Dear Dearest Mary,

I'm new to glasses. A year? Year and a half?

Doesn't sound very new but as the only one in a family of five who didn't need them I thought my eyes were special. Made of tougher stuff. Thought I might need reading glasses when I was old, where old = some far-flung future where I am suddenly blessed with the ability to knit and the personality transplant needed to choose to craft instead of reading or writing.

But then reading was making me sleepy. I chalked it up to pregnancy. To being tired from work, life, baby, caring for my mother. Then to pregnancy again. Repeat.

When I finally stepped into an optometrist's office for the first time since my eldest brother hit my eye with a small hard ball (my fault for looking skyward trying to see where it had gone) -- I didn't just need reading glasses. I needed progressives which sounds really awesomely liberal but just means I'm three levels of blind.

Getting glasses meant the world was suddenly HD. This was cool -- the skyline suddenly went from wide watercolor to so sharp I actually heard Rhapsody In Blue when I looked at it. And also very not cool -- oy my face! I never worried about wrinkles, it turned out, because I couldn't see them.

Don't know how it is in Denmark by you, but here all glasses available are still of the skinny early Tina Fey variety. On her: Sex-hay. On me: Bifocal Betty. My husband kept asking me if I was angry. I wanted a pair of owls. Not chunky black hipster frames but ethereal floaty Ruth Bader Ginsberg's or a pair of in-your-face Lynda Carter's. And not just for fashion -- it's hard to get a progressive into a skinny frame which I learned the hard way. Those small glasses, my first pair, made reading in bed like trying to spy on your neighbors through a venetian blind.

These specs, above, are designer sunglasses. Purple frames. It's all I could find and what I'm wearing until the comet of large eyeglass frame fashion swings by this planet again.

And yeah, I totally look like your uncle Morty.



xoxo,

Me

My friend Bob has a new book out -- again! It's gotten stunning reviews. Here's a video featuring Bob himself, currently being shown on TV.

Dinosaur vs. Bedtime from bob shea on Vimeo.
Isn't that awesome? Fer sure.

Buy a copy or five of Dinosaur vs. Bedtime right here.

Strike it from on the record!

My old pal Bryan Tucker (who I once interviewed for Comedy Central's blog) writes for Saturday Night Live. Or rather, he doesn't write for SNL, because they are on strike.

Here's a fabulous article he wrote about the striker's life that appears in today's NY Post. Funny and so fresh it's still flipping! And you should read it, yes indeedie.

Who dat?


Happy Birthday to me!

Don't miss my good friend Stephen Gardner's ambitious, awesome new blog, Sketch of the Day. Steve is a incredible professional illustrator whose precise and beautiful works I've blogged about before (here too). Partly inspired by the MA in illustration he recently completed (while also working as a pro illustrator), on Sketch of the Day he shares his sketches, and dashed off thoughts, letting himself be more experimental and in the moment.

I personally love his really quick slices of life. they are like poetry. Only someone with so much training could make something so simple, so beautiful. Like this parking pic in Crown Heights Brooklyn...


And this nakedy lady at the Society of Illustrators...


So if I were you, or your were I, I'd check him out everyday, right here.