Our Paris Halloween disguise 🥸 of a few years ago (with Paris Window above). Garden of Hotel Des Grande Ecoles, Paris 5th.

And the Paris Window from the other side.

Paris Windows is a series designed to divert us in trying times. Click to see more Paris Windows.

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No doubt about it, I’ve had a FANTASTIC summer as regards my “creative” endeavors. Gratifying, and at the same time, somewhat flabbergasting.

I had TWO pieces of writing published in places other than my Substack: 1. “My Trick List,” which first appeared in the online HERE’S MY STORY feature of G&LR: Gay and Lesbian Review, now included in the print anthology Here’s My Story: Personal Essays From the Gay & Lesbian Review (G&LR Books, 2026); and 2. “A Beautiful Saturday for Cruising Euclid Avenue,” in Superpresent (Summer, 2026, pp 15-16). And there has been a nice increase in readership of my Substack, Recollections, Reflections, Fantasies, Fictions.

Since I’ve thought of myself as a writer for 60 years, this has been very satisfying – but it’s not the flabbergasting part.

The flabbergast came with my needlepoints. I’ve needlepointed for 60 years too, but never thought much about it as a “serious” pursuit, one that might be part of what defines me, certainly not as an art. And yet this summer, three group ART exhibitions included my needlepoints, two by invitation and one a juried show selected by a curator of national reputation.

First, artist friends, Nick Vaughan & Jake Margolin borrowed a piece on a Houston art history theme, for the Rendezvous Center For Art display in the Houston Pride Festival History Tent. Then two pieces were selected for the Houston area BIGSHOW at Lawndale Art Center. And finally – icing on a most delicious cake – Foltz Fine Art borrowed six pieces for their summer HOMEGOODS exhibition.

All very wonderful, but, when the Foltz show closed, all over, I figured. My 15 minutes of fame, or at least moderate notoriety, as predicted for everyone eventually, by Andy Warhol, now finished, over, done. Fine. It was fun while it lasted, and I’m grateful for it.

But wait.

In what is an amazing turn, it now looks as though I may get a 16^th minute. Recently I’ve been asked by Daniel Santos to lend needlepoint pieces to his Deli Radio (Houston Rendition) group installation, slated for the Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, during winter, 2027. And, undoubtedly most mind-blowing of all, Alton DuLaney, Curator of Public Art for Houston Airports, has invited me to be an AIR: Artist in Residence, as part of the Houston Art in Airports Program, designated the best such program in the WORLD for five years running!

If all goes according to plan, I’ll be stitching needlepoints for 10 hours a week at Houston Intercontinental Airport (IAH), January thru March, 2027, for the diversion of travelers going through, and to give some attention to the diverse, dynamic Houston arts scene. So, AMAZING, almost 80 and an ARTIST at last. Better late than never, as they say – though this has waited until almost NEVER to come my way.

My husband Rick has suggested that I might be getting the big head. I’m fighting that, but, hey, I’m human, and NOT a candidate for sainthood, so I admit that he may be right.

A concerned reader has delicately suggested that it might not last forever. I acknowledge that. No, not forever, maybe not even for very long, if for no other reason than that I’m pushing 80. At 80, nothing will be lasting long.

Pushing 80, which is part of the amazement. Happening to (for) someone who is a whisper away from becoming one of the OLD old. AT least there likely won’t be time for the NEW to wear off.

Another thing I’ll admit: I’m feeling a little guilty. This good thing is happening for me, who has not done the work to deserve it. No training in ART; no career devotion to ART; and yet tagged by some with the honorific (even sort of beginning to be embraced by me), ARTIST. So sometimes I’m feeling a little guilty, but not guilty enough to say, “No thanks, invite someone else who is more deserving.” (I’ve already admitted that I’m human.)

So if all does work out, I will be stitching at IAH.

Always a writer at heart, however, I plan to write about the experience for Substack. I’m thinking of calling my series “Terminal Musings.” Though for someone pushing 80, that may be a little too grim. Some have already said that I write about death too much (I hear you, Husband). So perhaps I’ll search for a different title for the series.

No matter what I call it, I hope you’ll be reading along with me. And if you happen to be at IAH this winter, I hope you’ll come by my “studio” for a visit. I’ll be sitting there 10 hours a week, stitch, stitch, stitching. I’ll probably be longing for some diversion myself.

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Mrs. Cherry’s window in the 5th, October 1925. After a summer in Brittany, Cherry and her traveling companion, Clemie Tan, found their home in Paris for the season - and Cherry sent a postcard home so the folks in Houston could know where she’d landed.

The building is still there, but is now so different.

Paris Windows is a series designed to divert us in trying times. Click to see more Paris Windows.

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OMG, what those ladies were getting up to. Shocking! The women who were members of the Houston Artists Gallery in the early 1930s may have looked like staid matrons to the unknowing, but when they got into the studio and gallery all H*** broke loose! The brushes came out, the clothes came off, and they were painting nudes like decadent Frenchmen.

Today we’re looking at some of those nudes by some of the ladies of HAG (that’s Houston Artists Gallery) from 1931 or so: two paintings by Beulah Schiller Ayars, and a drawing by Emma Richardson Cherry, dated June 29, 1931, and titled “Beaconsfield Sketch” – as in the Beaconsfield Apartments, location of the Houston Artists Gallery, an artist-run cooperative space, housed in two basement rooms of the Beaconsfield through the early 1930s.

Even more shocking than the works themselves, the model for Mrs. Cherry’s drawing and the Ayars nude-from-the-back seems to be one of their own members, Myrtle Stedman, shown in the photo here, at middle.

The other Ayars nude is titled “She Is I”. Could this be Beulah herself? Shocking, Shocking, Shocking!

And you may not believe this, but the Ladies of HAG weren’t the only Houston artists taking part in this scandalous “life” drawing from the nude model. Not even the first.

An article in the Houston Gargoyle, dated January 29, 1929, took readers on a tongue-in-cheek tour of Houston Life Classes. At that time there were three (the ladies of HAG, a couple of years later, made four): The Museum School, The Sketch Club that met in the Outdoor Advertising Company building downtown, and Rice Institute (now Rice University). All three had both male and female models in the altogether (except at Rice, where there had to be at least a wisp of something covering something), and were open to both male and female artists (except at Rice, where the oh-so-innocent girls could only draw from plaster casts).

