Happy Halloween
J.C. Leyendecker was an illustrator best know for his chiseled-featured Arrow shirt men and the elegant ladies and gentlemen in the 1920’s Kuppenheimer clothing adds.
It’s hard to believe that he also created this all too creepy witch, flying across the moon, for the Saturday Evening Post.
But he did.
Witches Night Out from October 1923
We had a black cat when I was a kid,
Salem joined our family as an malnourished stray kitten that our Shepard-mix, Duke, cornered under the picnic table in our back yard.
My mother always claimed to be allergic to cats, so my brothers and I never brought any stray cats home with us. Although we had ample opportunity for them, we mostly brought home stray dogs, and box turtles, and garter snakes, and lizards, and about-to-die baby birds, and crawfish, and mayonnaise jars full of minnows, …….but never a stray cat. Until Salem.
We didn’t have too. Like all the best pets, he found us.
Salem was dark as night, with golden-yellow eyes. He grew to almost 20 pounds. He wasn’t obese, just big. He was never anything but loving with our family, you could hear him purr from the next room, but he brought a reign of holy terror on the chimney swifts that set up home in our chimney every spring. Waiting stealthily on the hearth for hours then pouncing up the chimney to return every time with an unsuspecting sparrow in his fangs, which he would parade through the house for everyone to see untill my mother would finally shoo him and his prize out the back door. We lived in the country where our animals were strictly outside only. But not Salem, he had in/out privileges. We rarely had rats, or mice, or even the snakes that eat the rats and mice. Salem was in charge of that.
He lived a long happy life until he had to be put down my junior year of college. Salem developed a tumor on his nose that all too quickly became worse.
He was a good guy, and the only cat we ever had.
I’m glad that he had found us.
So why are black cats considered bad luck?
(image via Folio Illustration Agency)
Black cats weren’t always feared or considered bad luck. In early Egyptian times, cats were the rock stars of the word held in very high esteem. In fact it was considered a capital crime to kill one. It wasn’t until the middle-ages that cats began to be associated with witches. The hysteria of witches practicing black magic spread across Europe, and unfortunately stray cats were often fed by the poor lonely old ladies who were later accused of witchery. This lead to many people killing cats, which had the unintended consequence of increasing the rodent population. Thus only spreading the bubonic plague even faster.
In folklore, black cats act as spys for witches. The Pilgrims had a very devout biblical faith and were suspicious of anything associated with the devil. They considered black cats to be part demon and the companions of witches. Anyone caught with a black cat would be severely punished or even put to death.
Why is it considered unlucky for a black cat to cross your path?
The folklore tells of a father and son making the rounds in their village on a moonless night when a black cat ran across their path. Being men, the started throwing rocks at the poor creature until it retreated under the house of a woman suspected of being a witch. The next day, both men witnessed the old woman bruised and limping, and believed that it was more than a coincidence. From that day forward, it was thought that witches could turn into black cats at night.
Even today the association of black cats and witches still holds strong during Halloween celebrations.
Some foods I can’t get enough of…
This is one of them.
It’s more Caribbean than Asian. And filled with all the flavors I love – coconut, curry, sweet potatoes, and peas.
Jamie, ……….not so much.
That’s pro’lly why I always make this soup when he’s out of town. I freeze it, and microwave a bowlful whenever I’m so inclined. I’m just loco like that.
Here’s what it takes:
Fill a stock pot with the chicken stock and water, and bring to a boil.
Rinse and drain the dried peas…..
Then add them to a stock pot with the already boiling liquids.
Reduce the heat as low at it will go and simmer for 20 minutes……stirring occasionally so the peas don’t stick to the bottom.
After 20 minutes the peas will be cooked through.
The veggies are next.
You should have been peeling and dicing while the peas were simmering.
Mix the diced carrots and sweet potatoes to the stock pot and simmer for about 10 minutes more to soften them.
After that 10 minutes, you’re ready to add everything else, like the coconut milk.
Add the whole, thick gooey can to the stock pot.
And the seasoning: curry powder and low sodium soy sauce.
Ohhh and salt and pepper to taste – go easy on each.
I roughly chop a whole package of baby bella mushrooms. About 2 cups.
Throw the mushrooms in there too, and simmer the whole mess for about another 5 minutes.
Turn your heat off, ’cause your soup’s done now.
Always add fresh herbs last. That way all the flavor is intact.
