​gate and sweeping the storefront sidewalk, by noon I was ready for our first clients. Mid-afternoon I’d order out for Chinese or nip around the corner for a slice at a favorite pizzeria. I closed at eight each evening. On my way home I often met a friend for a late dinner at a Greek diner.

My day was filled assisting first-time shoppers as well as patrons returning for fittings. I mpizzeria. I closed at eight each evening. On my way home I often met a friend for a late dinner at a Greek dineade drawings and patterns for new garments. I placed new orders and received completed ones. Working with the shop assistants, I became good friends with Pearla from Argentina and Angelica from Bolivia. Given free passes, we went together to openings at MOMA.

Lo’s was a specialty women’s boutique. The racks were filled with unique, one-of-a-kind dresses, skirts and tops. Each was custom designed in the shop. Our original patterns were sent to Great Britain where skilled needle workers, at home in their small cottages, knitted and crocheted then air mail returned the finished pieces.

We catered to brides and members of their wedding parties, professional performers and women wanting a “special something” for a special occasion. Since each garment was made from white and off-white fibers, many a customer chose to first wear her design in the original natural color. A few months, or even years later, she’d likely return to up-date her garment with a new color, dyed in the big vats in our basement.

Our customers came in all sizes. I was most often sought out by the generously curvaceous as well as the très petite. One of my favorite clients was the statuesque, picture-perfect soap opera star who came for one-hour fittings. To great praise and admiration, she paraded up down the shop for three hours. Back and forth she went requesting alteration tweaks and then some more. As I made notes and sketches and held her puppy, her driver kept the air-conditioner going in a sleek, black stretch limo parked at the curb. She always departed more beautiful and very happy. Like several other satisfied clients, she presented me with a huge blooming bouquet from the corner deli. From others I received complimentary performance tickets. Nice perks!

Creating the shop’s art-centric window displays was always a source of great fun and pleasure. A favorite was themed around a Porgy and Bess show tune: “Summertime and the livin’ is easy”. With the plate glass acting as their metro-aquarium, colorfully painted paper fish were suspended as though jumpin’ high over full-to-bursting cotton bolls shipped from Arkansas and glued to potted bushes I borrowed from a neighbor’s courtyard. I liked to watch the passers-by stopping to look and smile and laugh out loud.
What an unexpected thrill to be head-hunted by Barneys New York and invited to join the big league working on the team creating their artful, seasonal show-stopping window tableaus. In spite of the glamorous allure of the offer, I wanted to keep my life small and sane. Saying, “No. Thank you,” I stayed on at Lo’s until I moved to Brooklyn and then back to Arkansas and then to my sweet, new hometown of Carthage where I find charming window art to delight me every day.

Each morning I take Lasyrenn, our year old Aussie, for her training walk around Carthage’s historic downtown square resplendently bedecked with summer blossoms. David, my husband, joins us when his work schedule allows. We begin with Mother Road Coffee cappuccinos enjoyed in ceramic mugs, as we feast on the bistro’s two entry windows filled with marvelous enchantments festooned in patriotic red, white and blue.

Beginning our tour, we window shop as we go, while Lasyrenn responds to our rudimentary French and practices “au pied” (walking at heel) and “asseyez-vous, s’il vous plait” (sit down, please) before each corner crossing. Not too long ago she began to pull on her tether as though she had someplace special to go, and she wanted us to hurry up and get her there fast. We followed her lead and discovered the BigDogBoutique!
Next week return with me to the Carthage square and I’ll show you the charming windows of the BigDogBoutique and our favorite new hang out. I promise to give you a full tour of this newest jewel on Carthage’s square. The BigDogBoutique sets the bar very high for “The Art of the Shop Windows” in Carthage and all across southwest Missouri, too!

​HAPPINESS RUNS IN A CIRCULAR MOTION   

​Lyrics penned by Donovan Leitch tell us,

Happiness runs in a circular motion.
Thought is like a little boat upon the sea.
Everybody is a part of everything anyway.
You can have everything if you let yourself be.

