NEW YORK: KAATERSKILL FALLS

 July 25, 2021

We rented an Airbnb in Kingston, New York, for a couple of nights. It turned out to be a brand new house built specifically to be rented out. We could even smell the fresh paint. It was perfect for the four of us. 

Having an equipped kitchen was very important . . .

. . . as were the extensive woods and trails located behind the house, which produced, among other things, this:

MEXICO: COYOACAN, PART II--LA CASA AZUL

March 10, 2018

Finally it was time to go inside La Casa Azul.

I've always been intrigued by Frida Kahlo, but visiting her home in Coyoacán made me a little obsessed, which I have been ever since. 

Her life was crazy.  She was born in Coyoacán in 1907 to a German immigrant father and a mestiza, or mixed race, mother. She had polio at age six, which made one leg shorter than the other. A very intelligent young woman, she planned to attend medical school, but at age 18 she was in a bus accident in which a iron handrail went through her pelvis, fracturing her pelvic bone, puncturing her abdomen and uterus, breaking her spine in three places and her leg in eleven places, and crushing her right foot. She lived with significant pain for the rest of her life.

She met Diego Rivera, already a famous painter and 20 years her senior, in 1928. He had been married twice (and was still married). They were married in 1929. I don't get what was so appealing about him to her. Her parents, who didn't approve of him, called it "a marriage between an elephant and a dove."

Diego and Frida, 1933  (Photo from here)

They lived for a time in Cuernavaca, then they lived in various cities in the United States where Diego got commissions, including San Francisco, Detroit, and New York City. They built a house in 1934 in San Angel that was really two houses, his pink and white and hers blue, joined by a bridge. They lived there together until their divorce in 1939, at which point Frida moved back to her childhood home, La Casa Azul. She began to experience more and more success with her art, which was featured in major exhibitions in Mexico City, San Francisco, and New York City. She and Diego remarried in 1940. However, her poor health and escalating physical problems increasingly confined her to La Casa Azul.

By the mid-1940s she could not sit or stand for any length of time. She had a failed operation on her back in NYC in 1945, and further surgeries in Mexico City in 1950. Her right leg was amputated to the knee in 1953, and she became dependent on pain killers, even attempting an overdose when Diego had yet another affair. She died at age 47 in July 1954 of a pulmonary embolism. Her body lay in state under a Communist flag in the Palacio de Bellas Artes, and a few days later she was cremated as she had wished. Diego lived three more years.

Her art can be bizarre, and yet far more approachable for me than that of many others of her era. She spoke for feminism and social justice, and yet there was a deeply personal aspect of much of her work. There just isn't anyone like her--and I have to confess that I am part of the movement that has been called (and criticized extensively) "Fridamania."

In any case, La Casa Azul was opened as a museum just four years after her death; it is one of the most popular museums in Mexico City. It serves to preserve her personal possessions and to highlight the way she lived, as well as a kind of art museum.

I'll start with the art.

Frida started but never finished this Self-Portrait while she and Diego were living in Detroit in 1932.

WEST TEXAS: A SURPRISE DETOUR THROUGH ARIZONA AND NEW MEXICO

December 27, 2019

One of our sons was home for Christmas, and we thought it would be a good opportunity to have an adventure together. We wanted to go somewhere we hadn't been, but we didn't have a lot of time and it was winter, so our options were limited.  We chose the exciting destination of El Paso. One of my friends has a sister who has lived in El Paso for years, and when she heard we had chosen it as our destination, she was flabbergasted. "Why would you go to EL PASO, of all places?" she said. "There is nothing to do there."

Well, not to give away too much, but (post-trip) we would disagree.

However, on the first day of our adventure, we thought the trip might turn out to be a colossal failure. We had booked an early flight on Southwest Airlines from Ontario to El Paso with a one-hour layover in Phoenix, arriving in El Paso at 9:55 AM, which would give us almost a full day. At 3:15 AM when we were in the car on our way to the Ontario Airport, I got a text letting us know that the flight from Phoenix to El Paso had been cancelled because of a lightning storm in El Paso. Southwest would put us on on an 11:00 PM flight, but that would mean sitting around all day in the Phoenix airport and arriving very late at night in El Paso. We had a non-refundable hotel room 80 miles from El Paso in Alpine, Texas, and we would not get there until the wee hours of the morning.  We had activities  planned that clearly were not going to happen, including dinner at a restaurant in El Paso that Bob had his heart set on.

While waiting for our first fight, however, my crazy husband hatched a plot. We would give up the second leg of the flight, rent a care in Phoenix, and drive 430 miles through Arizona and New Mexico, reaching El Paso in time for our dinner reservation and with plenty of time to make it to our hotel in Alpine. We were able to reserve a car in Phoenix that we would drive to the El Paso Airport, drop it off, pick up the other rental we had scheduled there and eat at the restaurant where we had reservations, and then drive three more hours to Alpine.  Fun, fun, fun!

One of the benefits is that we would be able to stop for a meal along the way that would far surpass the airport food we would have been stuck with in Phoenix. We had a delicious breakfast at Five Points Market and Restaurant in Tucson.

We were hungry, as you might deduce from the FIVE entrees we ordered for the three of us.  The hot chocolate was amazing, just like everything else.