Chameleon: An Interactive Exploration
Part IV -- Reiterating Personal Experience
-- I Hear A Symphony, written by Motown's Lamont Dozier, Brian Holland, and Edward Holland,
and recorded by Diana Ross and The Supremes
"And then it was not enough for them to go astray about the knowledge of God, but though living in a great war of ignorance, they call such evils peace.... And it is all a confusion of blood and murder, theft and fraud, depravity, faithlessness, discord, perjury, clamor at the good, forgetfulness of favors, defilement of souls, confusion of sex, irregularity in marriage, adultery, and indecency. For the worship of the unspeakable idols [Hebrew: avodat elilim (idolatry); avodah zarah (foreign worship); avodat kochavim umazalot (planets and constellations)] is the beginning and cause and end of every evil."
-- The Wisdom of Solomon 14:22, 25-27, The Apocrypha
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"I don't even butter my bread. I consider that cooking." -- Katherine Cebrian |
"All oppression creates a state of war." -- Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
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-- William Tecumseh Sherman, Union General during the United States Civil War
"I went down to St. James Infirmary/ And I heard my baby moan./ And I felt so broken hearted./ She used to be my very own./ And I tried so hard to keep from crying./ My heart felt just like lead...."
"I went down to the St. James infirmary, I saw my baby there/
She was stretched out on a long white table, so cold, and fine, and fair./
Let her go, let her go, God bless her, wherever she may be/
She can search this world over, never find another man like me...."
-- American folk song St. James Infirmary Blues with many versions, two above, the former by Bobby Bland
Partially while employed full-time and part-time, the author earned a Bachelor of Science degree (.03 points short of summa cum laude) in cognitive psychology -- which included independent study in Chomsky's linguistics theories and Piaget's studies of childhood development, and fieldwork with extraordinarily-challenged young people -- from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. Other courses there, and at Boston University and East Tennessee State University, included ethics and logic, national and world history, world religions and art, biologies, physiologies and algebra, grammar and literature, and Basic and Pascal computer programming. She was born via "Twilight Sleep" in 1944, a year before the end of World War II, and is therefore a slight forerunner of the "Baby Boom" generation, in Los Angeles, California and raised as an only child in a "broken home" by her upper-middle-class divorced mother (Dorothy Harris Scranton Gerlach Scranton Alterio Baillie, "Dodie," born and raised in Newton MA, a graduate of Dana Hall preparatory school and an attendee of Stevens College, 1920-2006 of heart-and-lung failure in Luray VA), grandmother (Marjorie May Harris Scranton, born and raised in Trenton NJ and Manhattan NY, a Vassar graduate, a professional portrait and landscape artist, an alto in the chorus of the Metropolitan Opera, one of many descendents of the procreative Charlemagne, King of the Franks and Holy Roman Emperor, according to geneological records, 1888-1976 of a stroke in Fort Lauderdale FL), and grandfather (Harold Curtis Scranton, born and raised in Hartford CN, a World War I US Army veteran, sales entrepreuneur and market investor, 1887-1965 of pancreatic cancer in Fort Lauderdale FL) in four suburbs of Boston, Massachusetts, as a professional performance acrobat, singer, exotic, modern and traditional dancer (Boston Ballet Company), and classical and pops pianist (New England Conservatory of Music). Her father (George Arnold Gerlach, 1921-2008 of complications from Alzheimer's disease, deafness, partial blindness, pneumonia, and heart attack in St. Petersburg FL) was a native of Darien CN, disabled World War II USAF veteran, and lifelong accountant, business owner and market investor, who lived briefly in Nevada and on the California coast before settling on the Florida Gulf, also owning a summer home for heat relief in Pisgah Forest NC for many years. She has an estranged-by-parental-events half-sister, an accredited union Hollywood makeup artist; half-brother, a drummer and salesperson, in Colorado; step-sister, a securities broker, in Florida; step-brother, an electronics technician, in North Carolina; step-mother, a retired business owner and philanthropist, in North Carolina and Florida; and step-father, a retired salesman and mechanics/factory worker, also in Florida. Her birth name is Jeannette Harris Gerlach; other legal last names have been Scranton, Gerlach (again), Marion, Howes, and Harris. She received private tutoring in horseback riding, swimming and diving, ice skating, snow skiing, singing, modern and classical ballet, piano, tap dancing, and acrobatics, and had lessons in ballroom dancing, modeling, drama, crafts, sewing, cooking, grooming and deportment. Sports she has had lessons or engaged in are: archery, riflery (marksman), water-skiing, varsity field hockey and basketball, tennis, golf, miniature golf, softball, soccer, lacrosse, rowing, sailing, fishing, canoing, sledding, bob-sledding, snow-boarding, snow-skiing, roller skating, shuffleboard, bowling, pool/billiards, tree-climbing, horseshoes, badminton, ping pong, pinball, tai chi, hiking and camping. Her "old money," ultra-right-wing Republican family is of German, English, French and Welch origin, imparting an eclectic mix of religious paths including, most particularly, Christian Science, evangelical Christianity, Judaism and mysticism.