When my husband, David, was substituting in our regional public school systems, I always sent him off with a kiss and a hug and a request. “Bring me sweet stories, please!” I loved David’s afternoon returns and the stories he brought home to me, especially the ones about playing his guitar and singing with the youngest students. I loved hearing how when he sang and played rounds of “the happiness song” all the kids joined in, even the most timid and withdrawn among them.

“Happiness runs in a circular motion!” So, so true at artCentral, especially at artCamp. The happiness with which our creative adventures began just grew and grew as our amazing ten days unfolded and were celebrated with the grand finale of our fabulous artCamper Exhibition and Reception at Hyde House.

That last Friday morning of artCamp, I arrived super early at artCentral. Sandra Dawn Ebbs and her two artistic children, Jasmine and Eric, were already outback beginning work on the artCamp mural in anticipation of the arrival of the artCamper artists in Sandra’s class. As I booted up my laptop in my upstairs office, I was surprised to see David’s name on my cell phone screen. He was calling to tell me he was getting the day off. “Wonderful!” I instantly responded. “Will you please come help me for artCamp’s last day?” Moments later I heard the sweet purr of his vintage BMW motorcycle pulling up on the patio below. 

​After the artCampers were checked in by our artCamp interns, we gathered on the porch to begin our last day for artCamp 2018. David helped me make the time special. With his guitar accompaniment all together we sang “Happiness runs in a circular motion…You can have everything if you let yourself be.” Before heading to class, I introduced the teachers and then our interns.

Our interns are the best! They give two precious weeks of their school-free summertimes to work very, very hard for the love of art and for experiences that prepare them for their futures. Maddie Capps and Sydney Hartless, both artists and Crowder College students, are studying to be teachers. Kate Beeler and Gabby Cook will be terrific assets in fields of art and service.  Allie Lambeth will certainly have a career that embraces the world of fashion. Kaylee Shultz-Carmichael plans to be a surgeon. Amy Lane anticipates Christian mission work. Practicing artist Emily Rose, not only donates her limited free time as a superb weekend gallery docent, she enthusiastically helps out as an intern, too. Lead intern Owen Platt is an impressive role model for both artCampers and interns, as well. His years at artCamp teach us all that “You can have everything if you let yourself be.”

I first learned of Owen four years ago when his grandmother called to inquire if artCamp might be a good place for him to spend some time during his summer visit to Carthage. Owen’s story is told best in his own words:

​​“A portion of my summers are spent in Angel Fire, New Mexico, visiting my maternal grandparents, where I go mountain biking and work as a busser at a country club. When I’m not working or going down a mountain at 20 miles an hour, I’m in my room drawing or painting. The other part of my summer I spend in Carthage visiting my paternal grandmother. She’s the one who introduced me to artCentral and artCamp. At first I thought, ‘I really don’t want to go. I don’t need any art lessons!’ (But I really, really did!) After weeks of pestering from my dad, I reluctantly agreed to go.”

Owen continues, “When I first got to artCamp I was a small, shy little freshman. After some help from the interns, I started having fun. Also, Alice Lynn made me a kind of a pre-intern. She had me help her move boxes and tables. That led me into being an intern the following summer when I was too old to be an artCamper. Ever since, I’ve loved spending the end of my summers at artCentral. Every year artCamp is always interesting and exciting. I never know what will happen. Just like the day this year when Alice Lynn unexpectedly asked me to substitute teach. With the help of Allie Lambeth, another experienced intern, I was able to have a successful print-making class. Unexpected surprises like this, the awesome teachers and interns and the kids are what keep me coming back to artCentral year after year to spend my time being an artCamp intern." 

Yes, at artCamp, “Happiness runs in a circular motion…You can have everything if you let yourself be.”

Daddy served in the Air Force in World War II, then earned his law degree as they began our family with my birth. Working for the Veterans Administration, he served two tours in Vietnam, where he prepared GI’s for their return and their resuming their high school and college educations.
 
