Tea with McNair

• making friends

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Presenting: You

One of the best pieces of advice I have ever received came from a Sunday school teacher in seventh grade. We were planning creative ways to invite friends who don't go to church to come visit for a Sunday. Someone mentioned that their best friend said they came once and people at church weren't very friend.
    "In order to have friends, one must appear friendly."
    That struck me. I was aware of situations I had gone into where I did not present myself as a friendly person. It's a two way street, this friendship deal. When you go into a new setting are you bright eyed and smiling? Do you look up at your server in a restaurant and greet them in a friendly manner or bury your face in your menu, magazine, or  stare blankly waiting to decide if you are treated well. The ladder tactic is the method too many people use.    
    "I'll just wait and see if I am treated right before I jump in and waste my time being nice." If that is our attitude, we deserve little of no friendliness.
    In any new retail, restaurant, or other setting, I make a game of trying to be more friendly than those serving me.
    There's a lot to friendliness, making friends, and being a friend--even to ourselves. Too many of us (I include myself here) have spent too much time not being our own friend. This is not the self-love of egotism, but love that supports and affirms self with our inner self-talk and sense of confidence.
    During a break in one of my creativity workshops I was handed a note. We had been talking about what I call "listening to the right voices" - - the people in you life (present and past) who have supported and encouraged you. We are too often drawn, inexplicably, to those who give us negative and spirit-killing criticism.
    The note said, "There are a lot of people who love you. Make sure you're one of them."
    Being your own best friend is a key part of a remarkable new book on friendship that I am reading--and loving.
    Fabulous Friendship Festival is the latest creation from author/artist/ creativity maven, SARK. This my friend Susan's twelfth book and, I believe, one of her most important and most person books. The subtitle says a lot, "Loving Wildly, Learning Deeply, Living Fully with Our Friends."
    Between the bright yellow covers you will discover eleven very full chapters on every area of friendship from self-friendship, to the joys, difficulties, pleasures and kinds of friendship. Created in her own unique hand-printed style, every page (more than 250 of them) is filled with color and packed with SARK's deligthful and inspiring art and illustrations.
    If you have not yet read your first SARK book, this is a great entry point to PLANET SARK (also the name of her hugely engaging website.)  While at Planet Sark check out the link to her recent TV interview here in the San Francsico Bay area (link in upper right corner of Planet SARK.) If you go to one of SARK's events you are in for far more than a standard issue book signing. Nothing with SARK is standard.   SARK will be traveling throughout the west in the coming days as this big hug of a book is launched. If you live in Colorado, Arizona, California, check out her the schedule of her book signing and interactive event tour. (When you go to a SARK event, tell her "McNair sent me." You'll get an extra giggle and smile.) We have been very close friends for more than a decade now. (You may see my name a "few" times here and there (and again over there) in this book. I show up a good bit: top of page 43, 89-91, middle of 254 . . . and few tiny print places, "hanging out in the "blue drapes" of the Friendship tent. You'll see.
     This a rich, full, remarkable work. SARK covers so many bases here you will be delighted. There is even a big section of questions to ask your friends, games to play with friends, and even...READ IT, you'll see.
    Get a small fist-full of colorful pens to scribble and doodle your thoughts in your copy of the "FFF" book as you listen to SARK speak. (Buy a copy before the event starts!) Know too, that all of her events fill up quickly, even though they are free. Check with the bookstore nearest you (see tour schedule) for tickets or reservations.
    Fabulous Friendship Festival is a book to read cover-to-cover right away and then keep it bedside for a nightly (or morningly) boost as often as you need encouragement. Keep those colorful pens at hand to doodle and inscribe your thoughts as you read.
     I really DO want you to get FFF and read it. Don't just think oh that's McNair's friend, he doing her a favor. Not so. My list of books for our creative soul (at left) are written mostly by people I have never met. They are great books. If you read one-a-month for the next year, you'd have a terrific and transformative year.
     For now, go see SARK. Start a Fabulous Friendship Festival in your community of friends. Beware: it's contagious!
    Meanwhile, get thee to thy local 24 hour coffee shop and be a friend to the staff--all of them.

