Door Jambs Drawings

Mom's House (part 2) « The Periodic Fable

When friends would come over they would compare against us… though my friend Scott Storey called our family “Land of the Giants” (after a 1970s TV show ) so it was more often a comment about how tall we all were. My mother was 6’0″ and very self-conscious about being too tall, especially while she was growing up. My father was 6’4″. We kids are as follows: Matt 6’6″, Joe 6’3″, Mark Fletcher (labeled as “Pookie” in the above photo) 6’7″, and Liz 5’10″.

Gradually the edge of the frame got too busy and the marks went onto the door jamb. I don’t know where mom got the idea for this, but we all thought it was cool… and I recommend it for other family’s homes.

There was a point when mom took down the very short drapes that hung at the top of the kitchen windows. Mom took down the drapes at some point, in the mid-1980s. (Just found notes on this in my sketchbook number 11 from 1987.) I think because they were getting ratty, and she was intending to replace them. That left some wood sitting bare for a while. I got the idea to paint this piece directly onto that bare wood:

, a musical by Stephen Sondheim . It’s a play (later a movie, too) that my mom loved and had seen in the theater numerous times and had listened to countless times. Mrs. Lovett is a pie-maker. Sweeney Todd is a barber upstairs. Todd kills people and Lovett bakes them into pies. It’s very dark, but also really incredibly moving and wonderful musically and lyrically

When I was initially proposing the idea to mom (and I think that my sister and maybe other folks were in this discussion) the suggestion came up to do the piece a bit more along the lines of the song A Little Priest – the song where Lovett and Todd initially get the idea to make corpses into pies. They muse about all sorts of professions that they might make into pies: “a politician so oily it’s served on a doily/put it on a bun/well you never know if it’s going to run”. It could have been fun to take lines from that song and put those on the board, stuff like “Try the priest – it’s too good at least!”

I wanted to, and did, make it a bit more subtler (that word is in the song “Butler? Subtler.”) Even when Lovett’s business was booming due to “fresh supplies” of Todd slayings, to the consuming public it remained a secret that there was human flesh in the meat.  So I figured it would be good to not be too overt… which is more just a made-up rule/approach that worked for me.