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What We Sacrifice For Art

Friday, March 5th, 2010

Wednesday was Haircut Day.

Yes, all of the months of blood, sweat, and tears that I’ve been devoting to nurturing my shaggy, shoulder-length tresses have now been wiped out in one fell swoop by the need to look clipped and clean for tonight’s opening performance of Main Street Stage’s Second Annual Short Play Festival.

Well, the good news is that my dear departed mom can now stop spinning in her grave for a while. The sweet lady thought in all innocence, I suspect, that she would be able to rest easy with regard to my wayward hair choices once she had successfully pulled out her big guns (maternal tears) back in 1968 to overrule my desire to be the first senior at Birmingham-Southern College to attend his graduation ceremony wearing a Beatles haircut. But alas, her years of torture were only beginning.

Above and at right: Harold and Emma Tittleton ponder the inexplicable presence of a clown in their living room in Greg Freier’s play "We Appear to Have Company."

My cast-mates, captured in these evocative dress rehearsal photographs by Lisa Remillard, are Jackie DiGiorgis and Andrew Davis.

Ours is only one of five one-act plays that will be treading the boards this weekend and next at Main Street Stage’s intimate home base in North Adams. (Click here for more details.)

That’s March 5, 6, 12, and 13, to be precise. The shows start at 8 PM. Do drop by if you’re in the area.

Tuesday Was Amherst Day

That University of Massachusetts panel about comics that I’ve been telling you about unfolded enjoyably on March 2 as scheduled, I’m happy to report.

In my last blog entry I mistakenly predicted that N. C. Christopher Couch (the tiny figure at the podium in the photograph below) would be serving as the panel’s moderator, but after Chris introduced the panelists that role was actually played by James Hicks (the tiny figure on the right below), who in addition to fulfilling his professorial duties in the schools Comparative Literature Department serves as an editor of The Massachusetts Review, the UMass-based literary quarterly.
Besides having fun hanging out during the panel and afterwards with Gary Hallgren (the tiny figure in the middle above), who is a friend and colleague from way back, I had the pleasure of finally meeting and quickly becoming buddies with our co-panelist Sophia Wiedeman, writer and illustrator of The Deformitory. (Sophia is the tiny figure sitting between Gary and James above.) Sophia’s creativity has been appropriately recognized and rewarded by the Xeric Foundation, which provided funding for the dreamlike Deformitory, from which the panels below are excerpted. Sophia’s book is available in comics shops, sez Sophia.

Pursued by Squirrels

For some reason squirrels seem to have played a disproportionate role in my creative life (see the numerous "Squirly & Earl" cartoon panels I threw at readers of this blog for a while).

Fortunately I like the little critters. So does Lulu the Dalmatian, although I get the feeling her motives are less humane than mine.

Anyway, note the newly imagined squirrel below, which found its way into the logo I designed this week for an upcoming ecology-themed Children’s Fair at the First Congregational Church in Williamstown.

Me in Publishers Weekly

North Adams-based comics reviewer John Seven recently interviewed me about the upcoming re-issue of Stuck Rubber Baby (expected this June). The resulting Q&A was published this week in the online branch of Publishers Weekly.
Hey, here’s stuff of mine that you can buy!
Click a cover below to learn about my latest books.
…and click here to visit my
Cruse Goodies merchandise shop
"<p>Flash

A Note to Those Who Enjoy This Blog: Given how irregularly I manage to add entries, you may wish to send me email asking to subscribe to my "Blog Alert" list. That way you’ll be among the first to get notified by email whenever I add a new blog post.

Posted in A Tip o' the Hat, Family & Friends, Home Life, Life & Art, Me, Me, Me!, Yesterday & Today | 4 Comments »

Here We Go Again!

Saturday, December 12th, 2009
Above: A pre-winter preview of coming attractions. Sigh.

My Dr. Seuss Letters of Note

An unexpected side benefit arising from the posting in my last blog entry of more correspondence between the late, great Theodor Seuss Geisel and myself was the discovery of a great blog called Letters of Note, whose editor, Shaun Usher, wrote from his web perch in the UK to ask if he could reproduce the letters that Dr. Seuss sent to me in his December 4 installment.