McNair

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• and so it goes

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Leaving your Creative Imprint

Lost a couple friends last week. I never met either one of them, but their impact on my life was as real as if we had been roommates or beer-drinkin’ buddies. (Except I don’t drink beer.)
    My first friend has been in my life since 1958, but has been around since prehistoric times. He lives the simplest of lives--in a cave. The man who drew giggles from us all when every week he drew the simple inhabitants of “B.C.” is dead. Johnny Hart’s body was 76 (18 Feb. 1931) but his heart was that of a curious and mischievous school boy. Whether he was inserting the social missteps of modern times into the lives of cavemen and cave ladies, or reworking our language in his big dictionary, “B.C.” always made us smile. Sometimes he just told a simple little joke: guy walks into an out house, slams the door and, moments later, says, “Is it just me, or does it stink in here?” I know, juvenile. But it was a dumb caveman stating the obvious-just like everyone of us has done. Apparently the eradication of stupidity is as difficult as the cure for cancer all these thousands of years into human development.
    Along with creating "B.C."  as well as drawing and writing every frame, Hart was also the co-creator, in 1964, with Brant Parker of the delightful strip "The Wizard of ID"--a look at politics, power, and human social structures through the prism of Medieval king, Wizard, castle guards and ill-assorted villagers.
    Johnny Hart will be missed for his humor, creativity, his insights into the human psyche and deep spirituality. His impact on society was that of a gentle commentator on our lives, politics, and issues of faith and belief. He leaves a lasting influence on me in expressing who I am through my work. Johnny Hart never held back from expressing his beliefs in all areas through his delightful cave folk and Medieval monarchs, villagers, and wizards. But whatever he had to say, it was always done in an engaging style. Only his cavemen carried clubs. Johnny Hart wielded an ink pen. If you have been stuck in YOUR cave and never been a BC-ist, here’s a sample. Hopefully this will whet your appetite and tickle your funny bone to the point that you will want more.







































There have also been, not surprisingly, a mountain of memorials by other great cartoonists. Here are a few favorites I found on the web-o-meter.

There's also a great website of political cartoons and on their latest posting many of the country's greatest have created memorial cartoons to "B.C." and Johnny Hart here: CARGYLE'S INDEX

Artists (L to R, beginning with upper L): Steve Breen, Gary Markstein, and Gary Marvel (click each to enlarge)

 

 

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And now this... Another  "friend" slipped from out midst last week.  He was required reading when I was in college, if not by  faculty, certainly peer pressure required that we read Kurt Vonnegut , or be left out of late night conversations at the Black Forest  at the corner of 26th and Nicollet. As students at the Minneapolis College of Art & Design we found him inspiring and creative in his singular style of story weaving. Vonnegut broke rules both in his writing and his life. He taught us time travel in Slaughter House Five and  kept us engrossed in other works: Cat's Cradle and Breakfast of Champions. He was an outspoken critic of political policies. He also battled lie-long depression. Having tried to commit suicide in 1984, he even joked about being a failure at that.

Aside from his literary words I have run across a few choice quotes from his many  interviews, which he seem to enjoy: 

(Talking about when he tells his wife he's going out to buy an envelope)

"Oh, she says well, you're not a poor man. You know, why don't you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don't know. The moral of the story is, is we're here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don't realize, or they don't care, is we're dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we're not supposed to dance at all anymore."

"If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC"

He was also a known in some circles for his drawing and painting.  At right, a letter to an admiring fan with original self-portrait art added. (Click to enlarge)

WHen signing books, his signature included a cartooned self-portrait. This  appears to be his S.O.P. for everyone not just books inscribed to friends.

(Below my McSignature.)

 

" . . . and so it goes. "

   

• your number has been discontinued

  ~ Can I see you I.D.?

