progress on cart
I don't normally sew, but I aim to make a baldachin for my edible-body-painting cart (which J and I will be picking up the lumber for this weekend). So this afternoon I shopped at the fabric district in downtown LA. It's blocks and blocks of cramped mazes stuffed with dizzying piles of fabric rolls, and can be exhausting if one attempts to cover too much ground in one day. The stores are all owned by dark foreigners, some Jewish and some other. One nicely answers their hungry greetings and ambles about trying to collect one's thoughts, perhaps continuing to be pestered, then thanks them and leaves or else makes a decision and then haggles with them. Some of them have such pronounced ethnic features that they seem like racially stereotypical caricatures. I didn't recognize the languages they spoke among themselves, other than Spanish. I had thought I might hear Hebrew, but I don't think I have. Anyway, I found a store with a promising selection of ornate and nicely draping baldachin fabrics, picked up enough 1$/yd fabric to make a test of the pattern, and also some pretty mesh which will be part of J's ice-cream server suit, to be sewn by someone with far more costuming skill than I have.

Later I saw a production of Eugene O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms. O'Neill is apparently the only US playwright to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Granted, he got it for some other play, but it seems incredible that he could have exited the brain of someone who thought DUTE was in good taste long enough to write something nice. Whining can be very entertaining, as witnessed by so much literature being based on it. But despite the promising ways in which these characters' lives were messed up, their whining was annoying. It wasn't even as good as real people's on LJ, because it was mannered for the stage. Not well, in my opinion.

The best part of today was hanging out with my sister and having yummy Vietnamese roll-it-yourself rice-paper packages with herbs and pork.