Weekly View » CJ Woods III

Men With Hats

CJ Woods III — Thu, 12 Nov 2026 06:08:24 +0000

The head coach of the Indianapolis Colts was being interviewed on the Sunday morning program that I was watching, and — not for the first time — I noted his commitment to the “Men With Hats” club. Shane Steichen was wearing what is commonly called a “baseball cap,” one that had on the front of it, the horseshoe logo of the team. Later in the program, other members of the team were interviewed, and in keeping with the “MWH” theme, they all wore hats.

When I was young, one of the needs that I shared with my high school friends — all the young men — was a desire to have a snap-brim fedora with a small flower pinned to the silk band. I never got one, not even when my friends and I formed a singing group. “The Chancellors” wore navy blue sport coats with gold buttons, but no snap-brims. And in the 1960s, the only baseball caps that I remember were on the Pittsburgh Pirates team members, and the ball players on the Schenley High school Spartans’ baseball team.

The ubiquitous baseball cap is a necessary item in every modern man’s wardrobe. I have 23 caps, some of which are more than 50 years old (my brother’s cap being of that age.) But I rarely wear them. My Pittsburgh Steeler cap is mostly for bragging purposes, especially when the Steelers play the Colts. My Heartland Film Festival cap demonstrates my support for the festival, and I have a cap from my favorite cidery. I also have a cap that showcases my favorite beer. My Rolling Rock cap was given to me by the owners of the bar where I would shoot pool and drink that beer. But, as I said, I rarely wear those caps.

I am a photographer who looks through a viewfinder, and the bill of a baseball cap impedes that. Nor can I shoot pool with that ball cap bill protruding from my forehead. I, unlike most of the rest of the male hat-wearing population, will never turn my cap backward. Nope: Not gonna do it. Legend has it that Ken Griffey Jr., an actual baseball player, popularized the wearing of the cap backward, but various singing groups and rappers helped to push the trend. I remember having seen a meme on a social networking site that showed a man wearing his baseball cap backward, and using his hand to shield his eyes from the sun. Excuse me sir, but the bill on the cap was designed for that purpose.

Ball caps are often worn to disguise hair failure; I have seen men lift a cap from a rim of fur, only to reveal a shiny top. I understand the vanity inherent in that, as well as the necessity to warm that pate. On a recent cool day, I stepped out to find that my new haircut was too short to protect my dome from the cold. I slapped on a cap and went back out to join the rest of the “Men With Hats.”

Most of the men of my youth wore hats, though none of them wore ball caps. (My father wore a beret.) But hats came off when men entered the doors of a house, unlike today. Men wearing hats do not remove them, and ball caps stay on, even in the theater. In the sports world, ball caps are welded onto the heads of both the players and the spectators. And, unlike the snap-brim fedora, “Men With Hats” don’t have to chase a windblown ball cap.

cjon3acd@att.net

Nuclear

CJ Woods III — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 06:08:35 +0000

