Monsoon in Raptorville with owl and hawks

When it's monsoon season in raptorville, and the temperature is below 100, I go for an evening walk. First, a visit with the young great horned owl who watched my every move

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until potential dinner flew close by and turned the owl's head

As the sky began to darken, nighthawks flew above me, in numbers I've never seen before, all heading in the same direction, like the bats that fly out from under the bridge each night. There were bats flying also, but they fluttered like errant bits of confetti.

A Cooper's hawk arrived. I focused on it, but from behind me I heard a man's voice calling in a loud whisper, "Miss, oh, Miss, look here." He was pointing to a second hawk in a different tree. 

He introduced me to his dog, Gracie, her back end wagging while her front end was poised to escape. The man directed me not to make eye contact with her if I wanted her to approach me. "She's my rescue. I don't know what happened to her before I got her, but it wasn't good."

I was hoping to see Coyote, as I often do 

Coyote drawing Beth Surdut www.bethsurdut.com

but instead, I hooked up with  Maxfield Parrish, who'd come to  paint the sky.

 I walked home, watching the rain walk over the mountains.

Nuns, Pagans, and being fully human

I’ve been best friends with a pagan for 30 years, so you’ll understand how unsettling it is to see her dressed up as Mother Superior, a role so unlike the range of wildly experimental and classic pieces in her repertoire.

Actress Lynn Sharp Spears Climbs Every  Mountain

   Considering Lynn Sharp Spears is a professional actress/singer/director/set designer/make-up artist (that’s a short list) and has the voice of a powerful fallen angel, I know why she is currently receiving standing ovations in The Sound of Music in Baltimore.

    Nuns and art also convene in a life-sized cabinet carved by Massachusetts-based Nancy Carroll, whose business is aptly called Luna-C Arts. 

Artist Nancy Carroll gets into a nun's drawers

I profiled Nancy for The Middlesex Beat in 2002:

There’s nothing quite like a classic black dress and red high heels to make  a statement, especially if the black is a nun’s habit and the red shoe seems, in this case, to be on the wrong foot.

“There’s a full human being in here,” said artist Nancy Carroll as she approached her sculptural cabinet, “Bad Habits.” She put her hands on the cold-water faucet knobs of the nun’s breasts and when she opened the doors; dance music started to play. Inside was all pink and fluff-- pink Marshmallow Fluff®.

            “Go ahead,” urged Carroll, as I gingerly pulled open the nun’s drawers edged in carved ruffles and filled with memorabilia of Carroll’s experience as a novice. (She did not become a nun.)

            When she tallies up the time involved in making her basswood nun cabinet, she figures 330 hours of planning, designing, carving, joining and painting and, oh yes, 53 years.

I find the idea of being pigeon-holed into any particular style antithetical to being an artist and a person. Although their unique abilities to portray nuns made the news for both Lynn Sharp Spears  and Nancy Carroll , each artist continually expands into uncategorizable realms linked by curiosity about the next step forward. When someone asked an NPR correspondent to describe what I did, she responded that I was "a creative polymath." I think that describes us all--without boundaries. As Nancy said, “There’s a full human being in here.”

Looking like Benazir Bhutto

Buffalo Beth in Bali
©Beth Surdut 2007
In 1999, after a trip to Bali where I was repeatedly told I looked like Benazir Bhutto, I wrote a somewhat snarky piece called “Benazir and Cher” about the public’s desire to identify me with famous people and my desire to be known for my own accomplishments as an artist. To my sorrow, but not to my surprise, Benazir Bhutto, born the same year as I was, was murdered in the last week of 2007.
The Balinese villagers who called me Benazir and held up their children to look at me as my driver negotiated through their festival parade were not the only ones who saw a resemblance. After 9/11, juggling a dual career as an artist and journalist, I was assigned to interview a Pakistani terrorism expert in Massachusetts. Before meeting him in person, I mentioned the Bhutto connection, thinking it might help us bond. He invited me to come to his home to meet his family and to break the fast at the end of Ramadan. As the day lengthened, he told me that the reason he left Pakistan was because he was informed that his death had been ordered by Benazir’s father. So much for bonding! I was thinking that maybe I should have picked a more benign famous person—you know, like Joan Baez--when he said, “I think you’re smarter.”
A couple of years later I was at a party chatting with a Pakistani journalist who had interviewed Bhutto extensively. An American man married to a Pakistani woman said, “I think Beth looks like Benazir Bhutto!” His wife and the journalist chorused, “No!” and decided I looked like Rajiv Gandhi’s wife. Has anyone told these women that they look like me?
I was emailed by a guy in India saying he was writing an article and asking for pictures of me if I really looked like Bhutto. Having seen that someone had landed on my website by typing the search terms “Bhutto+nude+pictures”, I suspiciously asked him what periodical he was writing for and, no surprise, he disappeared.
What I wrote eight years ago, seemingly flippant about a leader I truly admire, ended with this:
“In Hawaii, after being ignored by a maître d' of a restaurant that catered to the famous and infamous, I considered renting a limo and going there dressed as Bhutto... Then I reconsidered, figuring some crazed assassin would pick that same night to make a political statement to the world. I think after all I would rather be killed for who I really am.”
May her courage and spirit continue after her death.