I roughly chop a whole bundle of cilantro leaves, and mix them in with my finished soup.
This hearty, rich warm soup takes about 45 minutes to make and is perfect for a crisp autumn evening.
You might even forget that there’s no meat in it.
This doesn’t happen often.
But occasionally someone notices us. (Someone other than all of y’all lurking out there.)
This time it was Lamps Plus.
The brilliant folks at Lamps Plus have compiled a list of top Home blogs and we are in the running for Best DIY Blog. We think that we are more of a “lifestyle” blog, but Hell….we’ll take any recognition.
And you, Yes, you kind folks can vote for us to make our online dreams come true.
Please make them come true.
“How do we vote?” you ask.
Simply click over to the Lamp’s Plus Facebook Page……and select The Cavender Diary from the drop down menu under DIY Blogs.
There is it right there, number 24.
Some lucky voters will win $500 Lamps Plus shopping sprees………..AND, you can vote every day for the next 3 weeks.
So what are you waiting for?
Go Vote…..
For us,
Every day for the next 3 weeks……..
Bela Lugosi looks like he is trying to hypnotize Boris Karloff in this awesome picture.
Although they are usually thought to be rivals, Bela and Boris were dear friends who starred in 7 horror films together.
Universal Studios ruled the “scary movie” genera for decades, and gave us the images we still have of Frankenstein’s Monster, Dracula, the Werewolf and the Mummy, until changing tastes made movie goers crave more aliens …… and gore.
Too bad,
These 2 guys knew a thing or two about scaring us.
That’s right, 3 years ago today we were introduced to Harley Davidson.
We found her through an online rescue society, North Dallas Dog Rescue, they specialize in placing Australian Shepards…..but by some act of fate, a Doberman Pincher named Harley Davidson dropped into their laps that week. She had been a puppy mill breeder, and then bounced from apartment to apartment.
I wrote them an email and we jetted to the front of the “Harley getting list”….read about that here. (It’s a good one)
We went to “just meet” her, and fell in love with that quirky girl immediately.
Like all gay men, the child-less variety anyway, we tend to personify our dog. Many’s a day that I would come home from work only to be greeted by a frustrated Jamie at the door shaking his head and saying,
“YOUR daughter”.
Sure, she’s my daughter when she’s a handful, like when she wakes us up in the middle of the night to let us know the power is off. Why would we ever want to sleep through that? But I know that her heart really belongs to Jamie.
And why shouldn’t it? He works from home and she spends most of her day laying at his feet……when she isn’t corralling the squirrels in the backyard, or warning the walker-bys in the front.
There have actually been times that I have arrived home to a Jamie-less house to have Harley greet me at the door, exhale/sigh loudly upon seeing me, turn around and return to her room to lay down……She was expecting the fun daddy. The one who lets her sleep on the bed when I’m out of town.
That’s right. I know about that.
Like I can’t tell that there’s a Doberman-shapped indent on my side of the bed.
When it came time for us to find some doggy daycare (We call it “school”. Yep, personifying again), Jamie went to the best. The Dog Lofts in Oak Lawn. Jamie works out of the house and there are days when he just needs some office time alone….taking conference calls, and giving training session and demos without 90 pounds of needy loudness 5 inches from him at all times. He toured the Dog Loft facility before committing, and cried like a baby on the first day he left her there.
The staff at the Dog Lofts is amazing.
I’m not sure if Harley truly is exceptional, or if they just tells us that. (She is pretty memorable with her one floppy ear. She will cock her head to the good ear side when someone talks directly to her) They seem to have a new story about her almost weekly. How she can open doors, but only lets the other dogs out. How she occasionally gets overstimulated and needs a “time out” to calm down (that sounds about right). And how she sometimes sits in the middle of the play area and howls straight up in the air like a siren.
There have even been days when she comes home with a French-tip manicure. I don’t know how they hold her still long enough without a horse tranquilizer.
She was banned for a week once because she had a wart on her lip. How humiliating is that? It’s like your kid is the one that almost spread head lice to everyone else in his class.
When I pick her up from school, every time she comes around the corner she slams into the glass door in front of everybody. (Staff, other parents and well-behaved dogs) She’s not trying to open this door, she just doesn’t see the glass.
Yeah, that’s my daughter all right…….
And I wouldn’t want it any other way,
Ahhh Autumn.
Finally you have arrived, (it was in the 40’s on the morning that I wrote this) too bad the trees in Dallas don’t register the change of seasons until about late November.