This in a city where only a couple of decades earlier the school board had rejected a plaster cast of the Venus de Milo as too provocative to be seen by school children in the city high school. You can still see Venus today in the Julia Ideson Building of Houston Public Library. IF YOU DARE.

PS: For those who don’t already know, back in the 1920s and 30s the smart set in New York had Vanity Fair to follow its comings and goings, and to tell it what was au courant. Not to be outdone, Houston had the Gargoyle, published from 1928 to 1932. With such publications the art is as important as the writing, and for its art director the Gargoyle chose the Mexican artist, Crescenciano Garza Rivera (1895-1958). Originally from Monterrey, he came to Houston by way of Madrid, Paris, Los Angeles and San Antonio; and he returned to Monterrey in the late 30s, where he spent the remainder of his life. He’s one of the few (or should I say just about the only) known artists of Hispanic heritage in Houston in the period. He is the artist who made the drawing at the top, and the issue cover above. Since his art was some of the most visible of any made by a Houston artist at the time – on every news stand every month for years – his distinctive Mexican-infused aesthetic undoubtedly had a huge impact by educating the way Houstonians were able to see. I’m pretty sure, based on the look of her own later work, that the young Dorothy Hood saw a lot of his work. Scans of many issues of the Gargoyle are available via the Houston Public Library Digital Archive. Have a look; it’s a hoot - and a wealth of information about our city in those years.

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Behind that window I had my first Paris café, in 1973! Rue Soufflot, Paris 5th.

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At the time, I hardly knew what “a Fuseli” was. Still, I sensed it must be important that he owned one, from the way he, and others, said the words.

“He has a Fuseli,” my friend said when he told me we’d been asked to dinner. Or rather, “to dine,” at the patrician residence on Maryland Avenue, in the silk stocking, white glove St. Louis Central West End – by then stockings with runs and gloves with sooty finger tips, but still pretending to the elegance of earlier times. A tone of matter-of-fact reverence tinged friend’s English accent as he said it.

“It’s my Fuseli,” our host said as he took us into his “sitting room” for cocktails. His tone failed to mask an obvious pride of ownership as he said it, with a grand gesture toward the piece, placed unmissably above the mantel in the room decorated in the elegant understatement that stated loudly, “social register old money lives (no, RESIDES) here – and always has.”

No one I’d known, or known of, in the West Texas of my childhood had “a Fuseli.” Or if they did, they didn’t say so – not from modesty, but from the almost certain knowledge that no one they might say it to would have a clue.

Certainly I didn’t have a clue, even though I’d decamped to St. Louis by then, and not just St. Louis, but the coolest neighborhood, the gay Central West End, where I hoped no one would fail to be fooled by my cool bravado as I worked to convince them, and myself, that I belonged.

When he glanced back at us to gauge the quality of our response – did we gaze enough in awe? did we bow to his superior place and taste? – my friend said, “Splendid,” and I nodded, and our host arched an eyebrow, smiled, and ushered us to the dining table.

He was the scion of a local dynasty who boasted of a famous personage in the 19^th Century segment of the family tree. A personage who some said had perpetrated unconscionable atrocities against “those people” of various hues and ethnicities – deeds not boasted of, or acknowledged even, in those days by our host, or most others. I learned this decades later when I Googled host, and found his obituary, and articles about the infamous ancestor. The obituary didn’t mention the atrocities either, but about my long ago host it did include the phrase, “last of the line.” As I read it, I thought, “No surprise there.” (No mention of Fuseli.)

As the evening proceeded, with clever bon mots and references that eluded me, lines by another St. Louisan came to mind, though somewhat altered:

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights of dinner parties ...
To lead you to an overwhelming question ...

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room where gay boys come and go
Talking of … FUSELI?!

That was the evening of the first dinner.

Only two of us, he and I, took our places for the second dinner. That evening, knowledge and appreciation of Fuseli, or lack of them, did not signify. Others of my attributes seemed to matter more that night.

Even bumpkin that I was, I was not a complete naïf. I knew, or thought I did, why I’d been invited there, alone. As he offered me his Roman torso fragment to gaze upon, in awe, and his Fuseli, for a second time, I knew (or thought I did) the part in mind for me in the queer Kabuki play on the boards that night. Or the bed. And I thought perhaps I’d go along and make the old fag’s evening – perhaps his month. Such is the conceit of youth, whether bumpkin or sophisticate.

I remember nothing about the dinner except dessert: a half grapefruit, topped with brown sugar, and popped under the broiler for a moment. Does anyone spoon sugar onto their grapefruit anymore? Everyone did in West Texas in my youth, so his dessert didn’t seem unusual, save for its subtle sophistication: brown sugar, and the broiler!

I don’t remember the other courses. They must have been delicious. Nor the dishes – oh dear, my faux pas, the CHINA! No doubt elegant. Nor the wine; I still drank alcohol back then. Some prestigious vintage maybe, to sniff and swirl and savor by candle light, from crystal goblets, tall and thin? Not likely, in retrospect, considering the guest list and agenda. There was no glittering conversation either – half at least my fault – no talking of Michelangelo, or even Fuseli.

Ah, yes, I remember all that … not at all.

What I do remember, aside from the grapefruit (and the Fuseli), is the distant expression on his face, especially as the evening wore on and he had more wine. And the sense I had, as he talked and sipped, that he did not talk to me, just as he did not look at me, but to some other man in some other time, long ago perhaps, but not forgotten. No, not a detail, nor a hope forgotten. He smiled a wistful smile as he seemed to be remembering someone in another place and time, that had nothing at all to do with me, or with that night.

Too young and self absorbed to understand it at the time, even then I knew it was one of the loneliest evenings I’d ever spent. By 10, he’d had enough to drink that he seemed almost to have forgotten my being there at all.

And so I left.

Graciously? I wonder. I’d had a bit to drink myself, and so I don’t remember that detail. He didn’t try to stop me. In fact, he may have stood and sauntered (or would it have been, by then, stumbled?) toward the door to make it easier for both of us.

There was no third dinner for me; his Fuseli and I never met again. I’ve wondered if he ever invited that man he really saw and talked with that evening – the one who really would have made the old fag’s night, perhaps have made his life. That is, if the man existed, then or ever, outside a wine bottle and a fantasy. I’ll never know. He too wasn’t mentioned in the obituary, in which, as I said, neither was Fuseli, who now must be hanging above someone else’s mantel. But then, so much of real importance is so often left out of obituaries. He won’t be mentioned in mine, for instance (it there even is one), even though he’s been with me almost all my life. (And like as not, neither will Fuseli.)