I read a recent article that reported that an Indiana state senator had introduced a bill to encourage utilities to develop sources of nuclear energy, and I thought, “Yee-ha: here come the locusts.” I flashed back to the early 80s, and my own “year of living nuclear.”
I was a full time adult college student and “stay-at-home dad” when my neighbor, a professional employment recruiter for whom I had designed a business card, asked me if I wanted a job. “Uh, no,” I said, “I’m a student.” He told me that he had received a request from a client for an artist and I was the only one he knew. He quoted a few numbers that the bride, the kid and I discussed, and I put on a hard hat and went to work for an electrical subcontractor at the Marble Hill nuclear power plant.
Public Service Indiana was the contractor for the plant; I was a “graphics illustrator” for the subcontractor. My duties were to be the production of a map of the progress of the company’s installation of “hangers” and laying of electrical cable. I set up an artists’ space with everything I wanted, but I shared an oversized cubicle with Fred, the recruiter.
Fred’s job was to find nuclear electrical personnel. Nuke plant workers are a specialized and migratory lot, and when one finds a job, others are notified of openings. Fred was looking for Quality Control Inspectors. Booted and hard-hatted workers with jangling tool belts would clomp past my office to his, and give Fred the name of a buddy back in Louisiana. Fred would call the buddy and try to determine if his (most of them were men) experience included working at a nuke plant and at what level. (The levels, to my limited knowledge, were QC I and QC II.) The end of the conversation that I could hear made for hilarious theater. The query would begin with “Have you ever worked at a nuclear power plant?” and devolve to, “Have you ever lived in a state that had a nuke plant within 150 miles? Good! I think we might have something for you.” (There may be some slight exaggeration, here.)
I was one of the nuclear locusts that swarmed over the Marble Hill site, gobbling up Public Service Indiana’s largesse (which, for my electrical contractor, was “cost plus” a stomp-load), earning stupendous amounts of money. But that pesky job-robbing government entity, The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, kept finding fault with the craftsmanship of the plant, the project fell behind the established deadlines and we locusts picked clean the massive fields of PSI money; after an investment of $2.5 billion dollars, the project failed. And on that failure we will now try to build another plant. I heard the stirring of locusts’ wings, and then – the bill was pulled. Seems that “no utility or large energy user” was interested in building a plant.
I cannot imagine why. The bill, as originally proposed, would have given financial incentives to the builder, with the best one being that the utility could charge customers today for future services.
I’ll not enter the debate about the development of a source of energy that produces byproducts too dangerous to live near (unless you live in Nevada) but I have to agree with the senator: that was a sweet deal. The state gives you incentives, and you can charge your customers for the costs of building the plant. It is a win-win for the utility. And we consumers may (or may not) get a “cheap to operate” source of energy.
Cue the locusts.

First published in 2014.

cjon3acd@att.net

Do Day

CJ Woods III — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 05:08:28 +0000

This was first published in 2013.

On October 10^th I turned the corner of one street onto another, ignoring the call of a woman on the other side. She said, “Excuse me,” and I kept walking. She called out again, “Excuse me, sir. You, across the street.”

I rarely respond to random hails from strangers on the street, but the woman was standing in the corner of the front yard of a home. I put my search for a daily paper on hold. I crossed the street to her, and she asked if I was busy. My filters discarded sarcastic responses and I asked how I might help her. She opened her gate and led me into the side yard of the house.

“We’re trying to get this up the steps,” she said. I peered through an open door and down a dark narrow staircase at three people clustered around a hulking white washing machine. I crept down the steps to also find a dolly. I made a quick visual assessment and some calculations: mass times space divided by big machine minus light volunteers, and decided the monster could not fit onto the dolly, swivel in the space and be lugged up the steps. Comments and suggestions were flying from the original volunteers and I said, “Let me think.”

“Let the man think,” said the other man in the basement. “We need a bigger boat,” I thought, but instead, we muscled the machine onto the dolly. Two people pushed as I bent down and pulled the beast up from the basement, one backbreaking step at a time. When we got the iron maiden to the top of the steps, it wedged tight in the doorway.

“When we got it in here, we put it in the door and turned it this way and that,” said the owner of the behemoth. I learned that the gargantuan was going to the junkyard and turned away and headed home for some tools. I came back in my car to find that the crew had managed to savage the brute enough to wrestle it through the door. “I guess my work here is done,” I said, brightly, but quickly recognized that the stone had to be rolled into the back yard and onto the bed of a pickup truck. This murderous fun was capped with, “Can you back the truck out of the yard? I almost scraped the sides driving in. You want some water, a pop, maybe?”

At the back-yard gate, I asked the vehicle’s owner if she could take it from there. “How am I going to get it down that bump?” she wanted to know. The “bump” was the curb she had mounted to get into the yard. With the truck in the street, I leaped from the cab. “Bye!” The woman and her friends waved and thanked me as I drove away.

