Florida Fling: Winter Park

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WINTER PARK EXCURSION

Florida has been our home for more than three years, but we haven’t explored much beyond our immediate area.  Thanks to the prompting of good friends, Alice and Bill, we made a short visit to Winter Park with them. Bill is a consummate organizer and tour guide (and driver!), and we were the beneficiaries of their combined knowledge from previous visits.

Winter Park is a lovely walkable town east of Orlando.  Rollins College (founded in 1885) is a dominant force in the community and graces the town with its tasteful Spanish/Mediterranean architecture.  Surrounding the campus are quiet residential streets with elegant houses and expansive churches of all flavors.  Winter Park Avenue, the main street, offers four blocks of inviting small shops and restaurants, many with outside tables.  There are also two small art museums.  It was a charming and pleasant place and, for us, reminiscent of Palo Alto.  

 

The Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art boasts the largest collection of Louis Comfort Tiffany’s work and his glass pieces are certainly a highlight of the museum.  It also has glass pieces, ceramics, and paintings by other artists.  

I particularly enjoyed seeing not only the gallery of Tiffany lamps, but also the re-created rooms from Laurelton Hall, Tiffany’s Long Island residence, as well as the elaborate chapel interior with its intricate mosaic work made for the Chicago exposition of 1893.

It’s a gem of a museum (the building itself architecturally pleasing) and was well worth visiting!

 

 

 

 

We also had a brief look around at Rollins College’s small art museum, Cornell Fine Arts Museum, on the edge of their campus. We didn’t realize that they closed at 4:00 pm and so had to hustle a bit to see “Towards Impressionism,” featuring works by Corot, Monet, and Harpignies (the latter new to me), and a bit of the permanent collection.  It’s noteworthy that contemporary works from the college’s collection are on display throughout the lobby and other public spaces in the Alfond Inn.

“The Misfits” by Rosalyn Drexler

Owned by the college, Alfond Inn is one of the loveliest hotels I’ve stayed in.  It’s been open for four years and still looks brand new.  The extensive main floor showcases paintings and sculpture by a variety of artists, including some lovely prism-like glass shapes hanging from a glass dome that I thought were fabulous.

There is also a large outdoor courtyard with seating and a sculpture called “The Hermit” by Jaume Plensa.    

 

I would be remiss if I didn’t say that we also ate well.  The hotel breakfast included some different fare from the usual bacon and eggs.  Lunches at the Parkview and Blu were tasty, and we sat outside watching the world go by.  Dinner was at the elegant and very contemporary Luma on Park where we sampled some creative pasta dishes, Hamachi crudo, and diver scallops.  As to shopping, we ladies bought shoes (a standalone Rieker shop) and greeting cards and browsed in Writer’s Block, a small independent bookshop, where I found Ant and Bee books for my granddaughters and succumbed to a paperback novel by an Australian writer.

All photos by JWFarrington (some rights reserved).

 

Tidy Tidbits: Culture & Nature

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CULTURE NOTES

In addition to the other lectures and cultural events we regularly attend, this year we added Town Hall, the lecture series that benefits the Ringling College Library. Former CIA director John Brennan was the leadoff speaker, and his discussion of intelligence gathering, the United States’ place in the world, and what should be required of anyone holding public office was focused, pointed, and oh, so very timely!

Kotler-Coville Glass Pavilion at the Ringling Museum. My sister Sally paints in watercolor and her husband Bruce works with fused glass to make jewelry so a trip to the art museum was a perfect outing. We were all impressed with the wide range of glass pieces on display here. This new gallery just opened and is a marvelous addition. Everything from blown glass to cast glass to slumped by artists from Czechoslovakia, The Netherlands, and Japan as well as the U. S. We also visited the Asian Center (opened in 2016) and explored some of the permanent collection in the main building. If you like glass, this gallery is a must and it’s free!

Shakespeare in Love at the Asolo Rep Theatre gets off to a slow start and then becomes lively and delightful! As always, the acting is wonderful, the staging creative, and the music an essential and lovely counterpoint to the action. Full of humor and fun.

 

SALT FLATS AND MANGROVES 

We live on a small island surrounded and bounded by mangroves, our buffer against tides and wind. The Chief Penguin and I took advantage of the opportunity to see less visible parts of the island, particularly two salt flats, each very different in character. One was dry and gray and bare except for the skeletal remains (gray limbs) of some very dead mangroves.  

The other salt flat gets covered over when it rains, but this day was just a damp stark black with scattered patches of a low ground cover with tiny red flowers and some bits of green foliage. The black surface looked soft, but it was actually about an eighth of an inch thick, and if you peeled up a piece, very leathery. Underneath was some pinkish brown earth.

Our guide and resident naturalist, Bruce, shared some of the history of the island and also showed us the three different types of mangroves we have: red, that are always in wet ground with new growth and curved shoots down to the earth; green, that often have traces of excreted salt on their leaves; and white ones on which some leaves have a small notch at the tip. Both the green and the white mangroves can tolerate a drier setting than the red ones.  You might say, “mangroves are us” here.

 

Note:  All photos ©JWFarrington (some rights reserved).

 

 

 

 

Tidy Tidbits: Around Town

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MARVELOUS MUSEUM

The name may be bland, but the South Florida Museum in Bradenton is doing big things!  The Chief Penguin and I were delighted to be at their groundbreaking this week for a new addition.  It’s an education wing with several new classrooms along with the Mosaic Backyard Universe.  The classrooms will enable them to build on the wonderful partnerships they already have with the local schools and the Backyard Universe is an innovative indoor and outdoor space that will provide new ways for younger children to explore their world.  The new center adds more exciting development to downtown Bradenton (the museum is practically on the Riverwalk) and will attract families with very young children.  It’s a win for everyone!