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Window on the sky, the glass house, Serre des forêts tropicales humides, Jardin Des Plantes, Paris 5th.

Paris Windows is a series designed to divert us in trying times. Click to see more Paris Windows.

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Note: I wrote this piece in an earlier time, when we were still adding to our many collections. Now that we’re at the stage of life in which we are DOWNSIZING (what a frightening word), we’re happy not to get the calls I missed so much back then. But I think it’s still a little amusing. Apologies to any dealer subscribers who may find it in any way hurtful. Be assured that it is not about YOU!

You know you've hit rock bottom when even your dealers stop calling.

Don't misunderstand. I'm not talking drug dealers here. I know, from watching crime shows on TV, that drug dealers don't call. They just sit tight and wait for the desperate to call THEM.

No, I'm talking ART DEALERS. Art dealers definitely DO call, or did once upon a time, and often. But now, me, no longer. I'm wondering if someone has spread the vicious rumor that my money is no longer green. Or that there's no longer any of it left, that they (that is, the dealers) already have it all. 

For the record: Dear Dealers, my money IS still green - and I DO still have a little of it – not nearly as much as would have been if you’d never called at all – but a little, that could be added to that lot you already have, if only you'd call now.

Could it be you thought I’d never find out about your infidelity – and after all my years of faithful buying? Or did you want me to? No! I can’t even grasp that possibility. You can be tempters. I learned that over many years. But cruel? No, surely not. Not MY dealers. Not YOU.

So why was I NOT offered that latest piece, that would have been so perfect for my walls? It would have filled one of the last gaps in my collection. Or maybe not “one of the last,” but for sure one of the remaining. And it would have perfectly filled that spot on the wall, which, you’re right, is not empty, but which has been filled for so many years by a piece (bought from one of you, I’ll note) holding the place in anticipation of this perfect one coming along. But now that it has come along, who got the call? Someone else, not ME!

For years it was: “I picked this just for you”; “I always call you first”; “No one else could appreciate it more.” And I believed you. But now what am I to think?

I guess I should have known you said that to all of us. I wasn’t born yesterday. Though where the charms of that “perfect painting” are concerned, I might as well have been. And you knew it.

I wish I knew how to quit you – but I don’t. We were so good together once upon a time, and surely could be good, together, again.

Now that I’ve seen the truth about our “special” relationship, will I ever be able to trust again? I doubt it. But maybe. Try me. Let’s see. Call. PLEASE CALL!

I’m floor-to-ceiling with paintings already, largely thanks to you all. Both a blessing and a curse, especially now that I’m getting old and have begun planning for the “home.”

I suppose it’s possible you think you’re doing it – calling someone else, not me –  for my own good, knowing how full my walls already are, and how perilous (and slow) the walk down, and especially UP, the stairs has become on ancient legs – what danger the paintings hang in, on their salon-stuffed walls, should I lose my footing, and fall into them. So perhaps you think you’re doing it for my own good, and for theirs.

Or did you spot that one amongst the many that I bought from someone else? My own collector/dealer infidelity. I knew I shouldn’t have as I did it. I knew it would come back to haunt me, haunt US. But don’t let that little slip destroy the brilliant thing we’ve had together for so long. It was only once (or maybe twice, or maybe …), forgotten as soon as consummation climaxed with the signing of the check. It didn’t mean anything. It was that well documented syndrome, CCC (Craven Collector Compulsion) careening uncontrolled. You knew from the beginning that I’m just a boy who can’t say NO to a pretty landscape.

Or can it be that, after all these years, you’ve grown tired of plucking (which rhymes with … ) me, and found someone else you prefer to pluck instead?

But that’s just bitterness and disappointment speaking. Don’t take offense. Don’t hold it against me. All will be forgiven, and my checkbook spread wide open for you, if you’ll only text or call. My number, in case you lost your contact list (yes, I’m sure that must be it), is – 1-800-BrokenHearted, ext. Disconsolate-that-we’ve-parted. Yes, yes, please DO call. We CAN be good again. I KNOW we can. Let’s TRY.

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Yes, it’s a stretch, but there is a WINDOW there, Cafe Monge, Paris 5th.

Paris Windows is a series designed to divert us in trying times. Click to see more Paris Windows.

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(This piece originally appeared a few years ago in the newsletter of CASETA: Center for the Advancement and Study of Early Texas Art, as an e-article, but it is no longer available. It is reprinted here because the events described, which took place when Mrs. Cherry was in Gloucester, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1920, marked a significant milestone in her development as an artist.)

From at least the time of her first known drawing, done in 1873 at age 14,^[1] straight through her life -- she was still painting and keeping up with modern trends in art at 93^[2] -- Emma Richardson Cherry (1859-1954) maintained a clear focus on the career in art she wished to pursue. Though she did follow the path of wife/mother/homemaker expected of women in her time and place, and though she felt, at times, that she had not fully succeeded in any of her roles as a result,^[3] by 1920, at age 61, she could already look back on a long and full career as a professional artist, art teacher and initiator of arts institutions. Even so, she was not ready simply to look back and to rest on her laurels.

Cherry lived most of her life in places that were literally frontiers when it came to art: Lincoln, NE, Kansas City, MO, Denver and, after 1896, Houston. To stay abreast of happenings in the greater art world she had either to travel, which she did often; to stay in touch with art colleagues around the world, which she did throughout her life; or to bring fragments of that greater world to her art frontiers, which she did everywhere she lived, through founding schools, clubs and museums, mounting exhibitions with borrowed works, and reading the world art press.

For Cherry on her frontier, staying abreast was work, but it was work well worth the effort. She always wanted to know what was happening -- what was new -- in art so that she could incorporate into her own art and teaching what she found interesting and useful in the new.

In an interview she gave to the Houston Chronicle in 1937, she said, “I learned to do academic, pretty things when I was young. As I became more mature, I wanted to make my work different. I wanted to inject modernism into it. I studied hard to acquire that modernism.”^[4]

In 1920, as part of her studying “hard to acquire that modernism,” Cherry enrolled in the Breckenridge School of Art, founded that year as a summer program in East Gloucester, MA, by Hugh Breckenridge,^[5] an artist himself and a teacher at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, in Philadelphia. She had encountered Breckenridge the summer before at the Academy’s summer institute in Chester Springs, PA.

