Works in Progress: Quilts, Books, and More

I am slowly finishing Row By Row kits and patterns which I obtained two summers ago. This kit featuring goldfish is so pretty, complete with crystal air bubbles. 

 The quilt was made with fusible applique and machine quilting.

I am also getting back to making blocks for my Great Gatsby quilt. Here is Jordan, Daisy's friend the tennis star. The design is based on a fashion illustration circa 1924.

I still have embroidery to do on this block showing Jay Gatsby and Nick Carraway. The design is based on a fashion illustration circa 1924.

I have started the Peter Pan Story Book Quilt blocks, designed by Marion Cheever Whiteside Newton. I found a copy of the pattern on Etsy.

 Tink needs hair still.

 One mermaid's tail still needs appliqueing.

On my reading list right now:

• Only Child is an e-galley from First to Read and concerns a family in crisis after a school shooting.
• I just completed The Winter Station, based on a real plague in 1910 Manchuria.
• Starlings is a book of short stories.
• Self-Portrait with Boy was given high praise from a Goodreads friend.
• As Bright as Heaven is historical fiction about the 1918 Spanish Influenza, set in Philadelphia.
• I finished The Immortalists, in which children who learn the day of their death must decide how to live their lives.
• Poetry for Kids Robert Frost is part of a series of books I have enjoyed reviewing.
• West is a novel that intrigued me when I saw it on Edelweiss, as did The Which Way Tree which I saw on NetGalley.

Not yet downloaded from NetGalley are First Ladies of the Republic by Jeanne Abrams, Gateway to the Moon by Mary Morris, and Lear by Harold Bloom.

I am still reading giveaway wins Debriefing by Susan Sontag and Winter by Karl Ove Knausggard.

W.W. Norton shipped me this slender book. I am saving it for when I have a full afternoon free to read it in one sitting.

 And also still to be read is this LibraryThing book.

We have new siding and gutters! We changed where the gutters were, added rain barrels, and put gutters on the garage.

When my husband saw this Gum Drop tree in a catalog he remembered how his grandmother always had one. So we bought one!

It was so cool to see this Tammis Keefe linen towel ad in a 1958 magazine! I purchased reproductions several years ago and use them in my decorating. You can see one under the Gum Drop tree above.

My hubby has been making cookies! I went on a butter run today. He is enjoying making bread and baking and cooking now the yard and garden work is over. That gives me more time for reading!

The 1958 magazine had some cute illustrations of Christmas shopping. Don't you love how the lady is shopping in heels?

She changed her scarf color and how is wearing boots with the kids. Balloons in winter--that is novel.

I don't have much Christmas shopping to do and the big gifts are taken care of. For our gift to ourselves we bought tickets to the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. We will take our son to two concerts at Orchestra Hall, and we bought tickets to the Neighborhood concert series.

What are you working on? How is your shopping and decorating going?

Hook's Tale: The Real Captain Hook, Demythologized?

I fell in love with Peter Pan as a girl watching the 1953 televised version starring Mary Martin as Peter Pan and Cyril Ritchard as Captain Hook. In Sixth Grade I found out that before the Broadway musical and the Disney cartoon, Peter Pan had been a book!

I read Peter and Wendy by J. M. Barrie and then set to read all of Barrie, including The Little White Bird and Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens.

I felt the book was very 'grown up' in its understanding. I loved how Wendy's heart cried, 'Woman, woman, let go of me," as she wished she could return to Neverland with Peter. I understood; I did not want to grow up and pitied her womanhood. And I loved Peter facing the rising water on Marooner's Rock, thinking "To die will be an awfully big adventure." What a paragon of bravery!

illustration from Peter and Wendy by J.M. Barrie

In Hook's Tale, author John Leonard Pielmeier views the wicked pirate character of Captain Hook as a legend and warped history. He offers instead James Cook, a teenager pressed into service. James has his father's treasure map and the ship's captain follows it to Neverland where they become trapped. Things turn ugly for James, but at the last minute, he is rescued by Peter, and he becomes Peter's first and best friend.

Tiger Lily tells James she knows he is new to Neverland, for "too many people here...forget that there is more to life than the Now." Peter and the bear wrestle and kill each other daily, only to be resurrected the next day. Their actions have no consequences. Peter hates change, so he is very able to forget the past.

There is a crocodile, but one named Daisy, and a pocket watch. James does lose his hand. We meet Starkey and Smee and the pirates. Tiger Lily and the mermaids appear, and James meets Wendy Darling. Tinker Bell is one of the last living fairies, and there is a cache of magic sand.



But this tale is very different from the one 'that over imaginative Scotsman' left us. James rescues a marooned sailor, Arthur Raleigh, whose identity will greatly impact his life.

James wants us to know his 'true' story, as opposed to the popular image of him set in literature and on the stage.

"Why, dear reader, do you always insist on believing that sad little Scotsman, who only heard the story third-hand, instead of believing one who lived it? "

Barrie's words, characters, and scenes crop up, but altered. "To die will be an awfully big adventure," James remarks, "was becoming something of an annoying cliche."