Reflecting on his full and satisfying life, my father told me that some of his happiest moments were back on the farm as a young boy—those sweet times he paused at the end of a long day.  His after-school chores completed with the livestock and in the gardens, standing on the side of Round Mountain in his dirty overalls and scruffy hand-me-down boots, he would look out over the farm and the two ribbons of slow waters meandering past, and he’d think “I’m the luckiest boy alive!”
 
He told me as he stood alone sometimes a poem he’d learned in class would pop into his mind, and he’d sing the lines loud and clear for all the world around him to hear. He said his very favorite poem was, “The Village Blacksmith”, written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The poem, familiar to so many of us from our own school days, begins:
 
Under a spreading chestnut tree
The village smithy stands;
The smith, a mighty man is he,
With large and sinewy hands;
And the muscles of his brawny arms
Are strong as iron bands.
 
Longfellow, on October 5, 1839, recorded in his journal: "[I] wrote a new Psalm of Life….'The Village Blacksmith'.” He presents his character as an iconic tradesman who’s embedded with deeply rooted strength in the history of his town and the town’s defining institutions. His blacksmith serves as a role model who balances his job with his commitments to his family and community.
 
His brow is wet with honest sweat,
He earns whate’er he can,
And looks the whole world in the face,
For he owes not any man.
 
Week in, week out from morn till night,
You can hear his bellows blow;
You can hear him swing his heavy sledge
With measured beat and slow,
Like a sexton ringing the village bell,
When the evening sun is low.
 
And children coming home from school
Look in at the open door;
They love to see the flaming forge,
And hear the bellows roar,
And watch the burning sparks that fly…
 
The artCampers of artCentral had their very own iconic village blacksmith working with them and teaching them to make horseshoes the first week of camp. Beneath the spreading maple trees on Hyde House hill, Longfellow’s poignant poem fully came to life when world-class farrier Chris Gregory and his son, Cody, arrived in two large trucks pulling two heavy trailers fully equipped with mobile forges, anvils, hammers and tongs and all the other tools and materials needed for making horseshoes.
 
Chris earned the title of Fellow of the Worshipful Company of Farriers (FWCF) at the age of 30. The Worshipful Company of Farriers is a group founded in London in 1356 and regarded by many as stewards of horseshoeing’s highest standards. Internationally, around 40 farriers currently hold this distinction, five of these are Americans. Chris’s 696 page book, “Gregory’s Textbook of Farriery”, has become the textbook for most of the top schools teaching the craft. He brought a copy for the artCampers to see. 
 
With the two men came Chris’s wife, Kelly, herself a certified farrier and full-time instructor at their Heartland Horseshoeing School, established in 1995 in Lamar, Missourui. Kirsty, Cody’s wife, a second time new mother, came, too, and spent the 97 degree day outside with the youngest family members—two-year-old toddler, Marcy Grace, and twelve-weeks-old baby, Heidi Fayth. The family’s farm dog—the robust, impeccably trained blue heeler, Blueberry—completed the Gregory family entourage.

All day long the hammers of the farriers and their artCamper protégés sang a beautiful psalm of praise for the art of blacksmithing! Just before “going home” time, I asked the artCampers, “What was your favorite part of your blacksmithing class?” In enthusiastic unison they replied, “Everything!”
 
With the words of Longfellow I say to Chris Gregory,
 
Thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend,
For the lesson thou has taught!

eAs the Beach Boys, those saints of summer, like to sing, “I’m pickin’ up good vibrations! Good, good, good, good vibrations.”

Each artCamp day brings together a community of visionaries resonating with our good vibrations—skilled instructors, hard-working interns, artCamper aspiring-artists-in-the-making and their parents and grandparents and friends committed to collecting and depositing and end-of-class gathering up our daily population. 

All this is happening now at artCentral’s eighteenth summer artCamp, because in years past and especially over the last several months, visionary members of our broader community have stepped up to give their support. They believe in the worth of artCentral’s one-of-a-kind learning experience that prepares our youth to be the culturally fluent future citizens and leaders of Carthage, greater Missouri and the world. 