Study with Breckenridge at Chester Springs, PA, inspired Cherry to experiment with both neo-impressionist brushwork and expressionist color in her work in the early 1920’s, as this comparison of paintings shows.

Though not so widely known today, in the earlier 20^th Century Breckenridge was a noted proponent in America of neo-impressionism and other modernist trends. Gloucester itself at the time was an art colony that drew many who would later be recognized as stars of American modernism: such artists as Marsden Hartley and Stuart Davis, both of whom Cherry met in Gloucester that summer. So it made perfect sense that she would seek out the Breckenridge School to continue her quest for Modernism in her art.

Here, Mrs. Cherry identifies herself, painting at the Breckenridge School, East Gloucester, MA, 1920 (from a later promotional brochure produced by the School)

These are two more of the beautiful paintings she did that summer.

As she told her daughter Dorothy^[6] in a letter home, she found in Gloucester what she’d hoped to find. One day in particular – Sunday, September 26, 1920 – was a “red letter day”, a day that warranted a whole letter all by itself …

“Tuesday 28^th [Sept. 28, 1920]

Dearest Dorothy,

I skipped your letter Sunday because I knew you were not reading letters in the hospital, and also because I had such a full day I could not find a minute.

I guess I told you of a man who writes modern poetry, a friend of the Pancoasts^[7]– Marsden Hartley. Well he also paints very modern pictures – like some of those things we saw at the autumn Salon in Paris.

I did some flowers a while ago – a bit in that direction and I like them better than the naturalistic ones – and I have tried to get some suggestions in the same way in some of my summer’s work. Mr. Breck rather encouraged it altho [sic] he was not exactly a help as he does not do those things himself. However he is most liberal and always willing you should try out things.

I have been satisfied to a certain extent with what he has given me but I felt too that I wanted more modern help. So the other day I asked Mr. Hartley if he would come & look at my summer’s work & see if he thought I had any inclinations that suggested I could break loose and really do modern stuff. (He had already told Mr. Pancoast that Miss Dercum^[8] & myself were the only ones in Breck’s class that showed thought in our work)

Well he came & was quite interested – said I had plenty of things good enough for my Baltimore show^[9] – and to go on with it by all means. Then I showed him my modern flower one & he was very enthusiastic – said “well, if you can draw like that you can go any length you wish.” You can imagine I was pretty happy.

I had on the table a thing I had just brought in & we talked about it & I asked him if he would let me pay him for a few crits & show me some things I did not know how to go at to express – said he would be glad to and therewith started in on my wet paint & I can tell you its far & away a mighty interesting thing he is doing, with my puddling around in it, pretending to help. I am so happy & enthusiastic over this chance it seems worth the whole summer. I wish I had had him all this month of Sept. but it never dawned upon me he would be willing and I was timid about speaking up.

That’s always my fault.”

This painting by Cherry, now lost, is likely the one on which Marsden Hartley painted.

Hartley’s Still Life ca1920 and Cherry’s [Flowers On a Table] ca1920’s? make an interesting comparison. Both are in stark contrast to her “naturalistic” (and probably earlier) flower paintings (below): Cape Jasmine In a Copper Cup and [Roses].

Cherry’s letter continues:

“Then Paul Cornoyer^[10] – one of the well known painters in N.Y. – was talking to Mr. Pancoast about how much he wanted to drop his old methods & get hold of modern color & Mr. P. told him he ought to talk to their friend Mrs. Cherry. It was while we were over on the beach the other night watching them make movies.^[11] So we talked & Sunday he came & was also enthusiastic – quite so – and before he got away Mr. & Mrs. Baker^[12] – Alice – Ruth & Murray Jones – (Alice’s husband -) & Alice’s little girl all came – in their grand car, and walked into my humble rooms. You can believe with my self added we were closely packed. Rooms are each about 14ft square! But they seemed to enjoy it all very much. We had a real jolly time & Mrs. B. seemed quite seriously inclined toward two of my best things. She has gone to N.Y. to put Ruth in school & I will be gone by the time she returns. But she said she would see them again when we get home.

This filled Sunday with the exception that I was invited to go see Eben Comins^[13] pictures by himself, in his own studio. He met me in the street carrying one away from the Hawthorne Inn where it had been shown a month,^[14] said he liked it so much & wanted me to send more work next summer if I came - & introduced himself. So then I asked the favor of coming to his studio & had a most delightful visit.

This has been a red letter day in a red letter summer. If only you had been with me I would have been so glad. The air here is delightful & its [sic] an interesting place – to me – to be.

I am going now to Mr. Hartley’s studio to see his last work – as he is packing this afternoon to go to N.Y. He says when I go there he will let me know his address & will himself take me around to see the modern things. That will be fine because I will meet the dealers & I hope some of the artists.

Think about coming on for November – to be under Dr. Christian. Then I will stay for the exhibitions – 4 in November -- & he will tell you just how you can live to avoid all this. I will deliver Mrs. Wallace’s picture when I get to Baltimore & then I will have enough money to help out. Come on to Lou’s[?] & we will go up to N.Y. together – live simply somewhere & you will get well. Lots of love to you all. Frances^[15] let me know you went to Los A.

Good bye

Mamma”

And so Mrs. Cherry’s red letter day came to a close. But her interest in modernism did not end when she left Gloucester. Over the next few years she made and exhibited several paintings that she considered modernist, sometimes including them in her exhibitions as a separate group that she titled “Modernist Group.” A few times she even exhibited the painting on which Hartley had worked, with the title Sequence In Form And Color.^[16]

Color Sequence (l), first exhibited at the Eighth Annual Exhibition of Society of Independent Arts, New York, 1924, and Reflected in a Mirror, 1922, (c) are two paintings that appeared in the “Modernist Group” in lists of Cherry’s paintings in the early 1920’s. La Madonna a la Spaghet, ca-early 1920’s, (l) is another example of her modernist work.

Ever the professional, Mrs. Cherry was “painting canvases to sell.” Selling was important to her for more than just validation; she used the proceeds from her sales to fund, at least in part, many of the things she most enjoyed – not the least, travel. Since the demand for modernist paintings in 1920’s Houston was small, she often found it necessary to disguise their modernist aspects in order to sell them.^[17]

But, as we shall see in part 2 of this article (“Mrs. Cherry’s Paris Spree” in the next issue of the CASETA Newsletter), her affair with modernism continued and she continued to explore aspects of modernism in her work through the rest of her life.

