A couple of pix of the progress on this box. The stitching is beautiful and not terribly difficult but holy Hannah! Getting that top sewn together was a challenge. I still have the bottom and the little pincushions that go inside the top and bottom to go. I just love the blue and white. As my firend Becky says it is so "crisp". I ordered some Carrie's Creations threads yesterday and I would love to make some more of these boxes with those!
"Be a first rate version of yourself, not a second rate version of someone else."
– Judy Garland
I saw this on the Morning Show this morning. This is a 19 year old who with 2 friends, went and lived in an assisted living facility for the summer. The interview was great, the clips really heart touching. His blog adds more to the stories and the movie will be shown on Cinemax tonight I believe.
From the NY Times
By MIKE HALE
Published: January 15, 2008
Tammy Signorile, a sharp-witted 95-year-old with a klaxon voice that seldom rests, is one of the stars of the documentary “Andrew Jenks, Room 335.” Late in the film, in a rare moment of sentiment, she offers a philosophy of life: “It doesn’t take much to make somebody feel good. Say something nice to them, tell them how nice they are instead of looking for defects, instead of looking for something they’re not doing right.”
In that spirit I won’t dwell on the fatuous self-regard and not-quite-believable naïveté of Mr. Jenks, a New York University film school student who made “Room 335” when he was 19. Let’s just say that the residents of Harbor Place, the assisted-living center in Florida where he lived and filmed for a month in the summer of 2005, seem more genuinely curious about him than he does about them.
But still, after Mr. Jenks spends the first six minutes of the film explaining his mission (“I want to move in because I feel like I could actually learn a lot from old people. They’ve lived life longer than anyone else”), he takes his camera into a world that’s usually invisible and shines a light on a population that many of us would just as soon forget. There’s something to be said for that, even if the light doesn’t reveal much we don’t already know about the lives and opinions of the elderly.
Among the several hundred residents of Harbor Place, Mr. Jenks has no trouble finding people who, like Ms. Signorile, are articulate and entertaining and more than willing to play to his camera. In the course of the month he’s also present for moments, embarrassing or harrowing, where the camera seems like an almost criminal invasion of privacy. The residents mostly just seem to be glad to have company.
The institutional setting of “Andrew Jenks, Room 335,” being shown on Tuesday night as part of Cinemax’s “Reel Life” series, inevitably calls to mind the work of the documentarian Frederick Wiseman, maker of “Titicut Follies,” “Hospital” and “Near Death.” The contrast in styles, of course, couldn’t be greater: where Mr. Wiseman is famously self-effacing, Mr. Jenks is ever present, seemingly in every frame, paying his puppy-dog attentions to the old folks and desperately wanting them to like him.
Ah well, I said I wouldn’t dwell. Let’s give the last word to Mr. Jenks, who, after a month of recording the dignity, good humor and forbearance of his temporary neighbors, does in fact learn something. “They’re just such incredible people,” he says. “I never realized that’d be the case.”
ANDREW JENKS, ROOM 335
Cinemax, Tuesday night at 7, Eastern and Pacific times; 6, Central time.
Directed and produced by Andrew Jenks; Jonah Quickmire Pettigrew, editor; William Godel, assistant director. For Cinemax Reel Life: Geof Bartz, editor; John Hoffman, supervising producer; Sheila Nevins, executive producer.
I saw this young lady on Ellen today. I had to look her up. I this story doesn't get you, I would have to say you need to look at your life. It’s just past six o’clock when 11-year-old Michala Riggle plops down in a chair in my office. Her long strawberry-blonde hair hangs over her shoulders, framing the rhinestone “Believe” pin she wears over her heart. If you are not a believer when you sit down with this child, chances are you will be before you walk away.
It is already dark outside the office of Kentucky Monthly and, knowing that Michala and her parents, David and Emlyn, have not stopped for dinner, I suggest we eat before starting our interview. But Michala quickly reminds me that it’s a school night and she’s here to talk business. Her mom smiles and I can see where Michala has inherited her strength.