With our heartful, artful appreciation artCentral sends out a happy, happy “thank you” to each and every visionary artCamp donor and contributor: Helen S. Boylan Foundation, Carthage Community Foundation, Carthage Council on the Arts, Carthage Rotary Club, Crackpot Pottery and Art Studio, Ruth I. Kolpin Foundation, S&S Computers and Walmart, Store #13. These visionary, caring contributors are critical components to the success of artCamp 2018.

In today’s exciting classes artCampers are vibrating with enthusiasm and pulsing with discovery, expanding their horizons and exploring the depths of their new, hands-on art-making experiences.

Instructor Alexander Burnside is taking them out of our ordinary, everyday world, guiding them expertly while they travel together, equipped with paper and scissors, colored pencils and paints, through her “Outer Space Spectacular”. 

Tom Jones, a favorite artCamp teaching veteran, has his artCampers wetting paper and splashing and blending watercolors. They’re painting images from our natural world—hummingbirds, goldfish, flowers and the other diverse inspirations that strike their fancies.

World class farrier, Chris Gregory, is here from his Heartland Horseshoeing School in Lamar. Coming to teach “Blacksmithing 101”, in the midst of his global travels, he’s brought a forge and anvils and apprentices, too. With them, safety-goggled artCampers are outside learning a brand new skill set, making their own lucky horseshoes. The music of their creative hammering is echoing off artCentral’s Great Wall, across our ridge and down the road!

Have you seen artCentral’s Great Wall? What a tribute to artCentral’s community of artists! Painted in 2015 by Andrew Batcheller, Cheryl Church, April Davis-Brunner, Annabelle Fuhr, Helen Kunze, Brenda Sageng and yours truly, the Great Wall still stands brightly beautiful—a must see destination thematically riffing on what it means to be an artist in a community of visionaries listening to one another's ideas, cooperating and collaborating. Over the entire length of the long wall, one portion flows into the next depicting and celebrating our friends in the natural world. At the very end, the wall makes the corner and leads to the well-house charmingly painted by my husband, David Greenwood-Mathé. In between the Great Wall and well house, a stretch of primed, unadorned wall awaits a new mural by artCampers.

The last two days of artCamp, Sandra Dawn Edds will be mentoring artCampers in the art of mural making. On Thursday, July 19th, they’ll learn mural-making basics as they conceive, design and sketch the new artCamp Wall. On Friday, July 20th, artCampers in Sandra’s class will learn mural painting techniques, while making a significant contribution to artCentral’s artistic legacy with their artCamper-made artCamp Wall. 

Yet to be chosen are the images that will be painted. Perhaps they’ll include our resident hawks living high up in a nest beside the parking lot or the birds or squirrels or frogs or lizards living on the grounds of Hyde House hill. Perhaps they’ll celebrate the skunks and deer and wild turkeys that follow our eastern boundary fence, as they pass through on their wildlife thoroughfare. Maybe at the artCamper Wall we’ll easily feel and hear the good vibrations of the pounding hoofs of our imaginary brumbies—the wild Australian horses who’ve come from downunder to frolic on the grounds of artCentral.  

There are still some artCamp class spaces open for the remainder of this week and the next through Friday, July 20, 2018. Registration forms are available in Carthage at artCentral, Carthage Public Library, Cherry’s, The Deli, KOKA Gallery and The Palms. In Joplin you’ll find registration forms at Spiva Center for the Arts, Cleo’s Picture Framing and Design and Crackpot Pottery and Art Studio. Also, you can download the registration forms from artCentral’s website: http://www.artcentralcarthage.org/artcamp-2018.html. Complete your artCamper’s registration, add your check for tuition, then bring them to Hyde House, 1110 East Thirteenth Street in Carthage. Come and share our good vibrations!

“I wonder if we’ll ever get rain?” I lament to myself, leaving Joplin and driving east on Zora Road, soon after I move up, over the Missouri state line from a lush, green mountaintop in the foothills of the Arkansas Ozarks. A few years ago, I come with the assumption that transitioning to a more northern clime will mean cooler temps and more moisture. 

