Indianapolis Proud

Sharon Montrose Photography Video

I've followed Sharon's work for some time and am thrilled to find this video showing how she works.

The Home of artist Nancy Noel

I have always wondered if Nancy Noel's home was as beautiful as her gallery on Main Street. The Indianapolis Star published this beautiful photo spread. I am not disappointed.

HomeFinder: @home with Nancy Noel - More The Indianapolis Star Galleries

View this gallery at The Indianapolis Star: HomeFinder: @home with Nancy Noel

1976

The news that Mark Fidrych has died is very bittersweet for me.

Over 30 years ago, my dad took me to an autograph signing with Mark at the Kinney Shoe store on Dixie Highway in Drayton Plains. I waited in line for an hour, watching girls kiss Mark on the cheek and get their picture taken with him. I fretted the entire time on whether I would kiss him or not; an hour of convincing myself that I could do it, only to chicken out when the time came. He signed an autograph and I had my picture taken. I remember I had a really bad "Dorothy Hamill" haircut and looked like a boy.

I taped all his pictures on the wall over my bunk at cheerleading camp.

Here is a nostalgia piece I wrote sometime ago. It appears again below in an earlier blog.

If you haven't seen Splendor in the Grass, I highly recommend the film for those who love heartbreaking romance.

Saturday, September 2, 2005

Weekends with dad.

My parents woke me up this morning calling from their cellphone that they never use, from an airport. They are flying today to Denver to visit my sister and her family in their new home, in a new state. This is the "in case we die in a fiery plane crash today, we are calling to tell you we love you" call. My dad has had cancer for 15 years and they've beaten all death odds with good 'old love, I'd say the likelihood of them crashing today are pretty slim, but I'm touched, considering I'd just talked to them 48 hours ago.

A typical Labor Day weekend at home for me, as a kid, consisted of nothing but helping my father do chores. When I was very young, this entailed knowing what various tools looked like and their one of a dozen locations they might be. There's a hammer, adjustable wrench, flat-head screw driver, phillips head screw driver, needle nose something, wire, string, and of course cold can of beer. If he needed something...he'd ask me and then time me. "Run Forest Run!" You get the picture. There was always a ballgame on the radio somewhere and if he took a break to get his own beer, I was in charge of listening to the game and filling him in on what he missed when he returned. One time I told him "DAD, the Tigers retired!" Convinced the Tigers were no longer a team.

By the time I was a teen, it was no surprise that I was obsessed and in love with Mark "The Bird" Fidrych. (A lot of you were not even born when this phenomenon pitched for the Detroit Tigers. google.) My dad took me to the home games that he was scheduled to pitch and bought me anything and everything with his picture on it. I loved him because I thought he was cute and had hair like a Californian surfer, plus, he would get down on his hands and knees and move the dirt of the pitching mound around with such intensity; you couldn't take your eyes off him. While my friends were dreaming about Donny Osmond and the Monkeys, or maybe Shawn and David Cassidy, I was dreaming about kissing Mark behind the dugout and marrying him in a huge baseball themed wedding.

Years later I was flipping through a People magazine and there was a picture of Mark, retired from baseball due to injury, standing up to his knees in mud surrounded by pigs. Mark Fidrych became a pig farmer. This reminds me of a scene in the classic movie "Splendor in the Grass" (1961) when Natalie Wood's character, Deanie, is released from the mental hospital and goes to visit her highschool love, Bud, played by Warren Beatty, years later. She should have called first. Bud, the heartthrob in school, is now a farmer, covered in mud (I sort of remember bib overalls with no shirt) and is living in a shack of a home with his barefoot and pregnant wife who is the spitting image of Deanie. That is how I imagined Mark from that point on...Mark as Bud and me as Deanie...never to be.

Mary Ida

(left to right) Mary Ida, Wendy, Violet. My two grandmas. I definately take after Mary Ida and my sister, Kelly, takes after Vi.

