Tag: cayce festival for the arts

  • Cayce Festival of the Arts


    I usually reserve pictures for the Old Woman Slow’s Photos, but I thought I should share these with all of you who wished me well for the Cayce Festival of the Arts today…my good friend Donna Magrath of Evergreen Mosaics finagled around and arranged for her friends (including me) to be in the booths next to her. Good job, Donna.

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    Edie and Jenn and a recruit from another booth during set-up

    (while Edie’s partner Dawn supervised)

    Donna insisted we all be there at 7:15 a.m. which is very early for me to be anywhere other than bed these days. Oh, well. It was only one day. Anything for the arts.

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    Donuts and coffee my first stop at the Festival

    The mini-donuts were fried and a smaller version of Elephant Ears at the State Fair.  Thank goodness I only got a small order. Delicious – but somewhat of a shock to the digestive system at 8 a.m.

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    Mosaic Artist Donna Magrath setting up her booth?

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    Wonderful Booth Neighbors Edie and Dawn – multi-talented – super nice, too

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    Donna and her partner Jenn Kirby put finishing touches on their booth

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    My booth much easier to set up

    Thanks to my good friend Brenda Jo Bowen for loaning me her tent which would have been perfect if not for the 100 mph winds that blew ALL DAY LONG.  I had to hold my posters or try to catch them as they flew toward State Street and the Donut truck. After several hours of this, my friend Kati VanAernum dropped by for a visit and suggested the tent had to go before it took off like a kite and landed on an innocent bystander. I had visions of lawsuits swimming in my head so a man I didn’t know who happened to be chatting with me and  who turned out to be a sweet young Republican running for office in Lexington County helped Kati take down the tent while I watched.  This was a day of high drama.

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    Over 90 vendors participated in the Festival this year

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     State Street Baptist Church towered over us in the background

    Interesting tidbit about this church – I was the Minister of Music and Youth there in the mid 1970s – forty years ago…a lifetime ago…for three years. I never could have imagined at the time that I would be sitting in a booth in 2016 selling my books right down the street from where I led the choir for three worship services every Sunday. Unbelievable. Inconceivable.

    Thanks so much to the friends who came out to see me and especially to my friends Dawn and Karen who actually bought one of the two books I sold! The other one was bought by a woman from El Paso, Texas, who had come to South Carolina to visit her daughter who had just had a baby. I think she bought a copy of my first book Deep in the Heart because it has a picture of the state of Texas in the background on the cover.

    Thanks to Teresa for driving me to buy the four 40-lb bags of sand last night to hold down the tent today and for getting up at the crack of dawn to take me to Cayce to set up the booth and for spending two hours with me during the day to see that I had a lunch break and for coming back at 5:00 p.m. to break down the booth and carrying those same four 40-lb bags of sand back to the car along with all the books I didn’t sell and for taking care of Spike at the house when she wasn’t seeing about me or going to yard sales. Whew. No wonder she’s sound asleep tonight.

    Which is where I probably should be, too. I had a great adventure, met lots of really neat people and shocked a few others who didn’t like the “L-word” on a book cover; but then you can’t please everyone all the time.  All in all, a memory maker of a day, as Granny Selma used to say, and I wouldn’t trade for it.

  • Vanity Fair and the National Enquirer


    I picked up a copy of the April issue of Vanity Fair today while I was waiting in line to be checked out at the grocery store. The cover is this fabulous picture of Meryl Streep, and it hooked me because I love Meryl Streep. The title of the article suggested the possibility of new material about her early career.  It’s not unusual for me to pick up a magazine while I’m in line – the grocery stores make it so convenient – but I usually read the National Enquirer since their huge headlines are sensational and the pictures on the cover are incredibly tragic.  Sensational. Tragic. The mind races.

    I never buy a magazine because (a) they are too expensive and (b) the line is always very long when I wheel my cart in behind several people who are also waiting and I have plenty of time to read anything that piques my interest. Even if I choose the line that’s the shortest, it will invariably be the line that takes the longest amount of time. I don’t mind, though. It’s such a wonderful opportunity to catch up on current events both real and pretend. AOL and Al Jazeera notwithstanding, sometimes finding out that Princess Kate is about to have twins when even Prince William doesn’t know makes the National Enquirer fascinating.

    Of course, today was the day when my line moved as fast as a speeding bullet and I had no chance to even find the inside article on Meryl Streep in Vanity Fair – much less read it. As a result, I paid the $4.99 necessary to actually purchase the magazine and bring it home. I was in a fine mood thinking about everything I would find out about Meryl as soon as I unloaded the grocery bags from the car.

    On the way out of the store, I had a surreal conversation with an 83-year-old African American man who was ahead of me in line at the customer service area where he was buying a lottery ticket, and I was waiting to buy mine.  I believe I have a tattoo on my forehead that reads Tell Me the Most Intimate Details of Your Life in a Condensed Version because invariably people I meet in random everyday situations tell me much more information than I need to know. Today was no exception. Our conversation was brief, but I do hope that his vision of a world that Makes America Great Again is a bet with very long odds.

    The good news is that the article on Meryl Streep was everything I’d hoped for and  definitely worth $4.99 – but far less revealing than the tabloid tales with the tragic pictures. Meryl’s pictures were incredible and brought back a flood of great movie moments from her early days in tinsel town. Hooray for Hollywood.

    Tomorrow (Saturday the 9th.) is a busy day – I will have a booth at the Cayce Festival for the Arts from 9:00 to 5:00  and  would love for any readers in the Columbia area to stop by. I will be wearing my Tell Me the Most Intimate Details of Your Life tattoo on my forehead and you don’t even have to condense it. I promise.

    See you there!