Alas, I am mistaken. I arrive in the middle of a very long, very dry early summer heat wave. Every tender transplant I put in my new shade garden keels over before she can even settle into the ground, no matter how much water I provide with my hose.

Ordinarily I don’t worry about the weather, since the weather will do what the weather will do no matter how much we speculate or fret or worry or complain. Today, after so, so many arid days, I feel worriedly concerned as I head down the road home after a shopping trip in town. I can almost hear my produce purchases wilting by the mile. 

With my car windows rolled up tight and the ac cranked up high, I try to focus on listening to the music on my radio. I try to redirect my thoughts away from my weather-water-worries. Then as though by an act of divine timing, Bobby McFerrin comes on blissfully singing “Don’t worry. Be happy.” Really? Really!

Oh how I love that 1988 video with Bobby McFerrin and Bill Irwin and Robin Williams singing and clowning and dancing their troubles away in their outlandish get ups and silly faces.

McFerrin cheerfully carries on in his heavy island accent,

“Here’s a little song I wrote.
You might want to sing it note for note.
Don’t worry, be happy.
In every life we have some trouble,
But when you worry you make it double.
Don’t worry, be happy.”

“Don’t worry. Be happy!” I’m singing right along as I tap out the beat on my steering wheel and bounce up and down in my bucket seat. “Don’t worry. Be happy!” Looking out the windshield I notice clusters of charming little white, fluffy clouds, buoyant apparitions newly appearing like celestial angels blithely frolicking. Their undersides look heavy and gray-laden. Surely they must be carrying rain. “Don’t worry. Be happy!”

Can that possibly be a gigantic crimsoned smile I see stretching left to right all the way across the horizon before the puffy cherub clouds? Or am I hallucinating with the joyous prospect of rain falling from those gray bellies? Perhaps I’m picturing a heat mirage as a heavenly promise.

By the time I get home, I’m inspired to stow my groceries quick, quick, quick ‘cause I’m pumped to paint that glorious promise I’ve just seen before me. I grab a rectangular canvas. I sketch in the clouds and the big, big smiling lips. The summer sky is painted cerulean. Textile scraps in dark green become the good earth below. Sequins are stitched above, sprinkled among the wee clouds, just like the stars that burn all day even though we can’t see them. The text comes last tattooed in cursive over the lips as one simple word—“smile”. I title my heat wave painting, “Don’t Worry. Be Happy.”

Every morning David and I wake to our “smile” painting hanging high up on the wall opposite our bed—encouraging and reminding us how best to start each new day. “Don’t worry. Be happy!”

David tells me he first heard the simple admonition spoken in hippie days by Meher Baba (1894–1969) the Indian mystic and sage who often used the expression "don't worry, be happy" when communicating with his Western followers. 

This same expression was printed up on inspirational cards and posters in the 1960s. In 1988, McFerrin was inspired by the charisma and simplicity of the words, when he noticed the "don't worry, be happy" phrase on a Meher Baba poster in the San Francisco apartment of the jazz duo Tuck & Patti. Soon after, McFerrin wrote the now famous song, which he said is “a pretty neat philosophy in four words."

Are you still intending on registering you artCamper-wanna-be for artCamp which begins Monday, July 9, 2018? “Don’t worry. Be happy!” Classes are getting full, but there’s still room for your artist-in-the making!

Registration forms are available in Carthage at artCentral, Carthage Public Library, Cherry’s, The Deli, KOKA Gallery and The Palms. In Joplin you’ll find registration forms at Spiva Center for the Arts, Cleo’s Picture Framing and Design and Crackpot Pottery and Art Studio. You can also go online and download the registration forms from artCentral’s website: http://www.artcentralcarthage.org/artcamp-2018.html. 

Complete your artCamper’s registration and add your check for tuition, then drop them through the front door mail slot at Hyde House, 1110 East Thirteenth Street in Carthage.