The business that brought this family to my office started just six months ago when Michala, a fifth-grader at Jeffersontown Elementary, dropped a change purse with $7 on the kitchen table in front of her parents.
The couple had been discussing the experimental treatments for autism their 7-year-old son, Evan, had been undergoing since February. Before receiving the IV infusions of glutathione, Evan was combative and needed speech therapy. Inspired by the improvements in Evan’s behavior since beginning the treatments of glutathione, the Riggles hoped the treatment would become available to other families with autistic children. Unfortunately, beginning a controlled study would cost the Kosair Children’s Hospital in Louisville, where Evan received his treatments, nearly $200,000.
Overhearing the conversation, Michala decided to do whatever she could to see other children with autism benefit as her own brother had. She scraped her allowance together and offered it to her parents, saying, “I know it isn’t enough, but I hope it helps.”
She didn’t stop there. Determined to raise the $200,000 needed to start the study, she began beading bracelets, a skill she learned from a friend. “She was going door-to-door selling these little bracelets then coming in and beading more. We thought what she was doing was sweet, but we never imagined she would take it this far,” says David.
Neither did Michala’s 9-year-old brother, Dawson, who was recruited to make bracelets for the cause. “He told me there was no way we’d raise all that money selling the bracelets. I told him he had to think of it like a baseball game—if you go in thinking you’re going to lose, you’re beat. You’ve got to believe,” says Michala. “So that’s my motto: you’ve got to believe.”
Her $7 began to multiply, and everyone but Michala was surprised. “We learned in Sunday school that Jesus was able to feed 5,000 people with five loaves of bread and two fish that a little boy gave him,” she says. “I’m kind of like that boy, I guess. I didn’t know what was going to happen, but I wanted to help.” As she speaks, I have to look up from my notebook to remind myself that these words are coming from a freckle-faced 11-year-old sitting with one leg folded underneath her.
Within a few weeks of telling her parents that she would raise the money, Michala marched into the office of Dr. Stephen Wright, Kosair medical director, and proudly slid an envelope stuffed with $29, her first donation, across his desk. “I immediately went over to our foundation and said, ‘We’ve just started the Michala Riggle Glutathione Research Fund, and here’s $29 to get it started,” says Wright.
Michala first sold her bracelets to neighbors and classmates, but her sales dramatically increased after Kosair donated booth space at Jeffersontown’s Gaslight Festival, a move that sparked the interest of the local news stations.
After the first wave of media attention, Michala and her parents enlisted the help of family and friends to prepare for the St. James Court Art Festival, where Kosair had donated another booth, hoping that the recent news reports would bring a crowd.
For three days, Michala and her “peeps,” as she calls them, took money and passed out bracelets to people eager to meet the little girl with such high hopes. “There was a line just to get into the tent,” says Emlyn. “It really was like the miracle of loaves and fish; we just kept reaching into the bags and pulling out bracelets. I kept thinking that we were going to run out, but that didn’t happen,” she says, smiling. That weekend, Michala and her team raised nearly $11,000.
Michala’s infectious hope started to spread. “People started donating bracelets that they made with their team or church group,” says David. “We thought that we may get one or two donations like that, but it seems like we are getting more everyday. It’s just incredible how people have opened their hearts.”
They also started receiving invitations to appear at craft shows and festivals throughout the state. “She never turned down an opportunity to sell the bracelets,” says Emlyn. That is, until they got an invitation to set up at an Expo in Brandenburg.
“She was supposed to go to the UofL vs. Pittsburgh game with her dad that day, so we told them we would set up the booth but Michala wouldn’t be there. They were disappointed, but that game was so important to Michala,” says Emlyn.
In a strange twist of fate, the person who was supposed to give David tickets to the game had forgotten and given them to someone else.
“She is a huge UofL fan, and we had never had the opportunity to take her to a game before, so she was really excited,” says David. “She was sad for a few minutes, but then she perked up and said she’d just go sell her bracelets.”
Emlyn and Michala packed the car and headed to Brandenburg early the next morning. While at the expo, Michala met the trustees of the Ephraim and Wilma Shaw Roseman Foundation, who were impressed by her passion. “They said they were planning on donating $10,000, but I never expected anything more than that,” says Michala.
