Teresa Bruce's Blog, page 29

Draft Test

This is me trying to save a draft rather than publish a post. If it works I can make a huge lot of them, matched to the media I’ll name and upload. Circumventing HootSuite

 

An Upcoming Series about The Drive

(WASHINGTON, DC) The Drive: today’s date minus 14 years

This is a sample of a blog series I’ll be ramping up starting on Mother’s Day. Each day I’ll post a blog about a photo from the ultimate road trip: the one I took TWICE down the Pan-American highway that became my latest memoir, The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan-American Highway. The book goes on sale June 13th — and from May 14th on you can be an armchair traveler, along for the entire year-long drive. Don’t worry, following this blog series won’t ruin the story for you. There will be no spoilers — just bonus material that complements the book. Journal entries, the occasional video, tall tales, ghost stories, crazy close calls, even crazier people we met on the road, maps, B&W photos processed in South America, 44-year-old color slides, and stunning digital images from 13 countries that ended up on the cutting room floor. Like this one, in Guatemala, ten days before Wipeout left us:

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Hashtag help my PPT

Hi friends, trying out some new sharing tools. I thought y’all might enjoy this piece. I get to work with terrific designers to create these tips for PPT presenters who’ve gone “design blind.” If your slides typically look like this:

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Then jot down these three tips:

for lists of SHORT sentences, no more than three bullet points per slide
use paragraph returns between bullets
Use 30 point for headings, 20 point for body text

Same content now looks like this:

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Pictures that should have loaded with ea

Pictures that should have loaded with earlier post http://ow.ly/i/tHbS2

THE ART OF TITLES: This is a short piece

THE ART OF TITLES:

This is a short piece on the psychology of what we call ourselves. Mothers or Other Mothers. Grandma or Merma. The last one is my personal masterpiece. Two-year-old Helena was born with a fabulous grandmother from each of her parents. A third would be redundant at best and confusing at worst.

So I lobbied for the title of mermaid grandma: merma, of course. It makes perfect sense to her, after many mermaid stories, videos, earrings, dolls and various other mermaphenalia.

While this title represents my personal best it is not, however, the best title in the universe. That goes to a self-taught artist from Elloree, South Carolina whose stunning altar-of-tinfoil graces the National Portrait Gallery. If only I had thought of “Director, Special Projects for the State of Eternity.”

http://ow.ly/EYjq30aK7lC http://ow.ly/i/tH9uL http://ow.ly/i/tH9wN

Psyched about blurbs

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If you know anyone in Portland please sh

If you know anyone in Portland please share this event so we can pack the premiere! http://ow.ly/ad7R300rERz

Why my granny makes the Dowager Countess of Gratham look like a pushover

My grandmother Nellie has no idea why the staff of her nursing home ask if she’s related to Dame Maggie Smith: she’s never seen an episode of Downton Abbey. But if I put on a fancy hat and tell her I am Lady Mary she’d squeeze my hand and agree. She can still place a face, just not with a name. Or, as she puts it, her “forgetter works real good.”

Even in the advanced stages of dementia my granny can still summon a good one-liner. She’s had 92 years of practice. I’ve been on the Lady Mary end of her sharp tongue for quite a few of those years. Like the time I told her Ronald Reagan seemed like a good president and that I was joining the Young Republicans club at college.

“I will not stand for a granddaughter of mine to display such utter ignorance of history,” she wrote in the first of weekly letters and newspaper clippings she mailed to me until the day I registered as a Democrat.

Then there was the time she asked if I was making the same salary as the men at a newspaper where I had a paid internship. I said no – the only other intern was married and had two kids to support so of course he got paid more. It was as if I’d single-handedly unraveled the equal rights amendment.

“We did not work so hard for so long to be forgotten so soon,” she fumed. I learned that she had always wanted to go to college, to become a geologist. But the rich Texas uncle she turned to for tuition said the money would be wasted on a woman. She’d just drop out, get married and have babies.

So she never got to go to college but she did end up having babies, and more than a few marriages. One of them was to a union man, who encouraged her to organize the women where she worked: the ice cream counter at a department store in Portland, Oregon. That’s where she really started running circles around the Dowager Countesses of her era.

Granny considers Gov. Kulongoski one of “her kids”

She not only unionized her shop, she became the Vice President and Political Director of Oregon’s AFL-CIO and chief labor lobbyist at the state capitol. I wore a wooden sandwich board sign hand painted with “vote for my granny” when I was eleven. She lost her only attempt at elected office but defeat made her stronger. She went to China with a television reporter and unleashed her righteous indignation on Oregon’s own Nike Corp for the unsafe working conditions in its factories. She became the kind of power broker usually reserved for good-ol’-boys in smoke-filled rooms. When she backed a politician they won the race but lost the chance to ever back down on her issues. Or skip one of her birthday parties.

She gave speeches and kept the notes, marked up for pauses and dramatic emphasis. I’m reading them now because my aunt has asked me to prepare an obituary when the time comes. These typewritten pages are a window to a different world. In one speech my granny coined a phrase for the women she was recruiting: the “until” workers. They were content to make less than men because they were only working “until” the furniture was paid off, “until” Junior got through school or “until” their husbands got their jobs back.

I can picture her in her gold-rimmed glasses, wide-collared pant suits, burnt orange lipstick and hair-sprayed up-do, lecturing women who couldn’t visualize themselves as equal to men. Even the Dowager Countess would have cowered. But not me.

I got to be her Lady Mary. My tough-as-nails granny knew exactly when to scold and when to support her oldest granddaughter. After outliving four husbands, the one thing she never attempted to organize was my heart. When I broke up with my first, too-sweet boyfriend in college he wrote to my grandmother, begging her to make me reconsider. She only told me to make sure to find an equal match the next time. When I introduced her to the man I eventually married, my then 80-year-old granny shook Gary’s hand and gave him her business card.

This Sunday he will sit next to me and watch the final episode of Downton Abbey. There will be a box of tissues and a bottle of Tequila in front of me and when I sob at the sight of the actress who reminds me so much of my granny, he will suggest I propose a toast instead. To Maggie Smith for playing a reflection of the woman Nellie Fox actually is.

Getty Images

 

On Forgiving Go Set A Watchman

Source: On Forgiving Go Set A Watchman

The lovely Josefina Blanc — educator, activist, mother an...

The lovely Josefina Blanc — educator, activist, mother and all around Renaissance Woman. Life’s good when you’re a former model, photographed in dreamy natural light by Gary Geboy

thebeaufortportraitproject

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