Cherry, Flying Prisms c1925.

^[1] The drawing is a pencil sketch titled “Sash Factory” with a note in Cherry’s hand that says “Drawn at Montgomery Factory/March 22^nd 1873”. The drawing is on the verso of a printed form for her father’s business: Office of P. & R. Richardson/Manufacturers And Dealers In/Sash, Doors, Blinds, Mouldings [sic], &c/Montgomery, Kane Co., Ill. Cherry Papers B10.

^[2] Gordon, Lila. “Houston Artist Is Still Painting at Age of 93,” Houston Chronicle Feb 28, 1952.

^[3] “I have made the mistake of not having a regular studio and of not shutting myself up in it and working – no matter what happened – But I tried to be a good and economical house keeper – and paint at odd moments and I failed in both – For you know the first is impossible for me – It’s a good thing your heart is not set on it for it’s such a joke!” ER Cherry to her husband DB Cherry, Aug 1^st [1910?]. Cherry Papers B1 F1.

^[4] Houston Press, April 16, 1937.

^[5] Hugh Breckenridge (1870-1937).

^[6] Dorothy Cherry Ennis Reid (1892-1970). Her second husband, Col. Walter H. Reid (c1891-c1958/59) commanded Ellington Field beginning in 1940. Mrs. Cherry visited the couple often at various postings and, after the death of her husband, Dillin Brook Cherry (1856-1937), lived with them for a period at Randolph Field in San Antonio. While there she did several paintings of buildings at the Field. After Col. Reid’s retirement, he and Dorothy and their son, Walter Brook Reid (1928-2011) lived with Mrs. Cherry in Houston.

^[7] Morris Hall Pancoast (1877-1963) and Minnie Pancoast (1871-1954).

^[8] Elizabeth Dercum (ca1893-)

^[9] This show was presented at the Arundel Club, Baltimore, in October, 1920.

^[10] Paul Cornoyer (1864-1923).

^[11] The movie Cherry watched being filmed was an episode of the serial thriller “Bride 13”, starring Marguerite Clayton, written by Edward Sedgwick, and directed by Richard Stanton. The serial was not a success and is now considered lost.

^[12] James Addison Baker (1857-1941), Houston attorney and wife, Alice Graham Baker (1865-1932); daughter Alice Baker Jones (c1888-); daughter Ruth Baker Moore (1905-); son-in-law Murray Brashear Jones (c1887-); and granddaughter Alice Baker Jones Meyers (1915-2008) .

^[13] Eben Farrington Comins (1875-1949).

^[14] Though this sentence is somewhat awkwardly phrased, Cherry seems to have been carrying one of her own paintings.

^[15] Frances V. Mayberry (1900-), Cherry’s niece, daughter of Cherry’s sister Ruth and James B. Mayberry. The 1910 US Census lists the Mayberrys in the Cherry household, but by 1920 they had moved to California.

^[16] Sequence in Form and Color last appeared in the painting list for her show at the Witte Memorial Museum in 1925. In her copy of that list, Cherry has written “Hartley” after the title. The whereabouts of the painting is unknown.

^[17] Houston Press, April 16, 1937.

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A short post today, just to let you know that the story behind my just-finished needlepoint piece, Memories of the Way We Were (after Patrick Angus, David Hockney and Picasso), is now posted on Substack. I’m not emailing it directly, as I usually do, because it includes some explicit imagery of a homosexual nature, and not all may want to see it, even when stitched in needlepoint. Those who do want to take a look (no names will be shared!) can access it at this link:

Memories of the Way We Were

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“Why did he DO THAT?! I don’t want to see THAT!! He used to do such nice needlepoints, but now … !!!”

I can almost hear some exclaiming that about my latest finished piece, Memories of the Way We Were (after Patrick Angus, David Hockney, and Picasso), 2026. Some who’ve been brave – or fool-hearty – enough to look at even the expurgated version, that is.

I guess I can understand that response. There are some things I don’t want to see either. Like many of the paintings of John Currin, or Courbet’s L’Origine du monde in the Orsay. Google them if the images don’t come to mind.

No, not my visual cup of tea. Though I do understand that there’s something more going on in them than just the “all hanging out” bits.

I like to think that there’s something more going on in my needlepoint too, more than just the “all hanging DOWN” bits in this one, that’s right there front and center – and reflected in the mirror to the upper right, in case you missed it the first time!

This is my effort to explain what more I think is going on, and why I think it was worth spending five months, April to September, of stitching to depict.

Let’s get it out of the way right here at the beginning: Yes, that’s an image of “tea bagging” there in the middle. Some of you may not have heard that term, in that context. I’m sure none of you ever actually DID it. No, not my readers!

I confess that, being a nice West Texas boy, who even thought he’d be a Church of Christ preacher during his deluded but hopeful earlier days, I did not know the term myself until I had it taught to me by an episode of that educational TV program, Sex and the City. (To scotch the impertinence of any who might be bold enough to ask if I ever did it, even not knowing the term: NO COMMENT!)

There it is, TEA BAGGING, presented with a title implying that some unnamed WE may themselves have tried it in earlier days – whether deluded, hopeful, fantasized or whatever.

But enough about that tantalizing practice.

“Memories …” is inspired by the paintings of Patrick Angus (1953-1992), an American artist, born in California, who died in New York City. He was gay; he died from AIDS.

I first became aware of his work through a book I bought at Half Price Books in Houston’s then gay Montrose neighborhood in 1996: Strip Show (London: Aubrey Walter, 1992). The book came out just after the artist’s death.

Many of the paintings illustrated in Strip Show depict scenes at the Gaiety Theatre in New York City during the 1980s. It was the sort of place that our mothers would have warned us gay boys about – if our mothers could even have imagined that such places existed. (For the record, my mother couldn’t imagine it, and didn’t warn me!)

To say that the paintings are explicit is the soul of understatement, so, of course, I was drawn to them instantly! Many of them are so explicit that they’ve had a rough time gaining traction in the art world, even in New York. Watch a fun clip of the legendary Quinten Crisp, along with Angus and playwright Robert Patrick, trying to convince an NYC gallerist he should show them. (For the record: I’ve had something of the same challenge with my own Naughty Boy Needlepoints.)