Little did she know her dream was about to become a reality. After their chance meeting with Michala at the expo in Brandenburg, the trustees were inspired to throw their weight behind Beading to Beat Autism.
“The trustees called us and asked how much Michala had raised up until that point, and we told them she was just sitting at $101,000,” says Leslie Buddeke, the director of major gifts for the Children’s Hospital Foundation. “Then they asked us to set up a check presentation. They were so impressed with Michala.”
On Dec. 2, friends and family of Michala gathered at the check presentation at Kosair. “We all knew how much the check was going to be, but Dr. Wright wanted to make sure it was a surprise for Michala,” says Emlyn. “He said that she had surprised him every week with a check and that this was his opportunity to surprise her.”
When Michala pulled back the brown paper on the check, revealing a few more zeros than she expected—$100,000—her eyes filled with tears. “I was just so excited,” she says. “I couldn’t have done it without all the people who helped me. I would have been beading in my sleep to raise the money.”
With the money raised by Michala, physicians at Kosair plan to begin their study on glutathione sometime this year. As for Michala, she has her eye on a new goal. “We raised enough to get the program started, but now we want to keep it going,” she says.
Within days of receiving the more than generous donation that helped her reach her goal, Michala’s story aired on Good Morning America. “The phone has been ringing off the hook,” says Emlyn. “We are so blessed, but this has all been kind of a whirlwind.”
Michala is flattered by the attention. “I had to take a note to one of the third-grade teachers the other day, and all of the students turned around in their desk and started whispering,” she says. “You would have thought I was Hannah Montana or something.”
This experience and her natural philanthropic talents have changed Michala’s career plans indefinitely. “I used to dream of playing for UofL, but I think they’ve lost me now,” she says, grinning from ear to ear.
“We’ve all learned a lot from this experience,” says Emlyn. “I’ve learned you can never underestimate the dreams of a child, and I’ve learned through raising a child with special needs that you just have to surrender to God.”
Michala also credits her faith for her success. “Mom let me go to the grown-up service at church one weekend and I heard Greg Allen, the music leader at our church, say that he thought he’d never be able to sing again after having a surgery on his throat. He said he kept praying and telling God that He needed him to be able to sing, but God told him that He didn’t need Greg to sing—He chose him to sing. I feel the same way,” she says. “God chose me to do this.”
I believe her.
Michala is Kentucky Monthly's Kentuckian of the Year. best choice I have seensince I started reading that magazine and I always think they make great choices.
The article was written by Amanda Hervey and I hope she doesn't mind that I copied her work.
If ou would like to donate to Michala's cause you can do that here at the
Michala Riggle Foundation
God Bless Michala!
This was in a recent newsletter from Nordic Needle. I somehow missed it the first time around but reading it today thought I would like to keep it in my thoughts so here it is.
Needlework is a deeply spiritual experience for me. I am always grateful for my chance to stitch in my comfortable home, with my big beautiful collies by my side and a cup of tea steaming on the table next to me and my dear husband reading in the next chair. Sometimes he will read aloud snippets of things to me, but I find it can break my concentration. I like to listen to music so I can best think.
When I stitch, I often think of the legions of women before me who stitched together their lives and the lives of their families.
I think of the first woman to create a needle, to pull a thread.
I think of the women who struggle to make something beautiful from scraps and bits of precious thread, working late into the night, straining for light from a fire or a candle behind a glass filled with water even as they spent their days hauling water and searching for firewood. They stitch to mark birth, death, marriage; to create warmth and bits of beauty in a cold, stark world.
I think of little girls sitting with their mothers, learning the stitches they will make for a lifetime, learning the patterns of their culture. I see the swirling colours of the Middle East, China, Japan, Africa, Europe and the New World of the Americas dancing and blending before my eyes.
I see the Go-Gos (grandmothers) in the South African townships stitching motif laden pieces for sale to support the children of AIDS.