He arrived at the bottom of a concrete staircase before his dirty bike did. (He was seated on that bike just a moment ago.) As his 59 year old chin gushed blood he learned a lesson. My good friend knows now that there are certain things that his seven year old is more adept at than he is.
    I have several long-time friends who turn 60 this year or last and some who at 59, are bemoaning the coming zero on their age. Meanwhile, another buddy is spending a year celebrating being 65. He likes to refer to himself as “one wild olde man.” (He thinks the “e” on “olde” is fun.) But the the only thing old about him is the number indicating the amount of years he has been on earth. He is a very young life force.
    I was with him last week and asked his wife if she’d mind if I suggested he NOT say “old” for at least five more years. (In his case I do not expect him to even seem old for a decade or more hence.)
    “You have my permission to have that conversation with him.” She said with a smile and an emphatic poke to my chest to seal the deal.
    It wasn’t a few minutes later, when we were in his office, and he slipped the “old man” reference into a self referential comment as though it was more that silly “settled science” that’s going around like the flu. Borrowing his wife’s encouraging poke I looked him in the eye and said, “There is NOTHING OLD about you except that number indicating your time on planet earth. I want you to get a new moniker, YOUNG man. No one who knows you or meets you, finds you “old.”
    “I can accept that from you.” He said.
    I was expecting a bit of a debate, but he got it.
    It all grew out of my own birthday on the fourth day of this year (sound familiar, John & Marti?) I turned a certain age and wanted to commemorate it appropriately. I called CalTrans, the state agency that builds, repairs, and “maintains” California roadways.
    “I'm looking for a “55 mph Speed Limit” sign. Have you got an old one in the bone yard I can have?”
    “55? I haven’t seen one of those in a while. Mostly it’s 65 now. What do you need it for.”
    I told him about my birthday and that I wanted to commemorate it by hanging a big sign in my loft.
    “I think your number has been discontinued.” He said.
    “Really?”
    I don’t think so. My age, your age, they’re just numbers. They represent only the passage of time, signifying nothing.*
    Age is neither a badge of achievement,  a sign of maturity, nor an indication of looming obsolescence. Our age is not like the “use by” date on the milk in the fridge.
    I was struck by the importance of this double helix age of 55 when I went to the Holistic Institute for a massage in the student clinic a few days after my birthday in January. I had a $15 discount from their having canceled me a few days previous due to a staff shortage. But upon arrival I noticed a sign on the reception desk that, I suspect, had been there for all the years I’d been coming there.
    “$5 Discount for Seniors (55 yr.)”
    “Hi, reservation for McNair. And I’ll take one of those.” (Pointing to the senior discount sign.)
    “Yeah, right.” The young man working reception laughed at me, clearly not believing I was 55.
    “What’s wrong? My birthday was last week.”
    “Sure, 45, maybe.” He said incredulously.
    “Look!” Pushing my California driver’s license in his face.
    He leaned over for closer inspection and, not believing what he saw, grabbed it out of my hand and said, “Let me see that.” Inspecting it closely and for long enough to read every word a couple of times, he looked up at me, and then back at my license for the red letters: DOB:01-04-52.“WOW! You don’t even look fifty. What do you do?”
    “Well, massages help. And I’ve never, ever understood what it meant when people say, ‘Act your age.’ And, I won’t grow up!”
    So, I am keeping a log of the discounts I get in this first year of being a “senior citizen”--such a silly demarcation for any year. I know old (acting) people in their twenties and thirties who are driven by career social status and have no sense of play or spontaneity. And I have delicious friends who are 59 and crack open their chin on the pavement when they beat their dirt bike gets down the steps.
    Meanwhile, my wild 65 year old buddy is still wild, but not yet old. 
    Neither are you, my friend.
    Do something young today. You assignment for this Easter weekend--a time of resurrection (noun) “revitalization; revival from inactivity and disuse.” Go out and do something young (even if your birth year is under 30, or under 18.)
    Whatever you do, Don’t act you age. Your number has been discontinued!

    McNair

P.S. The massage was great, even with the old guy discount.

P.S.S. If you've never done it, check out the wonderful website RealAge.com and take that Real Age Test to discover how old you REALly are.


* Macbeth by Wm. Shakespeare
   Act V, sc. 5

MACBETH:

She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.--
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

~