That day, I had unknowingly participated in the Indy DO Day, a day when “the people of this city get to know their neighbors, take ownership of their neighborhoods and take care of one another.” I still do not know my neighbor, nor her friends, the four people I joined in battle with a World War II-era clothes washer; we were five strangers (or four friends with one stranger) hammering away at a piece of life, trying to get a better fit. But after gobbling some Ibuprofen, downing a frosty beverage and snapping open the pages of my paper, I realized that I did not regret having answered the hail of, “Excuse me…”

It was the least that I could do on that day.

cjon3acd@att.net

Fashion Fails

CJ Woods III — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 05:08:24 +0000

As I dressed for my singing date with the Harmony Collected community choir, I hesitated, briefly, as I buckled a black belt on my tan pants. I have been a fan of a “black and tan” beer — the layering of a stout beer over a pale ale — but in the fashion world in which I had been immersed for more than 30 years, a black belt with tan pants is an unforgivable fashion faux pas. Though I have graduated from the fashion scrutiny business, I still have the habits and instincts that were ingrained in me. And some days, getting dressed has unnecessary challenges.
Six pairs of shoes huddle on the floor in front of my bedroom closet; inside, there are 12 more pairs. A recent discovery in a closet in my hallway revealed another pair, some Penguin boots! I cannot remember the last time those boots were on my feet, but based on the wear shown on the soles and heels, they have not spent much time out of the box. But the companions for those 19 pairs of shoes are about 85 pairs of socks, spread out (or in) three drawers. Only one pair of these has not spent any time on my feet, and I am eager to put those football and beer-themed polyester and cotton fellows into play. But what is the appropriate color scheme to coordinate with tan pants?
And can I wear black shoes? In 2008, when the advertising department of the Famous-Barr department store in St. Louis Missouri was nearing its close, I did a “star turn” as a model for one of the catalogs. I had come to St. Louis from the advertising department of L.S. Ayres in Indianapolis and was an assistant Creative Director, but the end was nigh: The advertising responsibilities were being shifted to Texas. Our budget was strangled, and for the last Father’s Day catalog, I was photographed — along with another employee and a professional model — for the front cover of the catalog. I am wearing a light blue, short-sleeved polo shirt, and double-pleated tan pants, cinched with a brown belt. I have on a light blue baseball cap, and I am holding a golf club; my co-worker is wearing a similar outfit. The pro is posed as if completing a putt. I still have clothes similar to those I wore for that fashion shoot, though the double-pleated pants have long gone out of style.
I’d like to be able to dress without wondering if I am fashionable, but even when I am going to the pool room, I make sure that my clothing choices pass the “fashion” muster. My biggest problem is that I have no brown belts. At least, brown belts that are not braided leather, which are no longer fashionable. My shoes are old, my wardrobe is outdated, and I may be the only one who cares that my shirts are not “slim-fit.” And I do not have trousers that taper down to shoes that are as long as canoes. Nor do I have those “old man” shoes with the giant heels and the white soles. *Sigh*
Don’t judge me, please.

cjon3acd@att.net

The Halloween Time

CJ Woods III — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 05:08:07 +0000

