Questions and Answers

It’s another September 9th and those in the know will realize another anniversary is upon us!

For lo and behold, 104 years ago today, Alice walked into that room at Michael Stein’s in Paris and there she was the soon to be love of her life speaking through that coral brooch on her corduroy robe!  And as I and many, many other Stein folk have said or written: “The rest is history!”

As I was thinking about what to post for this year’s anniversary and what photograph to use, glanced around our dining room and there on one of the buffets were two collaged portrait-plates. Portrait-plates, you ask?  Yes, plates on which some early 1960’s Hausfrau pasted scrapes of felt and lace and other do-dads to create a wedding shower gift. (Sometimes the portraits are painted on the plates, though the collaged ones are more desirable.)  The  plates were to represent the bride and groom, with their names usually inscribed on each of the plates.  For some reason known only to someone like  the craft editor at Good Housekeeping magazine, the collaged portraits look like a couple from the not-so gay 1890’s not the 1960’s.  (You know the couple that would be singing “On a Bicycle Built for Two” on either the Lawrence Welk Show or Sing Along With Mitch during the somewhat Golden Age of mid-1960’s American television – Norma Zimmer and whoever. )

See what I mean:

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With all due respect to the musical The Sound of Music, one of whose songs contained lyrics bastardized in the title of this post, we must bid adieu to the Summer of Steins in San Francisco. Both exhibitions SEEING GERTRUDE STEIN: FIVE STORIES  at the Contemporary Jewish Museum and THE STEINS COLLECT: MATTISE,  PICASSO AND THE PARISIAN AVANT-GARDE at SFMOMA end tomorrow, September 6th.  And though both of them will be travelling, the first to the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC from October 14th – January 22nd, 2012 and the other one to both Paris at the Grand Palais from October 3rd  –  January 16, 2012  and  then the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York  from February 21 through June 3, 2012, the Summer of Steins in San Francisco will not be able to be replicated as the Fall, Winter or Spring of Steins in any of the other cities – this summer was just too special!

the movie Von Trapps bid their adieus!

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