Some of the paintings, however, are not explicit in the sexual way. One in particular, a double portrait titled Tom Stuart and Rob Stuart (1990), has a colorful, placid, almost tranquil quality, along with a complexity of detail, that made me want to stitch it as soon as I saw it.

It reminded me of some of David Hockney’s double portraits – not surprising, since Angus viewed his fellow California gay artist, Hockney, who got to LA from England as fast as he could, as a mentor in art. And Hockney had at least six Angus works in his collection.

In the spirit of Angus’s more provocative, even more confrontational works, I wanted to add some spice to my needlepoint. I found another painting in Strip Show that seemed to me could add another layer: and so now I had an image of two men depicted in their tasteful living room, with a portrait of the Matriarch looking down from the wall at their proper lives, while glimpsing what was perhaps one of those “Memories” of an earlier life that had been, and still was in some ways, part of their proper selves. Is that a glance of disapproval she gives – or of dismay?

Since there was an empty wall to the upper right in the original, and since as a needlepointer I HATE an empty wall, I decided to hang a mirror there, reflecting that memory, in case anyone might have missed it on first glance.

By adding that mirror, however, I created another problem, because there’s already a mirror in the upper center of the original Angus painting. I certainly wouldn’t want to have two mirrors in the same room, reflecting the same “zesty” activity. But what to put in its place?

I found yet a third Angus painting in Strip Show, one titled A Shower at the Baths (1984), that gave me the solution. If you don’t know what that title refers to, Google “Gay bathhouse,” BUT ONLY LOOK AT THE WIKIPEDIA ENTRY, and certainly don’t click on the Images icon. That guy with his back to us and the shower water coming down put me in mind of Hockney’s Man Taking a Shower (1965). Another connection made and another problem solved!

Since I had that strip along the top, with nothing useful to put in it, I decided to stitch in the title this time, “Memories of the Way We Were.” I’ve never done that before, but don’t you hear Barbra singing as you see it? And don’t you see adorable Redford, with his uniform and tousled sandy hair, standing there with his eyes closed as she sings?

If we had the chance to do it all again
Tell me, would we? Could we?

I also acknowledge Picasso as a “contributor” to this needlepoint. His contribution is perhaps a little harder to spot than those of Angus and Hockney, but he’s there. In 1980, Angus saw the Picasso retrospective at MOMA in New York, and the works moved him deeply. He did a self-portrait that looks to me to be drawn directly from Picasso’s 1917 pencil self-portrait – which also mesmerized me when I saw it in 2016 at the Menil Collection, in the exhibition Picasso The Line.

I knew I wanted to put something of Picasso in the piece, so, as I was stitching toward the finish, when I noticed a certain almost signature twist in the hats of several of Picasso’s portraits included in works on view at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston’s Picasso-Klee-Matisse: Masterpieces from the Museum Berggruen, I found my Picasso touch. Those squiggles on either side of my title strip are from PICASSO!

I’ve already written a lot, but I guess I still haven’t explained why I did this image, in needlepoint. Maybe this quote, from an article about an early Angus exhibition, gets at it some:

“Patrick’s painting is about breaking taboos. It is also about the body politic, male nudity, ritualized gatherings, penii and sex/love. The paintings, which portray aspects of gay life in New York City during the 1980s, raise important questions about masturbation, pornography, and the ennui of casual available sex in the AIDS era.

“Patrick paints scenes that have never been painted before. While we’ve seen paintings of stripshows, bathhouses, or the relationship between the hustler and the john, these scenes have been portrayed in relation to the heterosexual experience.”

So Angus painted scenes that had never been painted before. I ask myself, and you: Have they ever been NEEDLEPOINTED before either?

But maybe another lyric from Barbra’s song gets at my purpose even more directly:

So it’s the laughter 
We will remember
Whenever we remember
The way we were…

Admit it, when you saw this needlepoint – these particular images done in needlepoint – you laughed, at least a little, even if a little nervously. And can you really claim that now you’ll ever NOT remember Memories of the Way We Were (after Angus, Hockney and Picasso)?

A few additional observations as we end. That’s a copy of Strip Show, the book, on the coffee table.

That suggestive flower, beside the guy in the shower? I just couldn’t resist.

And where did I get the purple and gold pillow on the sofa at right, for which there is no precedent in the original painting? When I showed the work-in-progress to a legendary Houston gallerist (I won’t mention her name lest her status in HIGH art be tarnished by association with my VERY LOW art), she burst out laughing and said, “You need a ‘Home Sweet Home’ pillow in it!” So there they are, the pillow I hadn’t even imagined, and the laughter I’d been hoping for.

By the way, just because I’ve changed the living room walls from blue to pink - the color of my, and my husband’s, own living room, don’t think that I’m suggesting any biographical links to the images depicted. No, none at all!

Thanks for looking. Keep on laughing.

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(Note: I’m updating and reposting this piece from a few years ago, because I’ve just learned that an exhibition of postcards (along with Christmas cards and architectural sketches) made by Houston artist, Bill Condon (1923-1998), has just opened in the Art Library of Fondren Library (3rd floor), Rice University. Condon was a Rice University alum - class of 1949. How nice that his alma mater is honoring him this way. If you’re in Houston, don’t miss it!)

Here it is the end of the summer travel season. Crowded airports, crowded highways, crowded must-sees everywhere. I’m exhausted just remembering it. As a good friend used to say, “Being places is fun. Travel is NOT fun.” Sometimes I wonder if even being places is that much fun, in the summer tourist rush.

Which is one of the reasons I’m delighted that I can just BE PLACES (sort of) without the travel, thanks to an inveterate Houston traveler from the past, the Earlier Houston Artist, Bill Condon. There couldn’t be a better traveling companion when it comes to seeing the world through art.  So pack your bags, visually anyway, and let’s go. We won’t even have to leave the comfort of our world-class Houston air conditioning.

Houston architect/artist William J. (Bill) Condon (1923-1998) loved being places, and he loved sending postcards from those places to his friends back home. But not just any postcards. Condon made his own, using the cardboard inserts that came in his laundered shirts. He’d cut them into postcard size blanks before he left and then work them up into place-specific cards as he went along.

So if you were a friend of this Bill, you might open your mailbox to find a wonderful little work of art greeting you from wherever he was at the moment. He must have sent thousands of them, and you can still find them around Houston, framed and ready to fill small spaces on your wall – or big spaces if you’re lucky enough to get a group. And take my word for it: when you have one, you’ll want a group!