In the town of Irvington, Indiana, October is a special time. As soon as the calendar changes from September 30th to October 1st, the houses and grounds of the town bloom with ghosts and goblins and graves: Oh, my!
My neighbor across the street had work done on her sewer system; the heavy machinery plowed up the dirt in her front yard, and left a small hill. In the spirit of Halloween, plastic skeleton arms, hands, and heads now peek from the dirt pile. South of my residence is a house that will probably get a prize for its ghoulish decorations, which include full-sized skeletons and talking pumpkins. As I wend my way South on Ritter Street, I pass trees festooned with tiny ghosts, giant spiders and enormous webs on the railings leading to a spooky door, a yard full of plastic skeletons, and an enormous black cat blow up. At the corner of Ritter and Michigan there are three giant blow-ups. Frankenstein, a ghost and a witch are all about 15 feet tall.
When I lived in Southern Indiana, I used some ingenuity and musical equipment to create a properly spooky Halloween environment. I taped a microphone and a flashlight to my chest, and stood in the dark entryway to my house with a filmy black sheet draped over my head. When the kids rang the bell, I would turn on the flashlight, activate the reverb, and growl into the microphone. My big Pioneer speakers would howl and the kids would see my face beneath the sheet. They would leap into the air and bolt down the steps and onto the sidewalk. There, they would tell other kids, “You have to go to this house!”
My current residence is more modestly decorated for the spooky time. I have 6 small fabric witches, ghosts and goblins hanging from hooks on the front porch; attached to the walls are spiders and spider webs and a drawing of spiders and webs, by my artistic granddaughter. A one-legged plastic skeleton is poised over the mail slot to greet the mail carrier, and a lighted spider web has a spider in it. (A real spider has set up shop in one corner of the porch, and I wonder what that orb weaver thinks of the competition.) Next to the front steps of the porch, a four-foot high blow-up Casper, when activated, draws a barking comment from Bear, a neighbor’s dog. That neighbor’s porch is covered with lights that outshine the little one that tattoos my house with rotating spooky images.
Irvington has to be the greatest Halloween show on earth, and I have taken the tour bus that visits so many of the decorated houses. I often wonder how much more people pay for electricity in October to light all the decorations. I am also amused to see cars stop and disgorge kids — some of whom just barely qualify — and watch as they work the street until picked up again by their rides. But I am not mad at ‘em. I wish that I could accompany a child as they work their way from house to house, crying out “Trick or treat!” But the candy man has to mind the bowl, rationing the Reese’s, Snickers and M&Ms, cautioning the older kids that they may have only one, until the magic hour when the sanctioned begging must end. And so goes the Halloween Time.

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History and Mystery

CJ Woods III — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 05:08:50 +0000

I climbed the steps leading away from the light-rail station onto the street above it; a woman bounded up the steps behind me and at the top, asked for directions to a street. I pointed her in the right direction and she startled me by asking, “Do you want to go with me?” This encounter was astonishing to me for two reasons. A white woman, a stranger to me, was inviting me to go with her to the home of Scott Joplin, a place I had never visited in all my years in St. Louis.
I sat in wonder at a recent book signing and listened to Al Hunter — a fellow columnist at the Weekly View — tell visitors of his travels to historic sites. One of his stories (to which his bride Rhonda added rich detail) involved a historic site that none of the “locals” were aware of. That describes me, in St. Louis, Indianapolis, and Pittsburgh. I have stomped in the great footsteps of history and am largely unaware of the significance of the hallowed ground I trod. Had the stranger from the St. Louis Metro asked me for directions to “Scott Joplin’s home” instead of the street it was on, I would have been embarrassed to say, “I dunno.”
When I was traveling to Maryland to visit my sister and dying mother, I told my sister (having been shamed by Al’s multiple visits) that I had never visited Gettysburg. I lived in Pennsylvania for 23 years, and had never visited one of the country’s most hallowed historic sites. “We can go,” she said. “It’s not far from here.” I did not.
My eldest daughter, who lives near Morristown, New Jersey, and who spent some time with her mother in residence at a place called Headquarters Hotel, once asked me if I wanted to see some of the historic sites of Morristown. We finally got to do that this past August, when we visited the home that was General George Washington’s first Revolutionary War headquarters. Which explained to me why so many businesses in Morristown were named “Headquarters.” Of course, every school child in America knows that Morristown was Washington’s first headquarters, right? When my daughter asked about the historic sites, she did so because she knew that I liked to write about stuff; she may not know of my failings in the history department, as I managed to bluff my way through her high school years. I bleed history as if I were a hemophiliac, a “histophiliac”: it won’t stay in me. My feelings are readily available to me, but the facts of history are in books and notes and covered in dust in the remotest corners of my brain. I am a proud citizen of the United States who could not pass the citizenship test if it were administered to me today.
On a “Ghost Tour” with Al, I listened as he extolled the virtues of “Historic Irvington,” and was once again shamed. I do not know why Irvington is “historic.” I know some of its historic sites; I have walked them the last two Octobers of my life. But the greater mystery of its history is still just outside of my understanding.
I have passed a lot of historic markers in my life; some I have recorded (one being “The Old Courthouse” in St. Louis, where the Dred Scott decision was rendered). Some, I have merely noted by nodding. Had I accepted the invitation proffered by the stranger from the Metro in St. Louis, I might have enjoyed a richly rewarding experience.
Or, have been murdered.

cjon3acd@att.net

What? The Fall?

