Architects
• Thomas Jefferson designed his home, Monticello. Looked at from the outside, Monticello appeared to have one story (with a domed room above), but that is an illusion consciously created by Mr. Jefferson. On the second story, the windows are close to the floor, while on the first story the windows are close to the ceiling. Looked at from the outside, the windows appear to be providing light to one story. Mr. Jefferson based this design on windows he had admired while in France.
• Architect Frank Lloyd Wright once created a house for a cousin named Richard Lloyd Jones. Unfortunately, after being built, the house leaked when it rained. Mr. Jones’ wife, Georgia, joked, “That’s what happens when you leave a work of art out in the rain.”
Art
• In 1955, Marcia Brown’s book Cinderella won the Caldecott Medal. Charles Scribner’s Sons published it, although Viking Press might have published it if it weren’t for a strike by elevator operators in the 1940s. After Ms. Brown had completed her first picture-book, The Little Carousel, she decided to take it to various publishers to see if they wanted it. Her first choice was Viking Press, but their offices were on the seventh floor, and she didn’t want to climb that many steps. Since the offices of Charles Scribner’s Sons were on the fourth floor, she stopped there first. They were interested in The Little Carousel, they published it, and they continued to publish books by her.
• When Alison Bechdel, creator of Dykes to Watch Out For, first created the character of Mo, she based the character on herself — “a young, white, middle-class, marginally employed lesbian-feminist.” However, she attempted to disguise this fact by drawing Mo with glasses and with hair longer than her own. The attempt was unsuccessful — her friends easily see her in the character and laugh when she tells them about the disguise.
Caricatures
• One of the ways that comedian Whoopi Goldberg knew that she was beginning to make it big was that caricaturist Harry Hirschfeld worked his art on her in The New York Times while she was appearing on a one-woman show on Broadway. Mr. Hirschfeld traditionally hides his daughter’s name — Nina — in his caricatures, and in his caricature of Ms. Goldberg he wrote “Nina” 40 times. Ms. Goldberg was so pleased with Mr. Hirschfeld’s caricature that she sent him flowers.
• Enrico Caruso was a caricaturist as well as a gifted opera singer. In addition, Mr. Caruso was a genuinely likeable human being. The composer Victor Herbert was a big man, and he said of Mr. Caruso, “Even in his caricatures he shows the sweetness of his nature. He has never drawn me as fat as others have.”
• Zero Mostel was funny both on- and offstage. When caricaturist Sam Norkin arrived at a rehearsal to sketch Mr. Mostel and co-star Eli Wallach for an illustration of Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, Mr. Mostel took him aside and said, “Here’s $20. Leave Eli out of the drawing.”
Cartoons
• Jennifer Camper’s cartoon subGURLZ features three lesbians: 1) Swizzle, who is the strongest woman on Earth. She works in a bar, and when sexually harassed by men, attempts to push them away without hurting them, but tends to accidentally break their necks. 2) Liver, who is on a constant diet of alcohol, tobacco, legal and illegal drugs, and even drain-unplugging products in an attempt to balance the chemicals in her body. She also has the power to bring the recently deceased back to life. 3) Byte, who is so intelligent that hair doesn’t grow on her head. Her hobby is breaking into computer databases and moving funds from the accounts of greedy corporations to the accounts of people who need the money to do such things as go to college. If you ask Ms. Camper whether these subGURLZ are good or evil, she replies, “It depends. Whose side are you on?”
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Copyright by Bruce D. Bruce; All Rights Reserved
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