Tag: reuse

Día de Muertos

¡Feliz Día de Muertos!

Happy Día de Muertos!

Saturday was All Hallows’ Eve, Sunday was All Saints’ Day, and today was All Souls’ Day. My family has a very strong connection to Mexico and Mexican celebrations and culture, so we always celebrate Día de Muertos. Last year, I even brought sugar calaveras to my French students to have them decorate the extra sugar skulls from an event my mother had led (and with which I had helped). Talk about mixing cultures, eh? Houston kind of already is a huge mix of cultures, and in various ways, so I grew up in a world of mixed culture, with my family embracing the people around us in life. In other words, mixing cultures is totally normal for me and to me. 😉

This year, I created a special project for myself. Mattel created a Día de Muertos Barbie both last year and this year, but sells the collectible doll for far more than I could afford to pay. (Though, to be fair, she is stunning. They both are.) I found myself wishing I could have just one of these Barbies, perhaps one day, and, as I was looking at photos of them, my brain somehow developed an idea.

You see, there have been several old Barbies – from my childhood – in a box in my mom’s laundry room for ages. They, for some unknown reason, are all naked, and they have always kind of reminded me of a graveyard of Barbies. Though, I’ve never used that word, graveyard, as I’ve always just thought of them as, “the poor, dead Barbies”. It seemed like an extremely low-risk situation, since, and I mentioned, the Barbies were already “dead” anyway. So, I went for it. And I had a student join in with me.

I brought a bag-o-Barbies (yes, all still naked) to her house, and we each selected a Barbie. We then painted their faces and bodies, over a few days’ time, to be the designs we each wanted. Afterward, I then shopped for some ribbon and tulle, picked up a few fallen fake flower bits at the store, and then sewed a couple dresses for the dolls.

I hadn’t played with Barbies for probably about two decades at this point, but I think this really was some of the best fun I have ever had with Barbies. 😀

Alas, here are the process and the final results of today. Enjoy!

And the dresses…!!!

Post-a-day 2020

Recycled(?) and Reused(?) Concerts

We went to a sort of concert tonight, where musicians composed and performed musical pieces on unsalvageable – truly – pianos (or, in one case, a big chunk of what used to be a piano).

I saw an article about it in the Houston Chronicle on Friday, and sent a photo of it to a friend, since the concert was free and she and I were planning on doing something together Sunday, but weren’t sure what exactly… and so, with little knowledge of what precisely was going to greet us with this performance – I mean, we did know the location and that the location, Super Happy Fun Land, was absolutely absurd in and of itself, so we had a big hint that the performance would be of the artistically absurd type, but we weren’t sure in what way or ways – we went. 🙂

By the end of it all, we had seen and heard from our recycled AMC theatre chairs the use of hammers, drum sticks, bass drum mallets, a wheel-y thing, a piano tuner, pliers, chain mail, and vibrators (yes, the sexual kind – three kinds of them, actually, one being bright, Pepto Bismol-y pink) on pianos as a means of making music, and we’d heard a bit of poetry with one of the pieces, too.

And (Oh, I guess this counts, too, as something used on a piano.) the third and final piece ended with the performer/composer shoving, with an almighty wrench, the upright piano backward onto the ground – complete with a humongous, resounding and somewhat shocking BOOM! – and then jumping up and down on the strings, smashing all that he could with his shoes, before completing with a satisfied, deep chuckle.

It was, indeed, a creatively absurd evening.

Post-a-day 2018