Thursday, October 5th
Big GrandmaMary Ida was my big grandma, she was married to Marvin, my little grandpa. Although they acted like they hated each other, every time one of them filed for divorce, Mary Ida got pregnant and divorce matters dissolved into the air of their tiny home, with the perfumed smell of body powder, my grandpa’s cigars, and bacon fat. They had four children over a twenty year period. My father was their youngest..Because grandma was a big woman and legend whispered that she breast fed her children passed three years of age, she always had breast milk, and in an age decades before baby formula, became a wet nurse for neighborhood newborns who’s mothers had run dry and desperate.One Christmas season my husband and I were visiting my family in Michigan and stopped by grandma’s house to visit. She was quite elderly and nearly blind and I noticed a stack of Christmas cards next to her chair, still sealed in their envelopes, patiently waiting for someone to read them to her. When I recited the return address of first card, grandma couldn’t recall who the sender was. Inside the card was a handwritten letter; I settled back on the same couch that was as much an icon as my grandma and began to read to her. The letter was from a man who wrote of his entire life; surviving childhood, where he went to school, his Air Force career during World War II, marriage, children and now his own grandchildren. He said that he didn’t remember Mary Ida, but that his entire life he had been reminded numerous times just how important she had been in his life. My grandma asked me his name again and said in her thick Kentucky accent, "I recall him...he was a sickly lil’ baby...I saved ‘is life!" Before we said good-bye, while my husband was waiting for me on her front porch, I knelt down on my knees and laid my upper body across grandma’s lap, stroking the paper thin, soft skin of her forearms. My entire life I had been witness to so many cruel jokes about her size, about her not leaving her house for twenty years, about a woman who wasted her life, the entire time believing and now experiencing that Mary Ida was greater than all of us.Have a wonderful day and check back tomorrow for Big Grandma Part II, Mary Ida the modern day bag lady and her granddaughter (me) sidekick.

Friday, October 6th
Big Grandma Part II
When I was four, Mary Ida was really big. For the most part, she sat in a rocking upholstered chair that faced the front door, so there was no missing her. The front door was always unlocked and when you opened it, there she was sitting in her chair watching her little televison next to her on a metal TV tray. Also next to her chair was a gold overnight bag, with satiny lining and a little mirror inside the top of the case. This luggage was always packed with wads of money; it was never organized, the paper bills were just thrown in.She got around just fine, waking up each day, opening her front door so that fresh air could come through the screen. She might vacuum, but because she was so big, she had an electric broom in at least two different rooms of her very tiny house. She could sweep the livingroom without moving her feet, prop the electric broom against the wall, walk three steps into the dining room, use another electric broom to sweep, without moving her feet. Her domestic duties were limited to this and when one of my two aunts, Norma or Gladys, came to clean the rest of the house, she took great pride in telling them they didn’t have to sweep, because she had done it that morning. The money she kept in her little piece of luggage was for when she heard the neighborhood kids playing outside and she would yell for them. The woman had a set of pipes and the kids would come running and she would ask them to go down to the corner to buy a gallon of milk, or a coffeecake from the bakery that my Aunt Illeen worked at next to the grocery. She would ask the kids how much they thought that would cost and they didn’t know, just as much as she didn’t, so she would reach her hand into the case and grab a wad of money and give it to them. There was never any change. The kids would come running back with her requests, their pockets loaded with candy; they would be breathless, having difficulty sucking air with a huge jaw-breaker in their cheeks.In the mid 1960's, long before Salvation Army or Goodwill stores, people threw everything out. Once a week, my grandma would drive her station wagon up and down the streets of Berkley, looking for treasures. Sometimes, if she was babysitting me, I got to go. I would stand on the middle bench seat and lean over the front seat, at my grandmas right shoulder and help her scout the curbside. Often she would drive the wrong way down a one-way street and as if it were a sign of things to come, even at three years old, I would say "Grandma you are on the wrong SIDE!" Which she replied, "Thank you baby." She found a lot of junk and would get great pleasure sorting it all out; forever giving her finds to every member of our family. When anyone walked in the front door, it was like she was a psychic, she always had just the right thing next to her chair.When I was four she gave me, what my family continues to call "Thee Majorette Boots." Nancy Sinatra’s song, These Boots Are Made for Walking, was all the rage and when my grandma gifted me a worn out pair of someone else’s majorette boots with leather tassels, in my mind, I now had go-go boots like the lady on the album cover in my parents collection. The boots were not allowed in the house and one day my mother pulled off many of her "disappearance stunts" where anything grandma had found in the trash, suddenly vanished in some sort of Wonder Years neighborhood theft ring. I remember crying a lot. As I got older, and we would visit grandma, my parents always made me go in the door first because the first person was the one who had something from grandma’s stash flung at them. Onetime it was a huge bra that she assured my parents I would grow into (I was seven at the most.) Another time, I opened the door and a book hit me in the chest and dropped on the floor. Without even saying hello, grandma yelled "read page 68!" I would oblige. My parents would rush to me with panicked expressions, and check the book, as if I was about to be exposed to the world of Kama Sutra, with photos, when, in fact, it was a lecture on why not to eat eggs with cracked shells.In many ways, I am Mary Ida's granddaughter. That woman would have loved eBay.

Introducing Liam!

(Artist Rendering)


Lucky 6 month-old puppy, Liam, found his perfect family this week. Congrats to Laura, Ed, and Eric on their new arrival.