For the Love of Art

1. For the Love of Art Meet the Characters

2. Bridget • It is very special to have good wazicat. People will look upon as very important and respect a person with good wazicat- even a young child. • I love the painting over her bed from when she was three, with the stick arms and legs attached to the great big smiling head, proud of its one giant tooth. • God, I should go back to teaching. • Get in there and fight the good fight for our country’s youth and help rid the schools of mediocrity; Mediocrity with a capital M and Teacher with a capital T. • I was a dime a dozen. • Fear alone won’t keep me out of the classroom now. • My spirit is aching and beautiful. I am a mother and I am beautiful. • I answer the door thinking, this can’t possibly be the-rest-of-my-life.

3. Kelsey • I just hate the idea that he is the one who is messing around, yet if I am the one who calls him on it- I will be sacrificing the future of my family. • Martha’s Vineyard in September, huh? • They are fully loaded. Did I mention the gourmet restaurant- no children allowed! • Yes but this is a free vacation with friends, not family. Way different. Besides, it’s just one little week. Did I mention, free?! • Man, I get resentful when they don’t appreciate all they have! • I’ve just counted out the number of mojito cocktails I am going to have on my first day on the Vineyard by the number of times she has said the word unfair. • My heart is racing, and I swear if I stay this way any longer it will explode out of my chest.

4. Dani • With his spiky hair atop his meaty head, he started calling everyone asshole at age three, and to be perfectly honest, I really haven’t done much even two years later to help correct that. He get’s it from me you know. • I glance back at the tome of directions I’ve left on the kitchen counter realizing now that I’ve written way too much. William won’t get past the first page. • I stumble down the walkway toward the driveway soaking in the perfectly good compliment on my mothering, and I think he is right. I am not a perfect mom, but I am a perfectly good one. • We want to feel completely taken away this week. • We push against the wind with our chins held high and our wings splayed fully. We are free! Let this ride take us away. • Clink, clink went our glasses, and from that sweet but early to market little grape, or was it the welcoming champagne, the real fun was only just beginning.

5. Arthur • What am I supposed to do? Did you hear that arrogant prick detective? Insinuating I . . . • Oh great. Thank you Inspector Clouseau. No, my dog does not bite and yes, that is not my dog. What are you thinking?! • They laugh at my expense and I try to play it off cool, you know boys don’t cry. • For the painter, it is nearly impossible not to fall in love with the subject. I more often than not choose to paint objects. You cannot fall in love with a freakin’ leaf. • Now I am like that desperate cartoon guy on a deserted island. Really I picture myself helplessly waiting to be rescued, and in the meantime, everything here looks like a succulent roast turkey. • As my feet meet each concrete slab of sidewalk, I seem to be in some preternatural stride that places my feet so that they effortlessly miss the cracks, sometimes only by a hair. • My mouth seems overflowing with self pity and I am ashamed of myself.

6. Hal • I don’t just happen to be here, and I don’t just happen to be homeless. • Consumerism! People! Stop buying so much crap! • I cannot even see to where I am going, but there is to be no more crying. I am through with crying. • I do not care to get too close to the sculptures, but even from a distance they are like having a bit of company. • Oh, as much as the artist longs to behold Nature’s beauty, only small pieces of her can ever be disciplined by an artist’s palette. To get outdoors and exist with her is the only way to know that. • “Now hold on. The last thing I want to see is anyone’s family struggling. Especially not you guys. You seem so friendly.” I risk the sarcasm. • Suddenly, Evan comes at me like some kind of mad bulldozer, nearly knocks me off my bike. • I have played that day over and over again every day in my mind. There is no erasing it.

7. Holden • Naturally, I get a job as a bartender in Cambridge’s Harvard Square dispensing spirits mostly to the tired souls of professors and hopeful Harvard Wanabees during happy hour and to the over-privileged, over-intellectualized, over-entitled Harvardites and the townies secretly harboring resentment for them up until closing time. • The Transcendental movement- it’s like classic rock for me. • I love stretching out of the brick and mortar of Cambridge over the pavement of Belmont and Waltham to the more idyllic roads of Lexington and Concord. By the last stretch to Walden Pond, I am in my element pedaling past stone walls to ride the winding and dipping deciduous tunnels and streaming past the foliated edges of farmer’s fields. • It is like an exaggerated calm that my otherwise affliction with constant motion can completely relish. • Swaying across the surface of the water aiming in my direction, it was determinately heading straight for me. • It was like an initiation into the club of the most profound poets. • I have wondered a lot of things about a lot of folks, but this I think is about to get really interesting.