CJ Woods III — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 05:08:09 +0000

I was looking at the work of an orb-weaver that had crafted a web across a good portion of my kitchen window. I idly noted a curled and yellowed leaf caught in the web. Later that day, I saw the spider. It clung to the threads at the middle of the web, and by the end of the day, it had also bundled up a snack. The snack was in the shape of a stinkbug, and I thought, “Circle of life, man: circle of life.” The next day, both the spider and its snack were gone. From my chair in the living room, I looked out at the tree-limbs, its leaves bright with sun. I smiled at the passage of leaves across the window, and started softly singing “Autumn Leaves.” Then I thought, “Wait: what? Fall? Noooo!”
I had failed to notice that the year had blasted straight through summer and skidded into fall, which means that “The Old Man” — winter — is coming. So now, on my morning walks to the store, I see those yellowed leaves gathered at the edge of the grasses. In the spring, white fluff from some tree had clustered there like dust in the corners of my apartment. Now that the advent of fall has been foreshadowed by the drifting leaves (hang on, leaves! Resistance is not futile!) I am no longer melting in the blazing heat of summer. I am sweating in terror at the thought that temperatures could take an 80 degree plummet, from 90 to 10. I am a proponent of the cycle of “spring, summer, repeat.” Winter follows fall, so I want to eliminate the precursor to the cold, wet, un-wonderland.
I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: I hate winter. I do not like cold and I don’t like ice; slush gets old and (sorry Seuss) I fell down twice, last year. Or winter. Anyway, snow, ice and cold, while necessary for the balance of Earth’s environments, are not my friends.
I moved from Madera, California (average temperature, warm and cozy) to Clarksville, Indiana (average temperature, not hot) in June of 1978. My bride and I agreed that our daughter needed to be closer to our families, both of which were in Pittsburgh. We did not move east to get closer to nasty weather, so I was surprised when my bride suggested that we go to the recently opened Paoli Peaks ski resort. She thought that we would enjoy skiing. “Wait: skiing. Does that not involve snow, ice and cold? Why would I do that on purpose?”
When I lived in St. Louis, I would take my two young children to Forest Park in the winter. I had been told that they would enjoy sledding down Art Hill, a slope in front of the St. Louis Art Museum. I remember watching as Lauryn walked gingerly down the slope, and seeing her fly into the air when a sledder clipped her heels. And what great joy it was to watch my son on a plastic disc, in uncontrolled flight down that same hill and — Oh! Sweet winter — plow through the hay bales used to contain sledders and into and across the street below, coming to a stop just before he plunged into the frozen pond that had been a serene and scenic summer delight. Bad things happen in winter.
Johnny Mercer’s English translation of a French song became the “Autumn Leaves” we know. When I hear the line, “… but I miss you most of all … when autumn leaves start to fall,” the “you” I miss is summer.

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Skidding Into Home

CJ Woods III — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 05:08:19 +0000

