Much To Do

My flights are booked and there is much to be done before I leave Florida in less than two weeks.

The waiting has been hard and now it is time to get my final details in order before I head out. I will miss the beautiful Florida Room and my lovely little condo. It has been a good home for me and even though Little Man is gone, Puff still loves the mornings here watching the sunrise.

I was going through some old letters (I love mail so much!) and found an interesting letter from one of my soul-sisters, Anne Rainbow Shepard Crary. She is an incredible artist who does not have a website. She paints beauty in so many forms...her biggest work is (or was, last time I was in Seattle) a huge mural...I mean big...like 60 feet long and 20 feet high, in Westlake Mall, an urban downtown mall in Seattle. I may be exaggerating the size, but it really is HUGE!

She has done so many other pieces too and I had a copy of her work on my desk called "We have Marshmallows" which shows all these adorable woodland animals sitting around a bonfire toasting marshmallows. So peaceful and beautiful...utopia, where all the animals from Bears and Lions to Squirrels and Chipmunks get along and enjoy sweet treats.


She has also spent time with me in the "Malibu Stacey Funtime Camper" for weeks and weeks. We had some pretty incredible stuff happen to us while we were traveling across the southwest. We stopped in Crested Butte Colorado for 6 weeks and camped out loving life at 9000 ft. elevation.

Living at that altitude was an experience in itself. I was smoking at the time and I remembered it would take me half an hour just to smoke one American Spirit cigarette.

NOTE TO SMOKERS: I understand and love nicotine but it is an evil drug. If you must smoke, and baby, I would if I could too, please smoke American Spirit cigarettes. They do not add the extra chemicals that the traditional smokes do like that quick burning paper, the extra nicotine to keep you addicted and all the other toxins that Phillip Morris likes to add. If you decide to quit smoking then, it is much easier since you are only changing the habit and the addiction to nicotine is much less than a Marlboro or Camel smoker. I found that using nicotine patches wound me up even more since I didn't have those high levels of nicotine that the patches held for traditional smokers. I needed to use the lower dosed packages. You'll find too that if you smoke American Spirits you will smoke less naturally. Interesting stuff.

Anne Rainbow Shepard and I became ministers at the same time. I had to declare a name for my church at the ceremony I created an all-faith based congregation. Anne (my sister) was the first (and only) member to my church. But now I am wondering if I can create a nonprofit organization using my ministry to create the church of art....

Much to ponder....

So the letter....

The letter I was looking at is from Anne Rainbow Shepard when she was an extra in the movie "TITANIC". Such a terrible film...Karen and I saw it together in Athens GA. Karen was living there at the time and Anne and her boyfriend Sam, were extras. Anne had a small part where she caught Kate Winslet's shoes during that scene when Kate discovered how much fun it was to party with the poor people. Kate's down there drinking and dancing in the smoky 3rd class cabins and she takes off her shoes and throws them to a peasant woman. Anne Rainbow Shepard was that peasant woman.

Anne is an artist and not the most athletic of people, although she is now a yoga instructor and massage therapist...the eye-hand-coordination is not her strength. It took 20 or so takes to get the shot right where Anne actually caught the shoes. She was embarrassed and everyone was yelling at her, even Kate, to catch the shoes. The pressure was so great and the vibe on the set was terrible.

I found a letter she wrote me when she and Sam were extras floating as dead bodies in these large tanks of water. The insisted that they keep the water "cool" and the extras were fully dressed in period costume with blue grease paint makeup for that "cold and dead" look. They left the extras in the pools of water for 12 hours at a time and they wouldn't let them out for breaks because then they'd have to get back into wet clothes.

The conditions were terrible...I guess that really came through in the film for Karen and me.

When we watched the movie we had a hard time behaving ourselves in the theater. Karen is a classmate of Phil Hoffman from NYU school of Drama and they remain friends today...and she is a bit of a movie snob. I learned my movie snobbery from her...

When the ship finally hit the iceberg I yelled out, "Finally!"

I had no idea that the movie would last another hour....imagine my disappointment. The actual ship sank in 20 minutes. The movie was much crueler.

This letter details being in the tanks and a day in the life on a movie set.

I am going to post parts of it...it is fascinating stuff. After that I will see the strong Jean and have his beautiful hands all over my body. After all the biking to the tri-rail station (4-5 miles one way) and walking from the Metro to Dr. Paul's office (about 1 1/2 miles each way), in addition to all my other biking...I can really use the rub-down today. Thank you God!

So much love for you...
Linda