8. Evan • I’m not much of a thinkin’ man sometimes. These hands, well, they do most of the thinking for me. • If the piece still moves when it is standing still, then it has a spirit. If that does not reach you somehow man, I don’t know what will. • I toss in a classical guitar CD and open out the French doors to the balcony and gaze out at the hurrying tumbling waves of the ocean, with her broken crests lapping over in an undying cycle. • Time keeps moving forward, but all my work dangles precariously in my past, as if at some point in the near future, they will all fall and crash into pieces of my jagged life- all broken and ruined. • That I might touch her, but then I would fall in love with her. • I right the sketch again and sure enough, there she is. • The dullness and loneliness dissipate into the air with the forward motion of my legend casting them off once more. I hold it out proudly when I am finished and stare at it as if it is some kind of premonition.

9. Sean • Every hour the Chief is haranguing me about that damn painting. • If we choose to stay here, I would be spending the rest of my days feeling like I was always out there, right on the edge always looking over my shoulder. • They say worry can kill a man, and it would be wicked ironic for me to work all these years as a cop to then die of a heart attack my first year in retirement all because I could never quite settle my mind. • I think if I ever find the ones we call “they” I will arrest them for premeditated manslaughter for trying to worry us all to an early grave. • It makes my blood boil. Really, who are the criminals? • By the Native Wompanoag, their word for this place is Noe-pe, the land surrounded by bitter waters. • I reach over and wipe a tear over a blue paint smudge upon her cheek with my thumb.

10. Julia • It was only rated a category two hurricane. - Lesson number two; the weather can dramatically change the playing field, so never ever underestimate Mother Nature. • But here we are older now. And more mature, right? I am no longer some self-conscious, approval seeking kid. Right? - Lesson number three; it is possible to grow to love what you once feared. • I back up and angle a shot of his silhouette before the window, before the TV, and I think it is kind of profound- like shooting into mirrors. - Lesson number four; it is not all about me. • Folks were pouring out of everywhere with video cameras trembling in their hands. - Lesson number five; you can run but you cannot hide. • The whole point of this lighthouse was to warn maritimers of the hazardous underwater ledge nefariously extending out from the cliffs like giant talons of a determinately hungry sea monster in wait of its prey. They aptly named it Devil’s bridge. • The fifty one foot canonical beacon stands umbilical, compounding its significance in alternating pulses of red and white in fifteen second rotations. • The beach had become the parking lot and water was everywhere. • He was being pulled under the inky surface, holding on, hanging on while being pounded by the swells, fighting no longer for his life but for the love of his wife.

11. Stella • There is no stepping lightly in these shoes. If you are a local, then you have got family one way or another. • I would drop everything instantly and go to him like I was his live long mother, and he was my son returning to me. • You are in every word a mother, an Every-Mom to the Earth. • Because you live to love and love to live - and because of what your heart drum will give - now we might love to live and live to love. • Layer upon layer, she would coat the remnants of that old boat as if she were caressing her husband’s soul and trying to make him alive again. • She would stalk around the place purposefully as if searching for some mysterious thing, searching for something or someone she would never find. • She had no idea the desperate situation she would find me. • Why is it that the arts always suffer? It is so like the beating heart. • Now it is finally happening, when before no one actually thought this day would ever arrive. • Down at the Beetlebung Café, the beetle, a heavy headed tool used for crushing like a mallet, the bung, the stopper in the hole in a cask or barrel. Down at the Beetlebung, residents of Martha’s Vineyard moved forward in an assembled line. Thousands of feet, residents and tourists, crushing forward in that line like a finely tuned machine. The pistons hammering away literally fueled by caffeinated passion, ultimately churning connections between people and art. We work to make this happen one beetle after another. Yes we do!