Regular readers of this blog have already had a look at my treasured Dr. Seuss letters. But those of you who wander further afield in Usher’s blog will most likely find it as dangerously addictive as I have, what with its scanned letter composed by the 1923 version of Walt Disney, a disturbing eight-page-long combination j’accuse and cri de coeur from the distressed father of Brian Wilson to his Beach Boy son, and at least two letters from J. D. Salinger (one concerning the inappropriateness of Catcher in the Rye for film; the other a courteously withering response to a young aspiring writer with a typewriter-ribbon deficiency).

Detroit’s Linocut Whiz

"Those silly boys, breaking their backs shoveling snow out there!" thinks Lulu. "Don’t they know that if they just sit by the window looking beautiful like I’m doing, somebody will go outside and do it for them?"

Last week Eddie and I received this year’s round of holiday cards from my pal from Detroit John Benson, whose beautifully crafted linoleum-cut prints have been adding to the atmospheric majesty of Michigan’s Renaissance Festivals for years and whose artistic contributions to AIDS-related causes have saluted AIDS activists and commemorated those lost to the disease since the epidemic’s early days. As the link above indicates, John’s cards can also be found among the many gems offered by the Biddle Gallery in Wyandotte, Michigan.

I’ve been intending to call attention to John’s work in this blog for quite a while, and since he’s on my mind as I write this, let’s make it today!

In keeping with sensibilities John has borrowed from centuries past, he doesn’t maintain his own independent web site, which makes me feel a little guilty about tantalizing you with tidbits of his work here without being able to link you to a lavish presentation of his prints. But if you want to learn more about the range of his artistry, just email him directly and express your interest.

Below:
Much as I appreciate the cathedral-ready symmetry of many of John’s prints and cards, the perverse side of me loves it when he gets grisly!

At left:
Just for fun, John and I collaborated in 1993 on this limited edition print depicting two angels in a state of, uh, sublime arousal.

Posted in A Tip o' the Hat, Family & Friends, Home Life, Life & Art, Me, Me, Me!, Shop Talk, Yesterday & Today | 3 Comments »

Camper Comes Calling

Thursday, November 19th, 2009
First up was Robert Kirby, creator of the Curbside comic strip series, who included my newest book From Headrack to Claude, along with some generous comments about it, in the rundown of graphic novels to look out for that heads his October 26 blog entry.

Then on Monday I found email in my inbox from James Vance, author (with illustrator Dan Burr) of the award-winning graphic novel Kings In Disguise. James was giving me a heads up about his blog’s November 16 post, in which he comments generously about next year’s re-issue of Stuck Rubber Baby and reminisces about the link we share to my 1989 short play About Scott. The play, a theatrical tribute to Broadway dresser Scott Wiscamb, who was the first person that Eddie and I knew personally to be struck down by the epidemic, was written at the request of my college mate Lyn Spotswood, who wanted something to direct in Birmingham for that year’s International AIDS Day. Soon thereafter James wrote and asked if he could perform, for an AIDS benefit in Tulsa, OK, a stripped-down, one-man version of what in Lyn’s and my hands had been a multi-media, puppetry-enhanced pageant of sorts with masks and projected images of ACT-UP demonstrations interspersed with pop recordings and music by a live jazz ensemble.

What’s impressive was how moving James’ shorter and far simpler rendition of About Scott turned out to be. I know. James sent me a videotape.

A handsome trade paperback reprint of James and Dan’s graphic novel, which first saw print during the late-1980s under the auspices of Kitchen Sink Press, has recently been published by W. W. Norton, by the way, and a sequel by the same team — also from Norton — is now on the horizon.

From My Photo Archives It Came:
Could I Really Have Ever Looked Like This??

Eddie and I finally succeeded in luring cartoonist Jennifer Camper up to North Adams for a visit earlier this week. Jennifer was one of the earliest of the Gay Comix contributors, which means we’ve known each other and been buddies for something like 28 years now.

The weird thing is that Jen was already a grown up when we first met for lunch at a Seventh Avenue diner in New York — and yet today she still looks like she’s maybe twenty-two. How is this possible?

Jen’s longtime sweetie Emmalee couldn’t make the trip so she brought along another young cartoonist, Carlo Quispe (see below, with me and one of his drawings). If you’d like to see the online video of Laura Flanders‘ GritTV interview with both Jen and Carlo (as well as San Francisco’s Erika Lopez), click here.