No worries, I have a plan to bring a little Autumn to our front porch.
With a Halloween/Autumn garland.
I start with screws into the molding on all four corners of my door, then I run a cord from screw to screw.
Like so….
Sure, it’s white….but if you do this right, no one will ever see the white cord.
Green paddle wire from the craft store is all I need to wire branches to the string….
I just cut 4-5 inch pieces…..
…….and wire live oak branches, from the front yard, wherever they need it.
This layer is my base, because these branches were free.
Since the trees in Dallas don’t turn colors….I had to buy colored leaves.
Usually the craft stores carry them, but this year none of the children working at ours had ever heard of preserved natural leaves.
Found them at our grocery store in the floral department.
4 bucks a bag – 3 bucks with my “Reward Card” – I bought 10.
They look much better when they are unbagged and fluffed.
Using even more wire, I added in the colored leaves as a top layer.
I just keep adding leaves ’till I can’t see that white rope anymore.
Not too bad, Right?
Now the fun part.
I picked up some Halloween flicker lights from the Target. 3 boxes……I think that’s 30 lights total.
…and these orange b-lights (also from Target) we still had from last October when we filled the Indian Hawthorn bushes with them.
Can’t repeat that this year, since we no longer have bushes…….just cacti.
I never get rid of anything……so in the garland they will go as well.
I start with the flicker flame lights and pull them through the leaves leaving all my cords behind the garland. (HATE to see the cords)
The b-lights I weave back and forth in a zig-zag motion hiding the cord under leaves as I go.
Almost there.
We headed to the Dallas Farmer’s Market to buy a few pumpkins.
Yeah, they had some beauties…….
And another charming front porch at the Cavender house…….
When the sun goes down it looks even better…….
The Square Leaf Wreath I made a few years ago.
And the Orange Glass Ikea Lantern was a pretty simple project as well.
Check them out…..
Ohhhhh, and HAPPY HALLOWEEN!
Found this little 5 inch plastic ghost at a junk store not too long ago.
I didn’t know anything about him. I just liked his little “pot belly.”………and he was a dollar, my magic price.
With a little online investigation, I found out that he’s a Wilton cake topper. Probably from the early 80’s.
In 1929 Dewey McKinley Wilton opened a cake decorating/candy making school in a single room of his Chicago, Illinois, home. He shared the skills he had learned working in candy factories since he was about 14 years old. He published his first cake decorating book in 1954, ane even though publishers told him that it would never sell it was a huge success. Because of the minimal words and beautiful photographs, it was a worldwide hit and easy for anyone to learn/copy the techniques regardless of the language they spoke. Consumers loved the book so much that they wanted to buy professional decorating supplies to emulate the same techniques, but there were none available to the general pubic at that time. Wilton filled that need and began a mail order business selling pastry bags, turntables, and paste colors out of the basement of his family home. The Wilton company still gives classes on cake decorating, either in person or online…….and they offer thousands of products, from manuals to cake mixes, to help anyone achieve professional looking results.
So he’s a cake topper? Ehhh?
That explains the “pot belly”.
We love a good scary movie in this house……
Unfortunately, Hollywood hasn’t made a good one in the past 30 years.
Here’s a few that still give me nightmares……….(and a little trivia on each).
The Birds
I saw The Birds at school for Halloween in 5th grade………it freaked me the HELL out. How could they show this movie to kids? This is considered to be Hitchcock’s last great movie, it makes almost no sense, and it’s brilliant. He is truly a master, and Tippi Hedren his willing victim. The Birds was her first movie, Hitchcock discovered her in a TV commercial for a soda pop and instantly signed her to a 7 year deal. Filming this movie drove Tippi to the point of physical exhaustion and after a solid week of shooting one scene repeatedly, the scene where she is ambushed by gulls in the attic space, she was ordered to a week of bedrest by the set doctor. Most of the crew did not expect her to return. Luckily for us, she did, and now we can all share in her chilling screen debut.
Night of the living Dead
Normally I would never recommend a movie that spawned 37 sequels, but there’s a reason the sequels kept coming. Night of the Living Dead is a GREAT movie. Low budget. The producers started with a group investment of only 6 grand, but managed to scrape together $114,000. This is George Romero’s first movie, before it he directed episodes of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood. I couldn’t make that up. Color blind casting. In 1968 a black man as a hero was pretty unheard of, but Romero said that Duane Jones simply gave the best audition. Although considered to be the original “zombie” flick, no one in the movie ever says the word “zombie”, instead they say “ghoul”.