Leaving her parental home (Newton Center, Brookline, Newton, Ashburnham, Rockport and Boston, MA; Bustins Island, ME) at 18, she has lived and worked as an adult cross-country (Manhattan, NY; Naples and Ft. Lauderdale, FL; Macon, GA; Charlotte, Asheboro, High Point and Goldsboro, NC; Johnson City and Jonesborough, TN; Virginia Beach, Richmond, Arlington, Luray and Harrisonburg, VA; Washington, DC; San Francisco, CA; Chicago, IL; Abilene, TX; Montgomery, AL; St. Louis, MO; and Cleveland Heights, OH), including as a programmer/analyst (Pascal, Cobol, DEC and IBM OS) and project manager for state, local, and federal accounting systems, and received a state security clearance for wiretapping "drug kingpins" while working for the Criminal Division of the Virginia Attorney General's Office. She has been a lifelong activist Democrat, excepting one foray into the Green Party, and at times a radical resister to some government policies.
-- Susan Hayward in I Can Get It For You Wholesale
"She takes just like a woman, yes, she does/ She makes love just like a woman, yes, she does/ And she aches just like a woman/ But she breaks just like a little girl."
-- Just Like A Woman by Bob Dylan
"Few girls were asked to be super smart and none were expected to be powerful."
-- canne charters in funny isn't it?, WNC Woman, February 2008
"Writing and making art are dangerous activities. They inspire women [and men] to misbehave. They challenge orthodoxies of all kinds."
-- The American Women's Almanac: An Inspiring and Irreverent Woman's History, by Louise Berhikow
including twenty in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley where she owned a riverfront mini-farm, ran contractor painting and rental businesses, created a commercial web design venture including pages and advertising for seven clients (artist Robert Kuhn, Page County Chamber of Commerce and Veterans of Foreign Wars, Blue Ridge Pottery, Parkhurst Inn and Restaurant, Shenandoah Seasons, and Astro*Logic), a personal poetry site called Peace, and a promotional arts and tourism internet destination entitled O Shenandoah! Country Rag (Luray VA Owner/Publisher: Jeannette Harris; Literary Editor: John Waybright; Attorney: Samuel Price), and still co-owns real estate (a cabin and a riverfront lot). She also contributed cover copy to the Shenandoah Valley Tourism Association website, and her writing was published worldwide, sometimes without her permission. For four years or so, a chatty monthly newsletter was sent to current and prospective readers recounting seasonal changes and content updates. ACR/OSCR (at http://www.acountryrag.org and http://www.geocities.com/countryrag) -- first published in 1996, when ninety percent of World Wide Web users were white males, as an advertising-supported weekly, and later from the Mountain Empire, East Tennessee, Jonesborough (one of National Geographic's 100 Best Small Towns in America, along with nearby Abingdon VA) as A Country Rag (Owner/Publisher: Jeannette Harris; Literary Editor: Heather Jett; Contributing Editor: Carolyn Moore), a non-profit monthly display of contemporary arts, culture and tourism information -- has received many awards for excellence in design and content, including designation by Encyclopedia Britannica as a "Best of the Web" and inclusion in their search engine under numerous criteria related to Appalachia and literature. It has also been used as a supplementary text for some university courses on regional studies and art.
-- Woodie Guthrie, Lonesome Valley
"Pack up all my care and woe/ Here I go, singing low/ Bye bye blackbird/
Where somebody waits for me/ Sugar's sweet, so is she/ Bye bye blackbird/
No one here can love or understand me/ Oh what hard luck stories they all hand me/
Make my bed and light the light/ I'll arrive late tonight/ Blackbird, bye bye"
-- Bye Bye Blackbird, song by Oscar Peterson
"I'm really nervous, so I'm going to play the hardest song I know."
-- pianist/singer/songwriter Buddy Holly in The Buddy Holly Story
"The life I love is makin' music with my friends/ And I can't wait to get on the road again/ On the road again/ Goin' places that I've never been/ Seein' things that I may never see again,/ And I can't wait to get on the road again."