Eddie and I enjoyed taking Jen and Carlo around to see some of the cool attractions North Adams has to offer (besides Mass MoCA, I mean), including the top of Mount Greylock, the highest point in Massachusetts, and the fascinating collection of barber chairs (plus a dentist’s chair) that has begun drawing tourists to the waiting room at T&M Auto on Curran Highway.

Above: Jen, Carlo, and Eddie pause to seek shelter from Greylock’s mountaintop chill. Below: Afterwards, at T&M Auto…

What fun we have in the Berkshires!

Now For Some Thank-Yous

I’ve been honored of late by two friends and fellow comics creators who’ve seen fit to include laudatory mentions of me and my work in their respective blogs.

See Eddie play dentist.

…See Howie play barber.

Above: a photo of my mom and me taken on March 18, 1966, the day before I boarded a plane for a six-week visit to San Francisco.

As you can see, my penchant for plaids, about which I have been teased by no less a personage than Alison Bechdel, had already been established by then and has continued uninterruptedly to this day but for a temporary side trip into paisleys during the late-’60s and half of the 1970s.

Posted in A Tip o' the Hat, Books in my Bookcase, Family & Friends, Home Life, Life & Art, Yesterday & Today | 2 Comments »

I’m Resurfacing

Friday, July 17th, 2009
The exhibition of commercial artifacts bearing Whitman’s image, called Walt Whitman: The Commercialization of an American Original, is curated by a longtime collector of Whitman memorabilia named Ed Centeno, whom I met in 2005 when he commissioned a drawing from me showing Whitman’s spirit hovering over my characters Wendel and Ollie as they read the poet’s classic Leaves of Grass and snuggle. (Scroll down this blog post to see the drawing I’m referring to.

The exhibit opened on May 24, which means I’m being decidedly less than prompt in telling you about it. But if there’s a chance you’ll be touring Long Island soon, you’ll be relieved to know that Ed’s fascinating artifacts (and my own original artwork) will continue to be on display until August 31.

At left:
Ed Centeno shares his knowledge about Whitman with exhibition attendees.

Below:
Ed poses with my framed original.

Below:
The drawing I did for Ed four years ago showing Wendel and Ollie communing with the poet.

A side benefit of participating in my college alma mater’s Alumni Art Exhibition earlier this summer was being made aware of the fascinating, endlessly inventive, and humor-filled artwork of fellow Birmingham-Southern grad Don Stewart, who contacted me to suggest I send a comics page south to be part of the group show.

It wasn’t exactly my intention to bail out of blogging for an entire month, but that seems to be what I’ve done. There’s something about applying the final touches to big projects that totally consumes your attention and often leaves no room at all in your head even for putting together the simplest kinds of sentences describing those activities for loyal blog-readers to peruse.

In this case I’ve been polishing up graphics, finalizing page layouts, and completing supplementary text for a new book collection of old gay-themed comic strips that should become available for online purchasing within the next week or three, depending on how swiftly the wheels turn at Lulu.com (the same print-on-demand self-publishing site that I used last year to put out Felix’s Friends), and how briskly my application for ISBN registration gets processed.

The new book will be called From Headrack to Claude, and since I’m telling you this in a relatively G-rated blog environment I must add this note of caution for the curious: many of the comics compiled in this book were originally drawn for adults-only underground comic book and are definitely not recommended for the faint of heart. Or for children.

Anyone who wants to be among the first to know when From Headrack to Claude becomes available can pay regular visits to the book’s Facebook page. (You don’t have to be a Facebook member to view this page, but Facebook members who join the group will receive an actual notification when the book comes out.)

Now to catch up on some of the things that, if the book hadn’t kept me so distracted, I would have blogged about during the last month.

Walt Whitman: The Poet as a Commercial Icon

In times past, the face of 19th Century Poet Walt Whitman may have appeared on as many commercial product packages as Betty Crocker. He was just so darned folksy-looking and confidence-inspiring that you couldn’t help wanting to eat any beans that came in a can with his face on the label!

The box of tea you see below wasn’t one of those products, of course. It’s just a fictional Whitman product that I was asked to invent to serve as a promotional graphic for an exhibition of bona fide Whitman products now on display at the Walt Whitman Birthplace State Historic Site in West Hills, NY.

Browsing through Don’s image-rich web site will give you a taste of what this guy’s fertile imagination has to offer, but to fully grasp the details or his visual wit you may want to track down his beautifully produced hardcover book (see above). It’s the newest addition to my own library and I’m happy to report that there’s a gem on every page.