Condon was a native Houstonian.  After serving in the U.S. Army for four years during World War II, he got a degree in architecture from Rice University, and he was a practicing architect throughout his working life. It’s easy to see the architect’s eye in his work, but art was at least as much a part of him as architecture. Fellow architect and close friend, Ralph A. Anderson, Jr., said of Condon’s work: “He seems to be saying that, no matter how pretentious man is in what he builds, no matter how ugly, an other-worldly beauty exists there in spite of everything.”

So crank the A/C down to Frigid, settle into that armchair, leave all that nasty summer travel business to those foolish enough to thrust themselves into it, and enjoy seeing gorgeous places on a world tour through the eyes and the art postcards of Bill Condon – never mind that they’re addressed to someone else. Today they’re for you. (Oh, yes, don’t forget a tall cool glass of something lovely to drink. It’s HOT outside!)

Note: An earlier version of this piece appeared in the HETAG: Houston Earlier Texas Art Group Newsletter, No. 24, July 2018. All issues of the HETAG NEWSLETTER can be found on The Portal to Texas History.

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A window in a mirror at the Opera Garnier, Paris 9th. And who is that agile ballet boy showing his form?!

Paris Windows is a series designed to divert us in trying times. Click to see more Paris Windows.

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Today some beautiful watercolors by Mrs. Cherry.

It’s been a difficult few weeks, with hellish temperatures and little rain, some health issues, and national and world affairs to crush the soul. In times like these, beautiful art may not make all right with the world, but it helps. And there is little art more beautiful, to my eye, than the watercolors made by the Houston artist, Emma Richardson Cherry (1859-1954).

Cherry painted watercolors throughout her career, and especially in that late 19th/early 20th Century period when watercolor came into its own, especially among American artists.

She studied watercolor painting with some of the best: William Merritt Chase, one of her teachers at the Art Students League; Rhoda Holmes Nichols, in New York; Vetorre Zanetti Zilla, in Venice; Vicente Poveda y Juan, in Rome; and Ketty Gilsoul-Hopp, in Brussels.

I’ve been looking at her watercolors a lot lately, and realizing once again how wonderful they are. I hope they give you as much satisfaction and comfort as they’ve given me for decades.

So, rather than fixate on troubles and traumas, I offer today, for a little while, the respite of Mrs. Cherry’s masterful watercolors - because she was a master of the form - and she didn’t shy away from making gorgeous paintings. As I’m sure you’ll agree when you’ve glanced down the page at these splendid works.

Be safe - and soothed - and, with the help of Mrs. Cherry’s watercolors, perhaps a little comforted.

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Yes, one of those really is Emily’s window in Paris (I just don’t know exactly which), Place de L’Estrapade Paris 5th.

Paris Windows is a series designed to divert us in trying times. Click to see more Paris Windows.

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“Thank you for your recent submission.
We enjoyed reading it.
It went quite far in the selection process.
(Unfortunately for you, not far enough.)

We must report that
You did not make the final cut.

We’re sorry (though not really much, since)
The number of submissions we receive
Means (we don’t have to give a f***!)

We really did enjoy your work –
(Just not enough.)”

THE EDITOR

Fifty years into my writing career, and back to rejection slips. Only now, they're more likely rejection emails – sort of like breaking up by Post-it Note, as happened to Carrie in that infamous Sex And The City episode. Much better for the environment, if no better at all for the ego. But then, who really needs an ego anyway?

You'd think it would get easier with practice  - and the wisdom of age - getting rejected. But it doesn't. No matter how glibly I tell myself: "I don't care what they think"; "Just what I expected"; "I didn't want to be in their magazine anyway," they're lies. All lies. And I’m not nearly a good enough liar to fool myself into believing them.

"Develop a thick skin," they say. How thick they are to say it! Would rhinoceros hide be thick enough? Even rhinoceros hide can’t bounce the bullets off when the big game hunters come gunning. We writers call them EDITORS.

I sound so pathetic, even to myself, when I wail out things like this: “I gave you the best words of my life, and you were happy to print them - until someone with better syntax came along. And, no doubt, cooler and more with it too. Don't worry. Now you won't have Nixon - ur, I mean ME - to kick around with your edits anymore. No more of my golden sentences for you to butcher with cross-outs and red pens. I still have my pride! Though not much. You've seen to that.

Call me petty if you wish (or, here’s a thesaurus, Mr. Editor, if “petty” seems too trite to you), but sometimes I Google you to see if you’re still even alive after all these years. And, ah ha! Sometimes you're not! DEAD now, and not a comma too soon. See where all your smug editor-speak got you after all. Your disingenuous "wish we could offer you hope of a writing career, but ..." DISINGENUOUS! How’s that for a WOW word - and how does it feel, directed toward YOU?!

And what of your "splendid, exciting” publication? (I suggest you read between the lines to know my true opinion of it.) Folded long ago. Now don't you wish you'd published me, and had a shot at surviving? Because I'm still here - nyah, nyah, nyah - even though just barely. STILL HERE - WRITING! Not publishing, thank you very much, Editors, but publishing is so last century anyway. And I have SUBSTACK now. Why do I need YOU?!

CODA, three years later: And that’s the way my Substack started. My Substack, which now has 400+ posts. At 1000 or so words each, that’s almost War and Peace, though my plot’s a little different. I’ve had such fun writing it - I hope you’ve had fun reading it, too.

Who do we both have to thank for all this fun? That Editor, who sent me that rejection email three years ago. So, thank you, EDITOR. Your rejection helped me grow as a writer, since all these posts would not have happened, but for you. And you’ve helped me grow as a person too: I’m now so over the pain you gave that I hardly even Google for your obituary more than once or twice a week - most weeks.

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The window beside our table with a view, Le Mouffetard, Paris 5th.

Paris Windows is a series designed to divert us in trying times. Click to see more Paris Windows.

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(As another summer draws to an end, a quick look back at summer swimming as it used to be, long ago and far away.)

Swimming naked isn’t something I do often anymore.

Apologies to any who may now be cringing at the thought that I ever do it at all, and may now, and perhaps for evermore, have trouble expunging the image of such from a twitching mind’s eye. Rest assured that almost all the naked swimming I ever did was long ago and far away – and there are no photos – at least I don’t know of any. I’m twitching myself at just the chance there might be some.

