Women Over 40 Rock!

I recently checked out the websites of two friends I went to school with in Oklahoma in the 50s…two artists…and it suddenly struck me that growing up in the midwest in the 50s wasn’t, as I thought at the time, a one-way trip to stay-at-home-cook-clean-&have-no-opinions mom-land after all! Kate Kline has been working with fabrics her whole life…I remember her dressing her dolls when we were eight. She has moved on since then to include dressing herself, quilting, welding, pottery, painting and drawing. And my other friend, Sharlee Kuhns has a love affair with colors, as can be seen in her “pillow-face” collection of circus characters.

Not that many of my friends, including these, have not been homemakers and moms and workers, but they also opened themselves up to life, including all the slings and arrows as well as the bouquets, and processed it by expressing it in their artistic endeavors. And I don’t know about them, but looking back over my own life, I see that art and the appreciation of it helped me survive a less than ideal childhood marked with divorce, near poverty, and the early death of my mother. Although I became an actor, I really believe that an art teacher I had in grade school literally showing me how to absorb everything around me, helped me be a really good actor. - One of my fondest memories is his suddenly having our entire class get up, go outside, lay on the ground and look at what was a sky of amazing clouds that day. George Calvert was his name, and he was an artist as well as a teacher, and so committed to opening young people’s eyes that he gave classes after school as well.

Every time I see an article, or hear a news story, about one of our schools having to cut their budget, and doing it by cutting classes in the arts, I think about Mr. Calvert and how much he gave me at the time when I needed, and could absorb it, the most. Then when I visited these friends’ websites I thought of him again…although they both studied with many, one also had Mr. Calvert in grade school, and the other lists him as one of her teachers. Could it be that he helped open them up to the world around them as well?

And how many others? What a shame that society in general doesn’t seem to realize the importance of the arts in our lives and how they can be used to draw (no pun intended) young people onto the yellow brick road leading to better lives for themselves and those around them. I, for one, hope that the next rowdy protest I hear about is one outside a school that is cutting its arts classes!

Judith Art-Is-Indispensable Drake, blogger for In The Trenches Productions, The First Entertainment Website Celebrating the Power and Beauty of Women Over 40