'Tis the Season

November is my big selling season. This year both of my big shows fell in November, and it's been a hectic month!

First came ORA's annual Celebration of Art. It's our 8th annual art show, and it continues to grow and evolve.  We held it again at Mittleman Jewish Community Center, in the beautiful Ballroom. The show is just beautiful, with about 25 artists showing and selling their artwork.

Everyone agrees that the room is beautiful, and the show is beautiful. But everyone also agrees that the attendance is a challenge, seemingly for a different reason each year. We continue to ponder that problem. But in the meantime, I had an enjoyable day, and my sales were good enough.

Two weeks later came Hadassah's Chanukah Gift Fair, which returned to MJCC this year after many years at Neveh Shalom.  I welcomed the change, because of the neutral location and the superior space and lighting in the MJCC ballroom. But to be frank, the sales were dismal.

I've done this show for 14 years now, and feel a great loyalty to it. But it has been suffering a downward spiral since the economic downturn. Less paying customers = less quality vendors, and less quality vendors = less paying customers. It's a terrible conundrum, and I personally have a difficult decision to make. My sales for the day were definitely not worth all the time and effort that goes into doing a show.

This month I also opened my Etsy store, with just a few items at first.  In December I hope to post more items for sale, and give this thing a go!  www.etsy.com/shop/EstherBeads

Selling any kind of art is a tricky business, and I continue to look for the right path for my business.

Update on Goings On

Progress reports:

Art Spark was awesome! The folks from RACC said it was the best attendance they've ever had at one of these events. And we were so pleased to meet all these new people! Also, the Urban Farmer restaurant was SO very cool! I've never seen a restaurant like that, and it was extremely fun. Pictures soon.

Purim was wonderful! We worked really hard on our presentation, and it was worth it. With ten Disco song parodies spread out among the ten chapters of the Megillah, it was almost like a full-blown musical, and the audience was very receptive. Gershon and I both had solos, as well as a number of other choir members. Singing with a live band was so great, and I haven't seen so many platform shoes in decades!
Our friend Petra was kind enough to film some of it for us with my iPhone, so I'm in the process of uploading those videos to YouTube. The first one is up; you can see it at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AU948hA0JEE . Sorry about the mediocre quality, but hey, it's a phone!

The ORA exhibits continue in the lobby of MJCC, with my work among this week's featured artists. We set it up this morning, and it will be there until Friday at 2 pm. Next week will be the last exhibit in this series (and after that I'm gonna direct you to something really cool at Neveh Shalom).

Goings On

I've got a lot going on right now. First of all... Art Spark!
I hope you will be able to join us tomorrow as ORA hosts this month's Art Spark gathering.

What is Art Spark? It's a program of the Regional Arts & Crafts Council (RACC) to promote art in Portland. It's described by RACC as "a bi-monthly mingling for artists of all sorts to meet, discuss, blather, applaud and plot the growth of art in Portland." Each meeting is hosted by a different group, at a different restaurant, club, or bar.

This is a big coup for our group, and I hope lots of our friends will turn out to support us and have a good time. Each of the ORA artists will have one or two works on display, and Eddy and I will each do a very brief address, around 6 pm. The rest of the time is for schmoozing, networking, drinking, and socializing.

There will be raffle prizes, and a no-host bar all evening. Admission is free.

Thursday, March 17th, 5-7 pm
Urban Farmer Restaurant
(8th floor of The Nines Hotel)
525 SW Morrison
Portland

http://www.portlandartspark.com/


Then, this Saturday night is Purim! My favorite holiday, of course, starring Queen Esther. Gershon and I are co-starring in Neveh Shalom's musical Purim Schpiel, "Shushan Night Fever."

Gershon plays King Ahasueros, and I have a KILLER solo as.... wait for it.... Queen Vashti!! You have got to come hear Gershon singing the Village People, and me belting out "I Will Survive." I even bought gold platform shoes for the occasion!

Service begins at 7:30 in Birnbach Hall at Neveh Shalom. If you signed up for the dinner beforehand, you'll be pleasantly intoxicated by the time the service begins, and you'll enjoy the Disco theme all the more! Do come in costume, or you will feel out-of-place. Prizes for the best costumes, based on.... I have no idea what!