I was cackling and guffawing with my dear friend as she detailed her experience of shopping with her 16-year-old daughter on what she called “Old Folks Day.” She giggled, “We have to dodge walkers and canes and those motorized carts.” My own laughter skidded to a halt on the friction of a harsh reality: I was the butt of her joke.
I am in need of neither a cane, nor a walker. I get in a moderate amount of ambulation each day, so the motorized cart is also out. But I have ridden across the landscape of my life for more than six decades and though the face I see in the mirror does not resemble the face I imagine, I can prove an entitlement to the “Seniors’ Discount” at businesses that offer such a thing. Despite that, I have taken that discount only once, when I took my grandchildren to see a movie. I had a vaguely guilty sense of having stolen something.
When I was a young man living in Pittsburgh, Penn., I used to listen at night to a jazz station. They often played a song that I thought was called, “I’m Growing Old.” (I have since found that the artist I believed to have been the singer claims not to have sung it. I have yet to find a copy of the song, though I did find the poem and the poet who wrote it: John Godfrey Saxe.) When the song spoke of growing “fonder of the fire, mindful of the cold, and careless in dress,” it did not give me a vision of a life that might be my own. But I am now — ok, I admit it — in the seventh decade of my life, a number unimaginable to the twenty-something who had listened to that song.
On a recent visit to my fun-poking friend, (“dear friend:” an old-folks term) she watched as I tied the laces on my shoes and after noting that I did this each time I moved to another room — I am not a fan of the bare foot, unless it is under sheets, in a shower or buried in sand — she commented that I needed “slip-ons.” I responded to her, “I told Lisa (my eldest daughter) that if she ever saw me reaching for those brown plastic slip-ons that old men scuffle about in, she was to take me out back and shoot me. Just put me down.” I have no slip-ons, no fluffy sweaters that I miss-button, no “putter pants” with elastic waists. (Well, one pair of putter pants, purchased when I was about 10 years younger and did not know what putter pants were.) I am no cliché.
I have been told that I do not “look” my age, nor do I “act” my age. I’m not sure that I know what look I am supposed to have at this age, for I have never been here before. When I am shooting pool in the bar with my team, young people take pleasure in playing songs that they know will cause me to dance. After telling them that I am “107,” I bust a move, “wobble wobble,” or “Gangnam” style. These moves are a source of great embarrassment to my son, although hugely amusing to the bar’s patrons, judging from the lack of gunfire.
I am not going to “go gentle,” but I am “skidding in sideways,” and not by wrestling weights and stunning my feet against pavements. I believe that our inevitable slide into extinction can be “Electric,” and accomplished with grace and style and “The Cupid Shuffle.”

cjon3acd@att.net

Squirrel

CJ Woods III — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 05:08:41 +0000

One of my favorite movies has, as a bit player, a squirrel. In National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, the family cry is “SQUIRREL!” followed by that animal exploding from the interior of a Christmas tree. The squirrels in my old neighborhood displayed antics that amused me in much the same way as the movie squirrel. They were grey squirrels, with bushy tails in good times, and sparse tails in lean times. My apartment building was at the nexus of two “pocket parks” that people frequented; some people made temporary homes in these parks. The squirrels were accustomed to the presence of humans and, while cautious, were not in the least skittish. Not so, the red squirrels in my current micro-hood.
My micro-hood squirrels are a jittery bunch, and have the explosive lift of Olympic triple-jumpers. When I walk past the great tree that dominates the circular driveway, “Red” launches himself onto the grass, skitters across the gravel and vaults onto another tree. On my return, “Red” startles from the grass and clears the gravel driveway in an astounding leap, sticks the landing on a tree and immediately swivels around the tree to hide. The Russian judge would not hesitate to give him a 9. (I say “him,” but I cannot tell the gender of a squirrel. I was able to determine it one magnificently memorable time in my life, but my editor forbade the telling of the story.)
These squirrels live in a city: chances are pretty good that they are going to come into some contact with a bi-ped. A couple of years ago, while “touristing” on the grounds of the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C. with my grandpups, I acceded to their demands for a snack. At the food truck, a silent gathering of furry beings crept closer to us as we selected some goodies. Sitting on a bench with my two grandglories, I unwrapped the snacks, an act that emboldened the fuzzy snack-snatchers. The squirrels surrounded us, big eyeballs beseeching, demanding. These were gray squirrels, which had apparently grown accustomed to being fed by the patrons of the food trucks. They expected no less from my grandbeauties and me and we happily complied.
As the D.C. snackers snapped up crackers from our shoe tops, I was reminded of when my eldest daughter was very young, and her mother and I took her on a camping trip to Yosemite National Park. There, we stopped to see “The Lone Pine,” which was growing from a granite outcropping. This popular tourist destination had squirrels as an active part of the scenery. I have a picture of my two-year-old sitting on her mother’s lap, a swarm of squirrels surrounding them, looking for goodies. The older of those two humans seems to be the only one happy to see that swarm. (Not sure if a big load of squirrels is called “a swarm.”)
Collisions between man and animal generally resolve themselves in favor of the human; we bring an overwhelming capacity for destruction to the meetings, except in the case of 600-lb. deer and car windshields. Wild animals show an appropriate prudence, for the most part, in avoiding close contact. And while the startled bear, which was merely doing what it does in the woods, terrifies me, the startled city squirrel amuses me. I think, “Dude: I live here. This cannot be the first time that you’ve seen me.”
I see these red rockets on my daily walks and I try to walk softly in their micro-hood, to assure them that I mean no harm. But when they burst into frenzied flight, I cannot help but hear the Griswold family bellowing:
“SQUIRREL!”