Don was a surgeon by profession, incidentally, before he strayed from the medical fold and turned to producing art full time. Below is his visual reflection on the life he left behind.

Believe it or not, Don executes his subtly rendered drawings not with high-end graphic tools but with lowly ballpoint pens! I’m in awe! Who knew so much graphic potential resides in that Bic you do your doodles with while some customer service number has you on hold?

Let’s Get Candid

Our neighbor Zach Noel whipped out his cell phone and snapped this shot of me and Eddie as we left for the airport to fly to Portland in May. Taking photos with telephones! Making fine art with ballpoint pens! What is this modern age coming to?

As you can see, my Ben Franklin hairstyle is coming along well. If I persevere in nurturing this Founding-Father affect, my portrait may well soon qualify for display on U.S. paper currency of some obscure and rarely used denomination.

Zach and his girlfriend Lydia Reyburn graciously moved into our house temporarily to provide on site dog-sitting services while we were traveling, thus sparing Lulu the canine disorientation that goes with extended stays in a kennel.

And while I’ve got your attention, I should let you local readers of my blog know that artwork by Zach will be part of an upcoming group show at Elf Parlor (303 Ashlund Street). The opening reception for the show will be next Tuesday, July 21, from 8-10 PM.

Below left: Zach’s telephone captures Lulu during an uncharacteristically (when she has a camera pointed at her) tranquil moment. Below right: Neighbor dog Picalilly pays Lulu a courtesy call.

Posted in A Tip o' the Hat, Books in my Bookcase, Family & Friends, Home Life, Life & Art, Me, Me, Me! | 3 Comments »

Off To The West Coast

Monday, May 11th, 2009
Well, I was going to blog at more length today, but time has run out and Eddie and I have to pack for our trip to Portland and San Francisco that begins tomorrow.

I’ll report back as soon as I after May 20, when we’ll return to the Berkshires and resume our New England existence. Hang loose!

Posted in Home Life, Life & Art | 3 Comments »

Weekend Report

Friday, January 23rd, 2009
Work by six student artists from high schools in the area went up on the walls of the Storefront Artist Project gallery in Pittsfield last Saturday.

One of the students in question is Zoe Villane, a talented young woman whose budding career path might never have intersected with mine had I not agreed to be her mentor for this exhibition, which not coincidentally is named the "Mentor Exhibition."

As the show’s title suggests, each of the student artists in the show was provided with (hopefully helpful) guidance from a Berkshire County professional artist. Since Zoe was in the mood to create a series of illustrative panels that told a dreamlike story in a kinda sorta comic-booky way, somebody thought that I might have something to offer Zoe. I’m not totally sure she wouldn’t have done just as well without my involvement, but getting to know her and to watch her creativity bubble at close range was highly rewarding.

Above: Zoe and me obscuring your view of two of her most intriguing panels. Below: An unobscured view of one of them.

Other students with work in the show, which will remain on view at 124 Fenn Street in Pittsfield until February 1st, are Danae Lagoy, Stephanie VanBramer, Dom Newell, Nicholas Dixon and Jaime Keefner. The gallery is open on Saturdays and Sundays from noon until 5 PM, with a couple of weekday opportunities to see the show — Wednesday, Jan. 28, and Friday, January 30, same times as above — added on for good measure.

Also Last Weekend…

Getting to briefly see my old college pal Bo Walker at the Birmingham Southern alumni reunion in November only whetted both of our appetites for more visiting. So Bo and his wife, graphic designer Lynn Cole, took advantage of the three-day Martin Luther Day weekend to head northward from their Brooklyn digs to North Adams with their bright-eyed five-year-old Olivia in tow.

2. Their enthusiasm for making recreational use of Apple Photo Booth’s special effects (see below) is likely to be unbounded.

A great time was had by all, and I learned two things about five-year-olds along the way:

1. The more snow the merriers, as far as they are concerned; and…

Posted in Family & Friends, Home Life, Life & Art | 2 Comments »

Don’t Dis Mother Nature

Wednesday, December 17th, 2008
When Eddie and I awoke last Friday and looked out the window, we thought, "What a dud of an ‘ice storm’ that was!" The temperature was mild; there was no ice to be seen; and the only sign of winteriness was a bit of powdery snow in the air.

