Some people want to know so much about artists, they recreate visits with other artists to determine influences, and determine exact dates of visits. They write big books, tomes usually, about their excavations, which usually end up being a little dry reading.


Don't you ever wish you could sort through the detritus of daily living of some artists, to come up with a clue, that might tell you where the important art came from? Aren't you glad you can't, and that it all remains a mystery to you and something to think about now and again and wonder over.

Frank came over to take my sister to the movies in Pomona and I got to go along. We were going to see a George Pal science fiction film, and matinees were cheap (my price was 35 cents, as I still wasn't a "junior").

This was a special outing, and my sister made a great party meal, a brunch. With Aunt Jemima buckwheat cakes and some syrup. We'd kept the metal log cabin for a few years on my insistence, and always emptied new bottles of syrup into it. So it wasn't just "pancakes" you see. We even had pink napkins.

So Frank, my sister, and I had pancakes before going to the movie. On the television commercials of a recent time, Aunt Jemima pancakes were the sponsor for a television show and Aunt Jemima herself had appeared at a theme park I went to at a restaurant named after her. I'd seen her there in person, in real life when I was a kid. I was proud she'd started up a restaurant and at the time I just didn't get what the other hub-bub was about. My sister would even pull down a package of Uncle Ben's rice and set it next to Aunt Jemima and try to explain it to me. All I knew for sure is my mother who had come from the South herself said she didn't like the high voice of Butterfly McQueen. And I was use the words "Aunt Jemima" or "Beulah" very cautiously, less they be misconstrued.

So we went to the George Pal science fiction movie.

At home, when Frank watched television with us, he would zero in on the Alka Seltzer commercial ("Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it is").

I would call the claymation character "Alky" because I knew some adults sometimes dropped a few fizzies in a glass to better cope with a morning after. Although when I was a kid, I had a transparent bright red rocket ship powered with alka seltzer and after pumping it up, I fired it high into the air, but I soon lost it on a neighbor's roof.

This is exactly the kind of conversation Frank listened to when I was around and felt I had something to offer to the general conversation of the day.

The name "Alky" made Frank laugh.  ¶ 1/13/2011 02:52:00 PM