But wait! There's more! ORA has a series of exhibits all month in the lobby of MJCC. Each exhibit lasts for 5 days, and my work will be in the next one. The exhibit starts this Sunday, March 20th, and will be up till Friday afternoon. Stop by and take a look!

Crossing the Finish Line... Going Toward the Light!

Okay, boys and girls, the lamp is FINISHED!  And it's out of my hands, on its way to the gallery for our exhibit. Wow, I feel so strange with neither the lamp nor the chair hanging over my head!


This Thursday, ORA's  art exhibit opens at Elements Glass Gallery with a first-Thursday reception from 5:30 to 9 pm.  The theme of the exhibit is "LIGHT."  Please come and see the beautiful art works on display (including my lamp which you're sick of hearing about, but just dying to see) by our members and special guests.  There will be food, drink, music, and ART!!  Come celebrate with us.

Elements Glass Gallery
1979 NW Vaughn St.
Portland, OR 97209
503.228.0575

New Members are In!

I am so bleary-eyed!  It's been a long day in front of the screen, but I did it.... I made new web pages for our four new ORA members, and revised the "Artists" page that leads to each of us.  Exhausting!  But go take a look.... http://www.northwestjewishartists.org/artists.html

That grindstone i was talking about?  The Light project?  It will be a pleasure to get back to it, with no screen and no keyboard!  See you tonight at the Pre-JAM Slam!!!!  7 pm at MJCC.... fun and free!

Shell Beads

Today a market research person asked me what I would do if stranded on a desert island.  I said that after seeking food and water, I would probably collect shells and make them into beads.  This, of course, is a little warped.  But I'm feeling pretty warped right now, working round-the-clock on a beading project, I have beads on the brain.

I'm working on this massive project for our "Light" exhibit at Elements Glass next month. The jury is in a week, and I don't know if the project will be ready in time.  Also, our ORA meeting is tonight, and I'm not sure I'll have enough of a structure to bother showing it to the group.  I'll have to make that decision later today, but over the weekend I finally made peace with myself about the jury next week.  I gave myself permission not to submit it.  If I'm not done in time, so be it.  I have a few other pieces to submit anyway, so that might be all there is.  I'm not going to be stressed about it anymore, because it is not constructive.  And now that I'm feeling more stoic about it, it's moving along faster, and will probably (I hope) be done in time.

I do, however, need to learn from this experience.  How did I get into this last-minute position? Again?  It's mostly that "can't say no" thing, which eats up a lot of my time.  I really have to pick my volunteer commitments more carefully.  And then there's the old time management thing, which is tied with losing weight and quitting smoking for the number-one most common vice that people strive every year to control.  At this age, am I ever really going to lose weight?  Or manage my time better?  It seems less and less likely each year, but I have to hang onto hope, no matter how dim it may be, and keep trying to improve.  Find little shells, search for a way to make them into beads.... keep trying....

Light and Chocolate

I don't really like working on art with an assigned theme.  I find it stressful, especially because it usually implies a specific exhibit with a specific deadline.  And yet, something really good always comes from the challenge.  Right now, our ORA members are working with the self-inflicted theme of  "Light," which seemed a logical choice, since that's what our name means, and because the exhibit will be in a glass gallery.  But then I got to thinking I should do something with an actual light source shining through the beadwork.  Of course this leads to all sorts of challenges, and surprises too. Of course, in the end, it's going to be a gorgeous project, and I'll be really proud of it, but during the process I feel stressed and nervous.

I know that some people enjoy that nervous feeling, stepping out of the comfort zone.  But personally, it makes me want chocolate.  A lot of chocolate.  Hmmmmm... now THAT would be an interesting theme.....







Our exhibit "Light"  will be held at:
Elements Glass Studio/Gallery/School
1979 NW Vaughn St.
Portland, OR 97209
503.228.0575
 
It will open with a First-Thursday reception on March 4, 2010.  Music, food, wine, artists. The whole nine yards.  Yikes!  I hope there will be chocolate....

I'm a dot-com!

Okay, I finally did it.  I decided a long time ago to register my own domain name and pay for commercial hosting. But I never did it, mainly because I couldn't decide on the domain name.  With Yahoo closing down Geocities later this month, my existing website is going to disappear, so now the pressure was on.  This indecision's killin' me.... so I asked some friends their opinions:  EstherBeads  or CrownJewels?  Can you guess what the results of this little poll were?  You guessed it -- a tie!