Rosemary’s Baby
Rosemary’s Baby marked Roman Polanski’s first American feature film. Sure Polanski has had a few gruesome troubles of his own. But he definitely chucked out one of the best horror movies ever made. The supense that we never actually see the baby, just Mia Farrow’s reaction to his eyes. And how about that black bassinet with the upside down cross over it? Freaky stuff. Mia Farrow’s acceptance of the role of Rosemary infuriated her then husband Frank Sinatra, he wanted her to quit working, and had her served with divorce papers in the middle of filming in front of the whole crew. Farrow almost quit the film then, only to continue filming when Polanski assured her that she would win an Oscar. But it was Ruth Gordon who won the Oscar, for Best Supporting Actress……she’s brilliant, stealing every scene she’s in. Who wants to believe that there is a coven of elderly witches, trying to spawn Satan’s love-child, living in the Dakota? How can they afford that rent? Farrow actually wears a wig in the beginning of the film and later reveals her still-famous Vidal Sassoon pixie hair cut. Rosemary’s Baby is a film that’s gripping without explicit violence or gore. Hollywood could learn from this one.
The Exorcist
This film adaptation of the 1971 William Blatty novel The Exorcist, based on an actual Catholic Church sanctioned exorcism of a young boy in 1949, was the first horror movie to be nominated for Best Picture. In all, it garnered 10 Academy Award nominations in 1973, wining only 2 – for Sound Editing and Adapted Screenplay – and losing the Best Picture Oscar to The Sting. Linda Blair, who was nominated for Best Supporting Actress, won the role of Reagan over much more established young actresses who, for one reason or another, weren’t able to do the film. Blair and Burstyn both suffered injuries from the harnesses, and their genuine screams of pain are used in the final cut of the film. Regan’s bedroom set was constructed in a freezer to show the actors actual breath. Director William Friedkin had a priest bless the set and although The Exorcist was slated for an 85 day film shoot, fire and other bad luck on the set resulted in a grueling 224 days of filming.
The Shining
The best for last, Oh Man, the best for last. Stephen King was non-to-thrilled with Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of his novel The Shining. It differs from the novel quite a bit. For example, King’s Jack Torrence kills with a giant croquet mallet, not an axe. Harrison Ford was briefly considered for role of Jack Torrence, the alcoholic writer (all of King’s protagonists are alcoholic writers, btw), and some of the photography was used in his 1981 movie Blade Runner. Jack Nicholson was so frustrated with the constant scrip rewrites that he would immediately throw them away and only memorize his lines moments before shooting a scene. His improvised line, “Here’s Johnny”, was almost cut from the movie because Kubrick, a Brit, had no idea what it meant. Shelly Duval became so stressed out during filming, Kubrick would scream at her constantly just to keep her on edge, that she began loosing her hair. This was one of the first pictures to use a steady cam. The scenes where young Danny is peddling his Big Wheel down the deserted hotel corridors, or even being chased through a snow filled hedge-maze by his axe-wielding father, wouldn’t have been the same without this technology. The viewer feels like they are racing right along side Danny. Here’s the coolest thing about The Shining, the entire movie was shot so that young actor Danny Lloyd wouldn’t know that he was making a horror film. But we know. Yes, we know.
So what are you waiting for?
Turn off the lights, curl up under a blanket, and watch one of these masterful horror movies.
You can thank us later for the nightmares.
Happy Birthday Mr. Lauren.
(photo via Bruce Weber)
A little over 45 years ago, you had a vision of a wide, beautiful tie made from Italian silk. But in the mid-60’s no one made anything like you dreamed of…… So you made your own. And people liked them. Liked them so much that they offered to buy them right off your person.
You grew up a humble Jewish boy in the Bronx, with only a Hollywood-movie-inspired idea of how wealthy people really lived. You created a multi-billion dollar company based on that vision of the privileged life, and brilliantly marketed it to the world.
From that first line of ties, to suits, to women’s wear, to fragrances, to children’s clothes, and to everything a house could ever need. Now your name is associated with the elite that you wanted to emulate as a young man.
When I was only 14, I knew you would have a pretty big impact on my life……I had no idea just how big.
Happy Birthday to you ,
Mr. Lauren
THE CAVENDER DIARY 