I’m writing about it now because one of the paintings in our stairwell, a large one right at the top of the first landing, one which I pass many times a day, and have for many years, one that I sometimes even still take a moment once in a while to look at after all these years, is the image of some naked swimmers (above), painted in 1960 by Houston artist, Henri Gadbois (1930-2018).

I suspect that Henri might have been thinking back to the masters as he painted it, back to Picasso and Cézanne.

The young men he painted, so Henri told me, were students attending the high school where he taught. Ah, 1960, what an innocent time. So long ago, so much has changed. Can you imagine a high school teacher now, painting such a picture of his high school students, and NOT winding up in jail!?

And they say those old days were such a prudish time, that we’re so much more enlightened now. Don’t you believe it. Why, even in this modern age, I’ve blurred out certain passages of the painting, hoping that I won’t wind up in jail myself as I use it to illustrate this piece!!

The painting has brought the piece to mind because the period of my own life when I did most of my naked swimming was not many years before Henri painted it – the 1950s. Back then, as a kid in Lubbock, Texas, I spent many hours of most days of several summers going to the Boys Club on Avenue K. It’s now a tin-shed flea market, so Google Street View tells me, but back then it was a venerable brick building, set in expansive grounds, with a baseball diamond, where I spent many hot, dusty afternoons way out in right field – that’s the field where they send the worst players, isn’t it, the ones always picked last (like me), because every boy got a chance to play at Boys Club, whether he wanted to or not (like me). And there was a basketball court, and maybe some weights in what passed for a “gym.”

There was also a swimming pool, the first indoor pool in Lubbock, and only the second of either kind, when it opened in 1950. Indoor, for use in all seasons, though I only ever went there in the summer months.

Indoor, also, because of the naked swimming, which is where Henri’s painting comes in. It’s not just that swimsuits were optional, they were banned! It was swimming naked for every boy there, ages 6 to 17, no exceptions – except for the coach, of course. For all the rest of us, Naked, Naked, Naked, every swim, every day. All the little fellas all hanging out, all the time – though if memory serves, not all the fellas were so little, especially as their sporters approached 17.

Can you imagine such a thing today!!??

Yes, I’m sure some of you can, though I’m talking about the concept, not the actual sugarplum fairies dancing in some of your heads. (Don’t worry, I won’t name names.) It takes my breath away, thinking how no one thought it was even an issue then, not even, it seems, the preachers who spent long summer Sundays tempting us with tales of sins some of us – the younger and more sensitive ones – couldn’t yet imagine – or even believe – but it was Preacher Man (always men then) telling us about them, so they must have been true!!!!

It takes my breath away too, remembering that I walked to the Boys Club on my own from early on, by age 8 or 10 – walked the dozen blocks from our house to the Club and back again – and no one thought a thing about it. Why would they? All the boys did. And besides, I walked alone back and forth to George R. Bean Elementary, only a few blocks closer than Boys Club, and had since first grade.

And when I got home, to an empty house, since my parents both worked, I didn’t even need a key: we never locked the kitchen door. If we had, how could the milk man get in to put our bottles in the refrigerator, or the laundry man to make his pickups and deliveries? We did lock the front door, but only because everyone did that, since it seemed reasonable that some door should be locked. There goes my breath away again, that no one ever came in and cleaned us out through all those years – except for the cleaning lady, that is, who came in without a key too, at whatever time the bus got her to our house, from “her part of town.” I suspect you know what that implies.

Ah, the 1950s. How long ago, how different!

But back to swimming – though not naked now. When I got older and bolder – bold enough to walk even further on my own – I gave up the naked swims at Boys Club for hot summer afternoons at the newer, posher, outdoor Clapp Pool, way out southwest of us, in Clapp Park. Yes, I know, unfortunate name - until you know that it was named for Mr. K.N. Clapp, “longtime Parks board member,” and wasn’t a clever euphemism for something I couldn’t imagine at age 12, when I started going there, and wouldn’t have believed even if Preacher Man had warned about it in a Sunday sermon, which he didn’t – wouldn’t believe till some years later, when …

But that’s another story, for another time, and, perhaps, a different audience.

No, there was no naked swimming at Clapp Pool, except occasionally at night, when some of the more rowdy older teens – high schoolers for sure, probably soon to be graduating seniors – climbed over the fence for moonlight madness. I might have said “rowdy and randy,” though that might be misconstrued as a memoirist’s attempt to brag; I cannot claim to have ever been that rowdy. So no naked Clapp swimming in my history, not even as a soon to be graduating senior.

My next opportunity for au naturel-ing came some years later, as I pursued my higher education in Austin. This was in 1980.

Oh, there had been a few disrobed dips in between: a summer afternoon on Fire Island in the mid-70s; visits to the Continental Baths, in New York (where Bette Midler got her start, though not naked, one assumes), Man’s Country, in Chicago, and Club Baths, in St. Louis and Key West and other “randy” cities: boys clubs of a different sort. But “Hippie Hollow,” on Lake Travis, with beautiful views from the rocky shore, and (occasionally) other views from the scrub-covered bluffs, marked the real return of naked swimming into my exercise regimen. Oh those lovely afternoons of sunning on the beach, and dipping in the lake, and (occasionally) strolling on the bluff - in the buff. Ah, 1980. How long ago, how different. And how much slimmer the naked swimmer!

I suppose I should try, here toward the end, adding some legitimizing heft to what is basically a cheesy look back at nakedness legitimized by swimming. Here goes:

Was I somehow warped by that early immersion in naked swimming? To paraphrase Dorothy Parker’s comment, when told of the death of President Calvin “Silent Cal” Coolidge: How can we tell? By the time one has reached my age, there have been so many things that could have done the warping, that picking out that one in particular may be more a function of current trauma trends than reality. So, who knows?

There. Done with legitimizing heft.

And out of compassion for your twitching mind’s eye, I will rush to add that, for practical purposes, my naked swimming ended more than 40 years ago, in Austin. Now all my swimming is in trunks. You might even find it comforting to take the image below away from reading this; it might go a little toward quelling the twitch. And if you should somehow happen upon any of those nonexistent photos of me from long ago – I DENY IT! (twitch, twitch).

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Pigeons, prenez garde! Pigeons beware. Paris 9th.

Paris Windows is a series designed to divert us in trying times. Click to see more Paris Windows.

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