The story is told in the first person and has the feel of a 19th c tale. Readers who enjoy the fractured fairy tale versions of Once Upon A Time and Wicked will enjoy Hook's Tale.

"And for some inexplicable reason, possibly having to do with the unbearably pompous actor who first portrayed me professionally, I will always be depicted as bearing an unfortunate likeness to King Charles II."

Mary Martin as Peter Pan and
Cyril Ritchard as Capt. Hook

In the Acknowledgements, Pielmeier admits his lifelong love of Peter and J. M. Barrie. He believes that Peter is misunderstood: "He was not a boy who refused to grow up he was a boy who grew up too quickly."

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

John Pielmeier is a three-time Emmy- and Golden Globe-nominated playwright and screenwriter. His successful plays, television movies, and miniseries include Agnes of God, Gifted Hands, Choices of the Heart, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, and successful screen adaption of Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth. He has received the Humanitas Award (plus two nominations), five Writers’ Guild Award nominations, a Gemini nomination, an Edgar Award, the Camie Award, and a Christopher Award. He is married to writer Irene O’Garden and lives in upstate New York. Hook’s Tale is his first novel.

Hook's Tale, Being the Account of an Unjustly Villainized Pirate Written by Himself. By John Leonard Pielmeier
Simon & Schuster
Publication July 18, 2017
Hardcover $34.00
ISBN: 9781501161056

Woman, Woman Let Go Of Me; I Didn't Want To Grow Up Either.

Last night we watched the new NBC version of  Peter Pan. It was not the Mary Martin version I grew up with, or even the wonderful Cathy Rigby version we saw at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia many years ago. I couldn't pass up a chance to revisit James Barrie's tale of the boy who would not grow up.

The first broadcast of Peter Pan on television was in 1955 when I was a little tyke. I watched it then, and when it reaired in 1956 and 1960 I was glued to the TV screen once again. I always eagerly anticipated Peter Pan, along with televised showings of The Wizard Of Oz and  Gian Carlo Menotti's opera Amahl and The Night Visitors.

In Sixth Grade at Northwood Elementary School I found all the children's classics, including Peter Pan and Wendy and Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. I became a James Barrie fan.

What struck me reading Peter Pan at age 11 were the insights into the human experience. Peter is stranded on Marooner's Rock and the tide is rising and bravely faces death.

Peter was not quite like other boys; but he was afraid at last. A tremour ran through him, like a shudder passing over the sea; but on the sea one shudder follows another till there are hundreds of them, and Peter felt just the one. Next moment he was standing erect on the rock again, with that smile on his face and a drum beating within him. It was saying, "To die will be an awfully big adventure."

"To die will be an awfully big adventure." It set my attitude for life, that one line, that death is not something to fear. It is one more adventure, another part of life.

Peter is a child and yet a super-hero, a trickster, naive and boyish and yet a savvy and capable welder of a knife.

So, Pan," said Hook at last, "this is all your doing."
"Ay, James Hook," came the stern answer, "it is all my doing."
"Proud and insolent youth," said Hook, "prepare to meet thy doom."
"Dark and sinister man," Peter answered, "have at thee.

During the epic battle between Pan and Hook fifteen pirates perished.

"Seventeen," Slightly sang out; but he was not quite correct in his figures. Fifteen paid the penalty for their crimes that night; but two reached the shore: Starkey to be captured by the redskins, who made him nurse for all their papooses, a melancholy come-down for a pirate; and Smee, who henceforth wandered about the world in his spectacles, making a precarious living by saying he was the only man that Jas. Hook had feared.

Captain Hook I later learned was based on Charles II, with his swarthy good looks, black curled hair, and high 17th c style. Cyril Richard's Hook is my standard; he is large yet graceful, swarthy yet natty, evil without being terrifying.

It broke my heart was when Peter returns for Wendy to find her all grown up.

Then she turned up the light, and Peter saw. He gave a cry of pain; and when the tall beautiful creature stooped to lift him in her arms he drew back sharply.
"What is it?" he cried again.
She had to tell him.
"I am old, Peter. I am ever so much more than twenty. I grew up long ago."
"You promised not to!"
"I couldn't help it.

 I understood Wendy's aching for what she has lost.

It is scary to a child to think of being the adult, the one relied upon instead of being the one protected and cared for.

My Eighth Grade teacher Mrs. Hayden said that adults lost their imagination. That terrified me! My child world was make believe. My Midge doll was a boy from Mars. Nancy Ensminger and I pretended we were Scottish orphans riding ponies across the moors. Janet Leary and I were Gene Autry and Roy Rogers. Mike Randall and I talked about outer space and believed in alien life. In Sixth Grade I invented Homer the Ghost, named for Homer Price of Robert McCloskey's books. Homer was my friend as I navigated a new social world after moving.

I wanted to be a writer. Nothing could be worse than losing one's imagination! If that was adulthood, I wanted to be counted out.

Fourteen came, and high school. I let go and grew up. I listened to rock and roll instead of musicals, put on lipstick, and went through the teenage angst.

But I never left Peter Pan behind.