I think of young women, the most fortunate perhaps, attending "finishing schools" and learning the "ladylike pastime" that provided a socially acceptable means of artistic expression, though discredited and diminished by some men.
I think of the women who sat in a circle in Boston, discussing freedom as they sewed and, with Abigail Adams, decide to give up tea and other luxuries from over the ocean -- including fine needles and thread -- so they could support a revolution and help push forward democracy.
I think of quilting bees and church altar cloth makers. I think of the nuns tending the robes of priests and committees stitching pew pillows and baby clothes.
I think of the stitches my own mother made to provide me with a "purple sweater with popcorn" when I was six and the shawls and afghans that fill my home and the homes of my sisters and the socks she knit my father to keep him warm while he was in his final illness. She wears them still to bed to remember him. I think of her and her friends in the Happy Hookers at the Seniors Center making "preemie caps" for drug addicted babies and blankets for women taking shelter from violence.
I think of the cotton fields of slavery and women breaking their backs in the sun in linsey-woolsey, their skin never allowed to touch the soft yarns and threads their work made.
I think of families starving, removed from the land in Ireland and Scotland so their Lord could graze flocks of sheep and join the expanding wool trade meant to feed the Dark Satanic Mills. Still, the women sewed on the decks of the immigrant ships coming to the New World.
I think of Ruskin and the Morrises reclaiming skills and affirming that "craft" for the home is art for the soul -- as well as a means by which women might earn much needed money.
I think of the women who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and the women from many nations who banded together despite language and religious barriers to create the International Ladies Garment Workers' Union and the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers' Union. Yes, I think of "Norma Rae" silencing the machinery and demanding her rights.
I think of the weavers, bobbin carriers, and cutters and thread pickers working now for low wages to clothe us and decorate our homes. I think of children who work endless hours, no reading or writing, their growth stunted by work and hunger; their eyes strained from poor light, their lungs coated and full from poor ventilation.
I am thankful that my sewing is recreation, art, rest, reflection. I need not sew each stitch of my husband's shirts or pick apart my dresses to clothe my child. I work carefully to honor the work of the women before me and wonder at their courage and skill. I stitch samplers and reflect on the words in them, one at a time, a letter at a time, a stitch at a time. I stitch presents and think about the person for whom I sew. I stitch treats for myself -- though sometimes the touch of silk thread or fine linen is a sufficient treat and I give away what I thought would be mine.
We are all women. We all sew our lives together. We sew for peace. We sew for love. We sew for change. We sew for stability. We sew for beauty and comfort and the chance to sit quietly and think. We sew for money. We sew and we weave and we start and stop and tear out and begin again. We always begin again, one more time, with patience.
That is what stitching is about for me.
Sincerely, Victoria Cross
It's been a strange week. On Tuesday, I picked up one of my dearest friends at the airport because she is working in Cincinnati this week (she lives in Mississippi)> We worked together for nearly 8 years before I was laid off. Another former co-worker (and dear friend) joined us at the hotel where they are working this week. We set everything up and I helped with some of the technical problems that inevitably arise. After a late dinner because we couldn't solve the immediate problems we came back to the hotel and messed with it some more. It didn't take us long to solve the problem now that we were fed and had taken a break from it... Sometime in those 5 or so hours it occurred to me that for the first time in almost 3 years, I really did not miss that job. I didn't miss the problems, the a$$ kissing, the missing parts, the late nights the stress. I did (and do) miss my friends. Friends however are there whether the job is or not. It was the first time in three years that I am reconciled to not working in education anymore. On the heels of that came the realization that I am relieved.
I realized that I no longer believe that the education system in this state or in the country will ever be fixed. We have become increasingly complacent and neglectful of the education system to the point that decades of misuse use have made it nearly extinct. So I struggle with my youngest child to get him through high school and into a field that he loves, and I struggle with young co-workers who can't add and subtract, they can't write to save their lives and spelling and grammar are just words that they know. They make fun of me when I correct them and they don't care if they ever do things correctly... This is our future.
