It took longer than anticipated. It still needs some tweaking, not to be confused with twerking, and there may be some parts missing. Nevertheless, Miz Shoes is proud to unveil Girlyshoes Three Point Oh, now with more LOLZ.
What do you think?
I give up. I have spent close to two hours with my hosting service’s tech support. They are stumped. I have sent a tech support request to my CMS. I’m going to go work on a quilt now, because the sewing machine works. Unlike my brain and the back end of this blog.
I swore to myself that the first thing I was going to do once I left the office was revamp this blog. Today I found two installations of the software I use to make it. I’ve never cleaned my virtual house and now I am going to have to do a clean install of my cms, rewrite everything and redesign this site. Not that I couldn’t update without that, but it would probably result in three installations and more problems. The last time I updated I lost my photo libraries and archives, and I never had the time to figure out that problem, so it’s time.
Say goodbye to Girlyshoes, and hello to Girlyshoes Three Point Oh, now with more cats.
Or it will be soon.
They did fine by me, my team. They didn’t/couldn’t get my sense of humor, but they recognized that certain things cracked me up and gave me pleasure, so on the occasion of my leaving, I was thrown a party the centerpiece of which was this cake.
Guys, I love you for this. As for last night? It was the best send-off a dame ever had, even if in the old days we would have closed the Road, rather than warmed up the seats for the night crowd.
Miz Shoes makes no pretensions about her age: she is older than dirt. I graduated college in 1975, when most of the readers of this blog (if there are any left, that is) were still in diapers, if not in utero. I have worked as a graphic designer, a paste up artist, a web master, a sales girl on the Apple store floor, a nude figure model, a (very bad) camp counsellor, a piece-work painter of cheesy wind chimes and a commercial photographer. I have been a creative director, an administrator for an outreach campus of MiamiDade Community College on South Beach back in the 80s before South Beach was rediscovered and made over, and a college instructor of photography and graphic design. I have milked goats, tossed bales of hay and weed, run an unsuccessful political campaign for a loathsome individual who would have been a disaster if he’d won, done titles and special FX for non-theatrical releases & commercials and held a union card to do it and one of my t-shirt designs (for the Y2K non-event, to be exact) was accepted into the Smithonian’s permanent collection. I have stayed at jobs for as long as 12 years and as short as a week, but since I graduated college on my twenty-first birthday (one of the universe’s more piquant jokes, I feel) I have worked. Full time. The longest vacation I took was 2 weeks, and the longest period between jobs maybe 6 months.
All of that comes to a rather inglorious end on Tuesday, August 13, 2013. I quit my job, and the ten days notice I gave runs out on that day. At 5:30 pm EDT, I walk away from the corporate world and into my studio, there to make what I like to consider my art. I have been collecting art supplies and tools since 1975, stockpiling against this day when I might have the time to create, but not the money to buy the raw materials. I have enough fabric for three dozen quilts, enough wool for pounds and pounds of yarn, and enough yarn to knit a hundred sweaters. I have patterns and silks and oddments and ornaments. I still have my eyesight and my hand/eye coordination. On August 14, I will have the time.
Where do I begin? With this, my blog. I have loved writing and telling my stories for as long as I have had a voice, but knowing that the Big Brother of my corporate overlord was watching my words for me put a huge cramp in my style. That ends on August 13, too. So welcome back to the monkey house, my gentle readers. Buckle up. Now it’s going to get interesting.
Miz Shoes has a confession: she has, in less than two hours, become a devotee of DaVinci. Oh, not the maestro I studied in art school, nor the magician in the titular fictions of Dan Brown, but the anachronistic, badly written, desperately acted, beautifully filmed and costumed DaVinci’s Demons on a cable network the name of which escapes me, because I am watching it on the RLA’s iphone routed through the giant monitor that functions as a television.
The writing is execrable. No, calling it execrable is an insult to hacks and shitty writing everywhere. It is anachronistic to a degree that would embarrass a freshman writer in film school—a bad film school. Not only is it bad, it assumes that the audience has the art history knowledge and attention span of a gnat, and utterly incapable of following a plot or remembering relationships. The actors, bless their hearts, each and every one, struggle mightily with dialog that makes George Lucas look like, to be appropriately historic in reference, Shakespeare. While beautiful, the title animation is reminiscent of the title animation in Pillars of Earth. The slow-mo is part kung-fu movie, part Matrix. And yet…
And yet Miz Shoes is compelled by this. During her school years, Miz Shoes spent many an hour in rapt attention to the lectures of William Betch, the best damned art history professor the University of Miami was ever blessed to have on faculty. To see those sketches, as well known and dear to me as family photos, to see them come alive, no matter how thick the cheese crust, is bliss. To see the scale models of his wings, to see, however fanciful and improbable, the test flight… well, Miz Shoes swoons. It doesn’t matter that the character is written to be half Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock and half Peck’s Bad Boy. It doesn’t matter that the Pope’s Nephew and Assassin has done graduate-level work at the School of Bad Robert Downey, Jr. Impressions and Teeth Gnashing. It doesn’t matter that the writing is, well, has Miz Shoes mentioned that the writing is bad? She has? She hasn’t mentioned it enough. But it just doesn’t matter.
When’s the next episode?