almost 100 years apart.

Other evidence:

She lived in Tuxedo Park, NY. I have been to a wedding in Tuxedo Park.

She was admired by the Prince of Wales. A former president's son once flirted with me. And several Congressmen (but for this, I admit, the bar is low.) Also the Dalai Lama (although he may just have been really sweet. It's hard to tell.)

She became an actress in London. I was once asked to pose by a photographer from a famous men's magazine. (I declined. My father had, shall we say, objections.) 

She had a daughter. I have a daughter.

Her husband popularized the Tuxedo. My husband looks great in a Tuxedo.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/22/fashion/for-tuxedos-blue-is-the-new-black.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0

It was in summer 1886 that James Brown Potter, a Tuxedo Park resident, and his beautiful wife, Cora Potter, a Southerner, went to England to meet the Prince of Wales. The prince, indifferent to American social climbers but fond of pretty women, invited the Potters to spend the weekend at Sandringham. Dress-code quandaries are nothing new, and when Mr. Potter asked about what to wear for a country dinner at the 20,000-acre Norfolk estate belonging to the royal family, the prince dispatched him to his London tailor, Henry Poole & Co.

Potter returned to Tuxedo Park wearing the new truncated version of the once-requisite tailcoats, which was quickly taken up by other members of the club for informal dinners. Eventually, the new suit went into wider circulation and came to be known as the style that gents preferred nowadays for dinner “up in Tuxedo.” And in the mystifying organic way neologisms have of entering the language, the coinage stuck

Winston Churchill had a Ginger Cat named Jock. I have a Ginger Cat named Harry. 

Harry and Etta in a box because boxes are the coolest

I am a Time Lord

An Under-Appreciated Resource: Dr. Rose Frisch

Picture of Dr Rose Frisch from the New York Times


Henry Frisch, a physicist, said his mother also benefited from that environment, because, not expecting to receive tenure or equal treatment, she and other women were “free to follow paths that weren’t conventional.”Still, she was paid so little that her son said the National Institutes of Health once called to say that a grant application she submitted should list her annual salary, not her monthly salary. “That is my annual salary,” she replied.
Please read Dr. Frisch's obituary, and see if you aren't overcome with frustration at how such a brilliant scientist had to work three times as hard as a man to get the support she needed to continue her work. How many talented women scientists, researchers, professors and others have to leave their work because of lack of financial support, flexible jobs, and tenure?
If we want more young people to choose careers in the sciences, stories like hers will hardly encourage them, because associates of mine who are scientists say it is still pretty sexist out there.
We can do better.