Not what we had expected. My class at MCLA had been cancelled the night before because of threatening weather that we were told was bearing down on us. "So where was it?" we wondered come Friday morn. Snarky thoughts about our ever-unreliable Berkshire weather forecasters began coming to mind.

Shortly thereafter, of course, we learned that North Adams was an anomaly and that much of New England was being described in the national media as a disaster area. Eddie got a taste of the storm’s true aftermath first hand when an errand took him a few miles up Route 2 to our east, where he took the pictures you see here.

Above: Notice Lulu the dalmation in the lower right-hand corner, snapped by Eddie as she contemplated the fallen tree that made the driveway to our Florida Mountain friends’ home impassible without a very slippery hike uphill from car to porch.

As I write this some friends in nearby Savoy have just endured their fifth night with no heat or light in their house, which they were able to escape over the weekend only because of neighbors who arrived with saws to take apart the fallen tree that would have kept them total prisoners otherwise. The power company says they may have electricity back before the end of the week.

Party Photographer

Ice storm or no ice storm, our party celebrating the launch of the North County Perp’s second issue was held as planned on Friday night at MCLA Gallery 51. Like any respectable blogger I fully intended to document the doings extensively for you folks the way I did when the ‘zine’s first issue came out in 2007. To that end, I kept my trusty camera close at hand the whole time — and true to form, I had so much fun yakking with fellow partiers that I forgot to take a single photo. Sigh.

Above: Dramatic re-enactment of Howard forgetting to take photos of the Perp party.

On The Ball at Bowling Green State University

Fortunately, staff photographers at Bowling Green State University have their act more together than I do, and as a result I have some photos to enjoy of people pondering the pages of Stuck Rubber Baby that were included in Graphic Language: the Art of the ‘Comic’ Book, an exhibit that was assembled this fall in the Bryan Gallery at BGSU’s Fine Arts Center.

Pages of original comic art by Will Eisner, Scott McCloud, Jessica Abel, Frank Stack, James Sturm, and other internationally recognized creators were also part of the show, which was curated by gallery director Jacqueline S. Nathan.

Posted in A Tip o' the Hat, Home Life, Life & Art, Me, Me, Me! | 1 Comment »

Come To Think Of It, Happy Anniversary

Friday, July 25th, 2008




When Eddie and I woke up this morning, Eddie said, "Say, it’s our fourth wedding anniversary, isn’t it?"

"Oh, yeah, it sure is," I said, offering him a sleepy kiss. "Happy anniversary!"

And we proceeded with our morning.

I know that sounds pretty unromantic. Eddie and I do feel nice about being legally married in the first state where that has become possible. We should be able to be married. It’s an equal justice issue.

The fact is, though, that Eddie and I are very clear on when our real anniversary is, and it’s not July 25, no matter how heartfelt a ceremony of re-commitment we had before a gathering of our family and friends on that day four years ago. Like most long-term gay and lesbian couples who have exchanged marriage vows in Massachusetts, Canada, and now California since same-sex marriages became legal in those places, Eddie and I have a strong sense of dual anniversaries. And for us, the one to take special note of will come around next April 15, when we will have been together thirty years.

Such thoughts do send one spiraling back through time to the days when our relationship was new. So today I’ll share with you a photograph from Eddie’s and my first year, when we attended the very first national March of Washington for gay and lesbian rights.

It was exciting—but also a true test of endurance, as is suggested in a sketch I later drew based on that photo in which you can see what we were thinking when that photo was taken.

There have been three LGBT Marches on Washington since that first one in 1979, and the organizers learned an important lesson from that first one. That lesson was: if you’re going to hold a massive, all-day outdoor political demonstration, go for warm weather. And for God’s sake, don’t do it on a rainy, overcast day in October when frostbite begins competing with bladder overload for the attention of participants who would rather be thinking about loftier matters.

Such as what seemed an almost impossible dream in 1979: that someday the gays sloshing through the icy puddles on that field would no longer be frozen out of a major social institution that heterosexuals have been taking for granted for as long as anyone can remember.

 

 


Posted in Family & Friends, Home Life, Life & Art, Yesterday & Today | 2 Comments »

Quick Flash

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008




Bumping into Arizona author Steve Ringgenberg recently in deepest Facebookland after decades of zero contact with him took me back to 1984. That’s when Steve sat me down for the long interview that ultimately appeared in issue 111 (September 1986) of the Comics Journal.