So now I go to work in a job that isn't really for me and I do the best job I can, and maybe in some small way, I can set an example for these kids. On how to make a future no matter what hand you are dealt.
I cannot say that I am sad to see 2007 go. We started 2007 off with Tom losing his job and I guess we just never recovered.
We went 3 months without him working at all, his former employer screwing up his unemployment, going back to work part time and juggling 2 jobs with 1 car, then him getting sent back full-time but at his regular job and having to commute 70 miles a day. The good ending to that is he finally had enough and found another wonderful job that hopefully will take him through retirement and may be where Mark gets to spend part of his career.
Tommy left for boot camp in Ft. Jackson, SC an I didn't get to talk to him again until the end of March. That was hard but I think good for both of us. It was great to see him in March and hard to put him on the bus for Aberdeen after only 24 hours. He was fast tracked though and surprised me at work one night in June.
My sister in law had a horrible year dealing with her cancer and we thought we were going to lose her. After Chemo, radiation, 2 surgeries, a serious infection, and more chemo we are praying that she is finally on the mend and that she will regain her health and vitality in 2008.
Tom's mom had a totally botched surgery in May and we are just now getting her back on her feet but are fairly sure she will require more surgery before she can get around on her own. I have lost track of the number of doctors visits and prescriptions.
May also brought me to leaving National College after nearly 2 years when I couldn't take the underhanded treatment of the students any more. The people who were responsible for that have since left but since my position was filled I couldn't go back.
I was already to start the MAT program in the fall when 2 weeks before vacation I discovered that I needed to take a number of classes to get through the program before they would even consider me a part of the program. Of course, the class was not offered at Thomas More and one class would end up costing me over $1000 since I would have to take it over the summer in special session. To top it off, I would have to quit my job to do that since the class met 5 days a week. *sigh* They also informed me that I need to take the Praxis before I could start classes and it was only being offered (you guessed it) the weekend of vacation when I was in NY for our family reunion. I finally had had enough of the antics at TM and dropped out of the program. At 46, I think I am beyond juggling someone elses problems. If they had done what they were supposed to have done 2 years prior it would have been a different story.
We headed for reunion anticipating our usual 5 days of fun and that was shattered when my uncle was ordered to the hospital immediately the morning after we got there and was eventually diagnosed with leukemia. He and his family spent the rest of 2007 battling that and he is now officially in remission but in the process contracted pneumonia and had a heart attack. We are hopeful he is now on the mend as well.
September was the straw that I think finally broke the camels back. Tom's dad seemed to be losing ground very, very rapidly (just in a matter of weeks). He was having trouble walking, writing and finally quit eating. I took him to the hospital thinking that he had had a minor stroke and we discovered that he had metastatic lung cancer which had already spread to his brain. By the time we discovered it it was too late to do anything since his brain was riddled with tumors. He passed away 19 days later.
Tommy is now living with his grandmother trying to take care of her everyday needs and struggling with his own grief as well as hers. We are grateful that he is stationed with a unit in Maineville so he can be home most of the month to be there with her. We are now running 2 households since Lil has never paid a bill or grocery shopped. We hope to get her in a senior apartment of her own soon and get the house sold but the mortgage payment is so high that we are not sure we can do that.
The year ended with the death of my father's sister Mary on Christmas Eve. She was the last of my father's family. She died peacefully at home after a long illness but it is still hard knowing she is gone.
Time "off" is at a premium and we are trying hard some weeks to hold on to our sanity. Of course some will argue we do that anyway. :-)
We had some wonderful moments this year too. We gained a new cousin when Chris and Kryssa had Liliana and a new niece when Joe and Stephanie had Grace. I finally got to see my brother's baby in August (when he was 8 months old!), I didn't see nearly enough of him though! Nephew Dan got married on December 15 and we are glad to all Chelsea to the family. Niece Liz graduated from HS and moved back east to attend college at Kutztown State and seems to be happily settling in. Her brother Ryan has been in touch with her and we hope that soon he will be able to leave Montana as well.
Saying goodbye to 2007 was not much of a hardship at all. We are welcoming 2008 with open arms though.