  

 

The project has been in the works for more than five years and there are a number of forward-looking leaders and partners who’ve made it happen.  Current leadership includes two stellar women, museum CEO Brynne Anne Besio and board chair, Jeanie Kirkpatrick.  It was great too to see the museum’s class of kindergarten children wielding their own little shovels.  

 

 

TIMELY MOVIE

The Post

I like films about journalists and the press and I will see any film that stars Meryl Streep.  Predisposed toward The Post as I was, I found it excellent!  Meryl Streep is superb as Katharine Graham and Tom Hanks captures gung-ho editor Ben Bradlee.  It was also fun to see Matthew Rhys of “The Americans” showing up as Daniel Ellsburg.

But Streep gets my vote for conveying all aspects of Graham.  Graham was a product of her time, a woman who was raised to be a wife and mother and therefore, invisible; she was a gracious and skilled hostess, and she, like her late husband, was a friend to politicians and presidents.  She never expected to be thrust into the job of publisher and in the critical scene where Graham must decide what to do, Streep’s lips purse, her face wrinkles, she hesitates, and you feel the thought process as this woman weighs all she and the paper stand to lose and what might be gained.  In that instant, Graham becomes a publisher to reckon with.

There are some other marvelous scenes too:  when she’s the lone woman meeting with the bankers and when she has a telling and poignant conversation with her good friend Robert McNamara.  

I remember the controversy surrounding the “Pentagon Papers” and so probably did other moviegoers as the audience clapped at the end of the film.  With all the castigation of the press today and the emphasis on “fake news” by some, this film about freedom of the press is a must-see!  I also recommend Graham’s autobiography, Personal History, published in 1997.

 

 

Note:  Photo of Graham from cronkitehhh.jmc.asu.edu

Diaries in Life and Fiction

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DIARIES. As someone who has kept journals of one sort or another most of my life, I’m  also interested in the diary as a fictional device.  Here are a few words about my journaling and notes on two recent novels where diaries are key to the underlying story.

My first diary, which I no longer have, was the size of a paperback book with a bright pink plastic cover and came with a key to lock it. I was probably 11 or 12 when I started writing in this and know that my entries began, “Dear Diary.”

Recently I re-discovered a journal I began when I was seventeen and midway through my senior year in high school. I vowed in it to try and write every day. Early entries record my responses to teachers and classes as well as petty annoyances with friends. I am transcribing this journal as a Word document with the thought that perhaps someday my granddaughters might be interested in reading it. This is in keeping with a larger project of transcribing other journals.   I’ve completed our first European trip in 1971 and another one from 1990 when the Chief Penguin was appointed dean of engineering.

DIARIES IN FICTION

The Shape of Mercy by Susan Meissner  

Meissner presents Mercy Hayworth, a teenager in Salem, Massachusetts, who is a victim of the witch trials, to her readers solely through her diary. In the present day, college student Lauren Durough is hired by octogenarian Abigail Boyles to transcribe Mercy’s handwritten diary. Abigail is distantly related to Mercy, hence her interest in having it transcribed. Lauren, from a rich family, is sorting out her own life and worrying over how she judges or, more often, misjudges others’ actions and intentions.

I am not sure why I liked this novel as much as I did. In some ways, the premise that Abigail and Lauren would develop a closeness is an unlikely one and, one might also question why Mercy’s diary has such a dramatic impact on Lauren. The diary itself is well conceived and convincing, however, and I kept on reading to the end. (~JW Farrington)

The Summer Guest by Alison Anderson  

This is a beautiful novel that deserves to be savored like an extended afternoon tea.  It unfolds slowly focusing on the diary kept by Zinaida Lintvaryova during the several years Anton Chekhov and his family spent summers in the Ukrainian countryside.  Zinaida was a real person, the eldest daughter in her family, and a doctor. She developed a brain illness and began suffering headaches and gradually lost her sight. The Chekhov family did summer in Sumy in the late 1880’s, but the diary is this author’s creation.

In it, Chekhov talks candidly with the now blind Zinaida about the novel he’s working on. Linking the diary to the present are two other women: Katya Kendall, a publisher in London, who sends the Russian manuscript of the diary to an established translator, Ana Harding, based in Switzerland.  Katya is desperate to save her business and hopes the diary will do that.  Ana, who spent time in the Ukraine in younger days, becomes caught up in Zinaida’s diminished life, her friendship with Anton, and their far ranging conversations about life, literature, and philosophy.  For each of these women, Zinaida, Katya, and Ana, the diary prompts a reckoning with her own life—its disappointments and joys, its sorrows and shortcomings.

I was curious about Alison Anderson and aspects of her life show up in Ana.  Like Ana, she lives in a Swiss village and is a translator as well as a novelist.  Obviously, her work as a translator informs the depiction of what getting works to translate involves.  And, since this is yet another historical novel that features a famous author, I found this article in LitHub theorizing why there are so many of these novels of particular interest.  It’s by Helen Mcalpin.  As you might guess by now, I loved this novel! (~JW Farrington)

STRONG CINEMA & GOLDEN GLOBE WINNER

Three Billboards outside Ebbing Missouri

This is one of the most intense films I’ve seen recently. When Mildred Hayes, angry and grief-stricken that the police have not made any progress on solving the rape and murder of her teenage daughter, rents space on three billboards to publicly question the chief of police, she sets off a powder keg of hate and violence. Fights, fires, and general unpleasantness color everyday interactions.

Frances McDormand is magnificent as the mother. You want to sympathize with her pain and yet can’t condone all of her actions. You feel for her son and her estranged husband and also for Willoughby, the “good old boy” police chief, and eventually even for immature, misguided officer Dickson who exhibits racist tendencies.  Definitely worth seeing!

Note:  Header photo from www.brandsgifts.ae; other photos by this author.