The Art and Soul of Staying at Home IV

Clearly, avoiding travel during these days of pumped up fuel prices is on everyone's mind. I just read about "stay-cations" - places to go when holidaying at home. The zeitgeist is at work again.

I thought about this while listening to a captivating story on NPR about Marta Becket. Marta is 83, a former dancer New York-quality professional dancer who stumbled onto an abandoned theater on the outskirts of Death Valley Junction over 40 years ago. Peering into the darkened theater through a hole in the door, Marta says she felt like she was looking at the other half of herself. This place belonged to her and she belonged to it. She and her husband settled there and got to work rehabilitating this personal Shangri-La.

For forty years Marta has performed on the stage of the theater she named the Armagosa Opera House. Recruiting an audience in such a remote and sparsely populated area was, shall we say, difficult. But no matter who showed up (or didn't), Marta performed.

One of the most engaging aspects of the story is how Marta buoyed herself through the slow, isolated times and created the audience she needed to keep her going. Looking around one day at the bare white walls, Marta determined to paint an appreciative gallery of spellbound spectators. For four years, she populated the walls of the theater with a richly designed and ornately executed Spanish renaissance congregation: a king and queen front and center; courtiers and commoners, lovers and drunkards, priests and nuns. When she finished that, she tackled the ceiling, with cherubs and doves.

I thought about this as I opened my vacuous, monochromatic closet door this morning. Now, while I do not have the skills with which Marta Becket is graced, I do have one valuable commodity - lots of blank doors. What if, during this time of staying at home, I threw my inhibitions to the wind, researched landscapes of the hills of Jerusalem, the Judean desert, Sefad; recreated the interiors of 18th century shtetl homes, and surrounded myself with leaves, trees and spices from the Bible? What if the vacant canvas leading into the closets of my home were transformed into portals of our imagination. Pigment paradise.

I will definitely need some help pursuing this. And I will be grateful to whitewash that can, as a last resort, cover up all my artistic sins. But what an awesome memento of staying at home these magical murals would be.