Being a Flash Gordon fan, Steve invited me once our interview was finished to commit my personal take on the classic comic-strip space-opera hero to paper, which is how the spoof above (which ended up running in TCJ as part of my interview) came into being.

Bite-Sized Morsels

Eddie thinks I snore weirdly in a worrisome way, so I spent a night in Pittsfield this week getting checked out for sleep apnea. I won’t know what the story is for a while, since there are all kinds of charts and data to be analyzed, not to mention night-vision videos of me tossing back and forth with wires attached to various parts of my body like spaghetti that’s wrapped around the prongs of a fork. All in all, it’s not as bad a way as you might think to catch forty winks.

Besides that, I began applying myself seriously this week both to editing some submissions that have come in for issue #2 of the North County Perp and to chipping away at a comic strip of my own that I plan to include.
And to follow up on my mention a short time ago of the pen-and-ink portrait I did of DC Comics founder Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson: the BMA Audio CD for which that drawing is serving as cover art (a recording of the Major’s short story "The Road Without Turning") is now available for online purchase at the BMA Audio web site. And it’ll also be for sale at the upcoming Comic-Con International in San Diego, where you’ll be able to get it signed by the Major’s irrepressible grandaughter, my pal Nicky Heron Brown, herself.

 

 


Posted in Home Life, Life & Art, Me, Me, Me!, Pure Toontime | No Comments »

And Then I Twittered…

Monday, July 7th, 2008




I notice that two whole blogless weeks have passed in HowardCruseLand since my last post. This gap in updates on my life must surely have distressed you.

What can I say? Sometimes daily life is just too scattered to sum up easily. Still, rather than leave you any longer in the lurch, maybe I’ll take the Twitter approach today and feed you some undigested tidbits about my recent endeavors so you won’t lose faith that I’m still among the living.

Preparing for Spain

With a free trip to Spain comes great responsibility. Being a guest at the upcoming Vinetas Desde O Atlántico Comic Con in A Coruña this August means, in part, having forty examples of my comic strip art placed on display while the convention is underway, which means I’ve been (a) sifting through my numerous flat file drawers; (b) selecting which pieces from the last thirty years of my professional life will be exhibited; (c) preparing lists of said selected pieces for the insurers and descriptions of them for the printed catalog; and (d) getting ready to pack them all up to be shipped overseas. Meanwhile, Eddie and I have been corresponding with friends in Spain and southern France whom we hope to visit and working out which roads we’ll need to travel in order to do so.

Drawing

On my drawing table this week has been a pen-and-ink portrait of the legendary Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, founding father of DC Comics, that will be used as packaging art for an audio-book recording of one of the man’s short stories, which is being released on CD by BMA Audio in anticipation of an appearance by the Major’s granddaughter (and my longtime friend) Nicky Hearon at this summer’s Comic-Con International in San Diego.

More Exhibits on the Horizon

My artwork will be popping up in three different North Adams venues this fall, which means that selections have to be made and drawings have to be mounted for display. Members of the Fine and Performing Arts faculty at MCLA will be mounting a group show in September at Gallery 51 on Main Street (for that I think I’ll put the original artwork for Why Are we Losing The War on Art? on the walls); I’ll be mounting my own separate exhibit for this year’s North Adams Open Studios in October; and some yet-to-be-selected pieces of mine will be included in a month-long show called What’s So Funny, opening on September 5 at the Eclipse Mill Gallery under the curator-ship of Charles Giuliano of Berkshire Fine Arts. Like the exhibit in Spain, these involve preparations that don’t translate easily into interesting blog-prose. Hence my recent silence online.

Creating Comics

I’ve got new two comics stories germinating: one for the North County Perp and the other for, well, somewhere yet to be determined. What sort of stories? That kind of info I don’t blog about while the works are still percolating! Hence my additional silence.

Walk Hard

When the need for visual distraction has arisen during this blogless stretch, I’ve been able to contemplate the wanton destruction (at Eddie’s and my behest) of our front walkways, whose replacement has become unavoidable with the passing of years thanks to the cracks brought on by the mountain winters that have made our existing concrete walks ever more hazardous to life and limb.

Below: Ray Carpenter (right insert immediately below) and Joe Champney (back to camera in bottom picture) of Champney Masonry clear away concrete rubble and hoist attractive new bluestone panels up from street level for installation.

 


Posted in Home Life, Life & Art, Me, Me, Me! | 4 Comments »

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