-- from the album Essential Willie Nelson
After four debilitating years of physical and mental illness in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, during which she was confined to a mental institution (Western State Hospital, Staunton VA) for two months and required to undergo counseling and heavy medication (through Northwestern Community Services, Luray VA), she returned to Jonesborough TN in late August of 2007, and filed a Charter and Bylaws for ACR (Owner/Chairperson/Publisher: Jeannette Harris; President/Literary Editor: Gwendoline Fortune; Vice President/Contributing Editor: Carolyn Moore) with the State of Tennessee ("The Volunteer State") as a non-profit corporation, owned and operated by women, which was accepted October 31, 2007. An application for tax-exempt status was approved, effective on the state incorporation date, by the United States Internal Revenue Service on January 13, 2008. ACR, Inc.'s purpose has been and will continue to be to encourage contemporary arts and tourism in Appalachia, with special emphasis on the endeavors of women and minorities.
She has three out-of-print chapbooks of poetry, a novel entitled Tapestry, Coprolalia (Gr. êüðñïò ëáëßá), and Jeannie. Over the years, her poetry, short stories and articles have been widely published on the internet and to a lesser extent in hardcopy. Works in progress are:
Adanta (poetry written between 1974 and 2004); Flesh and Blood (Appalachian short stories written between 1996 and 2004); Gifts (computer graphics and digitized acylics created between 1996 and 2007); Chrysos (cartoons and art in other media created during three months in 2003); I, A Woman, an autobiography, Chameleon: An Interactive Exploration, and material additions and minor redesign in pages of ACR/OSCR.
In addition to painting abstract and representational acrylics, she has been a volunteer off and on for ten years for the Jonesborough Museum, music festival, Library, and environmental action group, and was, by invitation, the first Co-Chair of the Green Party of Tennessee, concentrating on issues of women's rights. In her spare time, she visits area galleries, attends concerts, ballets and other cultural events, studies seasonally with ETSU's popular, inexpensive and inclusive Adult Continued Learning classes at the Carnegie Library in Johnson City, reads fiction and non-fiction books and regional literature, and enjoys the company of new and older friends.
-- singer/songwriter Paul Simon
"As absurd as it sounds, the best of the best simply work harder at improving their performance than others do."
-- Supershrinks, by Scott Miller, Mark Hubble & Barry Duncan,
Psychotherapy Networker, November/December 2007
"There's nearly as much wisdom in rock lyrics about love, depression, anger, identity, grief, freedom, money, and sex and drugs as you'll find in any psychology textbooks."
-- psychologist Barry Farber, author of Rock 'n' Roll Wisdom
"what do you do/ anything for?/ you do it/ for what the mediaevals would call/ something like/ the Glory of God/ doing it for money/ that doesn’t do it;/ doing it for vanity,/ that doesn’t do it;/ doing it to justify a disorderly life,/ that doesn’t do it/ Look at Briggflatts here . . ./ It represents the best/ that the people were able to do/ they didn’t do it for gain;/ in fact, they must have/ taken a loss/ whether it is a stone next to a stone/ or a word next to a word,/ it is the glory-/ the simple craft of it/ and money and sex aren’t worth/ bugger-all, not/ bugger-all/ solid, common, vulgar words/ the ones you can touch,/ the ones that yield/ and a respect for the music . . ./ what else can you tell ‘em?"
-- Jonathan Williams, An Aubade* from Verlaine's Day from The Language They Speak is Things To Eat
Only about one-eighth of the revolving third planet orbiting around our sun is habitable. "The Earth's terrain varies greatly from place to place. About 70.8%[48] of the surface is covered by water, with much of the continental shelf below sea level. The submerged surface has mountainous features, including a globe-spanning mid-ocean ridge system, as well as undersea volcanoes,[32] oceanic trenches, submarine canyons, oceanic plateaus and abyssal plains. The remaining 29.2% not covered by water consists of mountains, deserts, plains, plateaus, and other geomorphologies."
-- Earth, Wikipedia
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Year
(sq mi)
1940 |
World
(197.0)
2,300.0 |
USA
(3.79)
131.7 |
CA
(.1637)
7.0
|
MA
(.0105)
4.3
|
FL
(.0658)
1.9
|
VA
(.0428)
2.8
|
TN
(.0421)
2.9
|
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*aubade [etymology: Fr., from Middle Fr. from Old Occitan aubada, from alba, auba dawn, from Vulgar L. alba, from L., feminine of albus white] 1: a song or poem greeting the dawn; 2 a: a morning love song b: a song or poem of lovers parting at dawn; 3: morning music