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The Degrees

CJ Woods III — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 05:08:47 +0000

In June of 2020, I saw a post on a social media site that was directed to an arts group that I had joined. Deb S Kent was soliciting participation from the Eastside Arts Collective to help a family repaint their fence. The fence had been “defaced… with hate speech,” presumably because of the message the family had painted on it: “Black Lives Matter.”
I did not know Deb Kent, but the vandalized fence was two blocks North of where I lived on University Drive near Arlington Avenue. I walked up to the home and took pictures of the fence; I emailed Kori Williamson, the homeowner, and she responded that her husband, Brent Williamson, would call me. His call, and my interview with the two of them resulted in “Not On The Fence,” which was published in the Weekly View on June 18th, 2020.
My interactions with Deb Kent, whose clarion call to the Eastside Arts Collective got an answer from me, continued when I started to attend sessions at the Magpie Artspace, a creative space operated by Deb and Jamie Willis on S. Audubon Road in Irvington. I remember being aware of Jamie – a superb artist – as she hovered quietly near me while I sketched a picture of my youngest granddaughter. Sometime in December 2025, I got a notification from Deb about the “Feral Tweens Makers Lab,” a gathering at the Red Barn Arts Collective where those tweens could gather to make art. I contacted Deb, and begged her to allow my granddaughter, 7-year-old Myah, to attend the sessions. (“Tween” is generally defined as a child between the ages of 8 and 12 years.) Deb let the kid in, and Myah has been eagerly attending the sessions and bringing home creative works, including a representation of a graveyard, with moss and plastic skeletons.
In March of this year (2026), Myah wanted to have a lemonade stand, so her mother and her artsy-fartsy grandfather tricked out a table and made a sign: “Myah’s Super Amazing Lemonade,” and set up on the corner of North Hawthorne Lane and E. St. Joseph’s streets. My neighbors pitched in to subsidize Myah’s enterprise, while I scurried about the stand, trying to instill in the kid the need for cleanliness when dealing with public consumption of her product. In April, the Magpie sent out a call for kids to set up lemonade stands in front of the gallery. I responded immediately, and when I sent Deb a picture of Myah’s “Super Amazing” lemonade stand, she responded that she was “not at all surprised” that Myah was “an experienced entrepreneur.”
I have heard of a trivia game that challenges players to “connect any film actor to Kevin Bacon” in as few links as possible. Though I enjoy participating in trivia events, I’ve not played “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.” When I ruminate on “degrees of separation” I think of my youth, when I listened to the R&B group, “The Three Degrees,” formed in 1963, and whose 1974 hit “When Will I See You Again,” was a chart-topper.
I learned of Deb Kent when she searched for artists to help the Williamson family (first degree) and established a connection with her when I attended her gathering of creatives. The second degree was when Myah was able to attend her “Feral Tween” sessions, where her creativity was given free reign; the third degree was the lemonade stand. I prefer to think of “the degrees,” not as measures of temperature or separation, but of connection. The three connections noted above make me happy, and I say this:
Hi, Deb.
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