What to do? What to do?  Did a little more research today, and found that the Crown Jewels thing is a little sticky, although I think I could have CrownJewels.net.  Made an executive decision to go with EstherBeads.com and I registered the domain name and ordered hosting service.  Yay!  So now I'm all grown-up, just like the big kids.  All I have to do now is get the website established, and then upload all those ridiculous pages.  I should start over from scratch, but I just don't have the time right now, and I want to have something there when people come home from the 10/25 show with my card in their hands.

Slowly, slowly, I'm getting there.  After the first of the year, I'm going to get serious about re-doing the pages, and getting shopping carts for myself and for the ORA site.  Dream big, little girl!

Time Flies

Wow, strange year! I haven't written anything for my blog, mainly because I'm busy trying to keep the ORA blog current. I'm not cut out for two blogs. Oh well, no one reads this one anyway.

So let's see, what happened since my last entry on January 28?
Oh yeah: Facebook! This thing has been incredible! I'm up to around 200 "friends," including a wonderful number of old Solel friends. It's been so fun to catch up with people I haven't seen in 35 years! And new connections too... people you know vaguely become real "friends" when you read each other's musings on FB. I find it fascinating, and gratifying.

Also this year: L.A. in January, Safam concert at CNS, RACC computer class, the crazy shit surrounding Robby's Bar Mitzvah, Pesach at the Conroys' (dining with Duke), Maimouna, trip to Oakland (sick as a dog), all the heartache around CNS releasing Cantor Shivers, the farewell dinner and Robby-Solomon-Shabbat, Dana and Craig came to visit, Gus Hanawalt's Hawaiian wedding, Micah's UofO graduation, Sonia and I went up to visit Lucille, Lucille visited here, Jonah's Bar Mitzvah in Boston, Judith Berdichevsky passed away, Micah got a real job, Joel screwed up in schoool, Nacho's seizures, my continuing efforts with Mary Lou to find a suitable med, Marty Berger's Bar Mitzvah, our 35th anniversary trip to Vancouver and Seattle, Kim and Paris visited here last week, plus lots of Mah Jongg, many books read, and lots of ORA meetings.

Well! No wonder I haven't written... I've been kind of busy! Still, it's hard to believe that this calendar year is 3/4 finished, and we just concluded RH and Yom Kippur 5770!

And now our big ORA show is only 4 weeks away! Am I ready? Not even close! I was thinking of writing about the Bead Fest show this past weekend, but I think I should go do some beading instead.

New Web Page

I get frustrated when things can't be 'just right' or totally complete. So I wrestled with making a new webpage for our recent ORA exhibits.

There were two separate shows, but they had related themes, so some pieces were in both shows. I didn't want that much repetition, so I decided to just do one big page.

But then, I don't have pictures of all the pieces displayed; not even close! So I had to readjust my expectations, and tried to have each artist represented by at least one piece. It's not perfect, but it will do. And the page came out pretty nicely!

Take a look, and tell me what you think:
http://www.northwestjewishartists.org/ExodusMiriam.htmlhttp://www.northwestjewishartists.org/ExodusMiriam.html


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Takin' Care of Business

Well, this was an interesting day! We had our big meeting at Neveh Shalom to review things for the art show, and get our booth assignments. Rosanne had us draw numbers out of a hat, and I got a great spot. A corner spot, so I can have two long tables, plus the half-circle rounding the corner. I've never had that much space! This should be interesting.

Some people were happier than others with their assignments, of course. But it was heartening to see people trading, and working together to make things work for everyone. Robin got the stage, and she was happy with it. I was glad it wasn't me, because of the lack of handicapped access.

I also managed to get photos of the final "hands" for the ORA website... Lynn's and Laurie's. Truly a victory of persistence! Will finish revising the ORA Contact page tonight. What a relief to finally have that little project done!

But the really amazing thing today was that the group had a surprise gift for me! In gratitude for my work on the ORA website, they all pitched together and raised some money for two gift certificates. One is for a luxury pedicure, and the other is for a significant chunk of $$ to be used on web design classes and software! Gee, how did they know I need (or want) them? Because Gary advised them. And they all managed to keep it a secret! I was truly touched, and very surprised. (The card depicted here plays "Takin' Care of Business" when you open it.)

This is getting exciting. And a little scary.... I'm gonna be a web designer.... I still think that's very funny!