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Quinceañera

nobody@flickr.com (≈ ☼ ≈ giamarie≈ ☼ ≈) — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 11:39:57 -0800

Last Saturday in San Antonio
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From: www.quinceanera.us/english/quinceanera.html

The Quinceañera
The transition from girl to womean is celebrated in different ways and at different ages in the world. In Mexico, it has very unique roots and it is celebrated when girls turn 15. It does not necessarily means that the girls are ready for marriage as many foreign to the tradition suggest. A closer approach is that the girls can now participate as adults in appropriate social events. It is actually a Thanks Action and preparation for the new challenges.
The term Quinceañera may refer to the girl turning 15 or to the celebration in her honour, either the religious or social events or both.

The Quinceañera is a highly Catholic tradition although it is celebrated in other Christian churches too. It is almost given that were the Spanish Conquerors who brought the tradition to Mexico. In reality, the celebration as is today, is a Christian adaptation of the Aztec Ceremony of Woman. Even before of the Spanish Conquest, the Aztecs celebrated their girls when reached womanhood. In such ceremony, other than the banquet and religious presentation, the mothers gave advice to their daughters exhorting them for good behaviour. The Conquerors took the pagan celebration converting it to Chrisitanism as they did with other ceremonies in an effort to Catholizing the Aztec people. The Aztec dance was replaced by a Waltz and the temple by the Christian altar.

The Quinceañera may or may not include a reception, banquet and dance but the really important part is the Thanks Action Mass.

The Mass
The Mass or presentation on the temple is a Thanks Action and a preparation for the new challenges of the girl that is almost a woman. The Dress, bouquet, the crown, the ring and other accessories have a special significance.
The celebrated girl sits in a honour seat near the altar. She can be accompanied by up to 14 Maids (representing her first 14 years) with their respective Chamberlains. A Honour Chamberlain (escort) also accompanies the Quinceañera. her Maids are pick among other girls that recently turned 15 or are close to.
The Thanks Prayer and the Blessing of the gifts during the Mass and the Eucharist are the culmination of the Mass. Nonetheless, nothing equals the emotive moment in which the girl gives a flowers bouquet to Virgin Mary, most likely to Our Lady of Guadeloupe. According to the family's wealth, The dress can be more simple or sophisticated but it is always special in pastel colours. White is utilized as Dress colour in the United States but in Mexico, such is reserved for the bride in weddings. The rest of accessories must match the dress colour and decoration.

The Reception
After the Mass, a reception is held that includes a banquet and a dance in honour of the Quinceañera. Other options ate a Trip or on an more American style, the gift of a Car. Since the Trip or a Car can be given at any other occasion, Most girls opt for a Quinceañera Reception, which is a once in a life time event.

The Piñata
Mexican children generally have a piñata for their birthdays. A Quinceañera has her last Piñata on her fifteen. This is optional since in the origins, the Piñata was utilized in other religious ceremonies. The incorporation of the Piñata to the birthdays is a modern tradition.

The Banquet
The banquette is based on traditional Mexican food and can be as simple or sophisticated according to the family's wealth.

The First Waltz
Mexican girls cannot dance in a public event before their 15th birthday. They may dance in school and family events..
When they Christianized the Ceremony of Woman, The Spanish priest added the European touch that is still maintained. The Quinceañera, accompanied of her Honour Chamberlain and her Maids with their respective chamberlains perform a Traditional Waltz.
The Waltz dance may include traditional movements or some of new design. The music can be live with a band on with a modern digital sound system. The Puerto Rican Chayane's "Tiempo de Vals" is widely utilized as an alternative to the traditional waltzes.
The Quinceañera dances her first waltz with her father or in case he is not present, with a close relative or friend of the family.
Following is the Waltz with the Padrinos (Godfathers) although this is not exactly a waltz. It is a popular music song in which the celebrated dances with selected godfathers from 20 seconds to a minute each, depending of the number of participating godfathers.

The Doll and the Surprise gift.
As the Piñata, The doll is the last one the girl will receive for a birthday. This, a surprise gift and other gifts are presented before or after the Waltz. This can also be omitted.

Las Mañanitas
A traditional song called "Las Mañanitas", usually performed by a Mariachi band is sung after the waltz or at the time of the Cake. The Mariachi band usually plays other selected songs too. Las Mañanitas may be played at the girl's house before leaving for the church, at the exit from the church or at the reception.

The Dance
After all these events takes place the popular Dance. The Quinceañera breaks the dance open being the first coming out to dance and inviting everybody else to dance.

The Cake
The Cake is generally cut during a dance break. The cake is usually of great colour and size. The cake colour and ornaments must match the Quinceañera's dress. She cuts it and is the first one to eat from it.

The Godfathers
The Honour Godfathers are who accompany the Quinceañera at the Mass. Other godfathers participate donating some articles utilized by the girl during the Mass or at the reception. Some godfathers participate in either ceremony giving the gifts personally as the Bible, the Crown, the Bouquet etc. Others donate articles the girl wears from home as the bracelet, the ring, etc. Traditionally, the Honour Godfathers help with the cost of the Dress. There is also godfathers that assist with the banquet, the room and other expenses

There are regional variations that may change the order or form of the events. For instance, the Quinceañera may arrive with the crown on or be crowned during the mass or during the Waltz.

A Wrinkle In Time... Madeleine L’Engle, Writer of Children’s Classics, Is Dead at 88

nobody@flickr.com (≈ ☼ ≈ giamarie≈ ☼ ≈) — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 13:35:51 -0700

≈ ☼ ≈ giamarie≈ ☼ ≈ posted a photo:

Here follows the obit from the NYT.
Please read my tags!

Madeleine L’Engle, Writer of Children’s Classics, Is Dead at 88

By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: September 8, 2007
Madeleine L’Engle, who in writing more than 60 books, including childhood fables, religious meditations and science fiction, weaved emotional tapestries transcending genre and generation, died Thursday in Connecticut. She was 88.

Her death, of natural causes, was announced today by her publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Ms. L’Engle (pronounced LENG-el) was best known for her children’s classic, “A Wrinkle in Time,” which won the John Newbery Award as the best children’s book of 1963. By 2004, it had sold more than 6 million copies, was in its 67th printing and was still selling 15,000 copies a year.

Her works — poetry, plays, autobiography and books on prayer — were deeply, quixotically personal. But it was in her vivid children’s characters that readers most clearly glimpsed her passionate search for the questions that mattered most. She sometimes spoke of her writing as if she were taking dictation from her subconscious.

“Of course I’m Meg,” Ms. L’Engle said about the beloved protagonist of “A Wrinkle in Time.”

The “St. James Guide to Children’s Writers” called Ms. L’Engle “one of the truly important writers of juvenile fiction in recent decades.” Such accolades did not come from pulling punches: “Wrinkle” is one of the most banned books because of its treatment of the deity.

“It was a dark and stormy night,” it begins, repeating the line of a 19th- century novelist Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, and presaging the immortal sentence that Snoopy, the inspiration-challenged beagle of the Peanuts cartoon, would type again and again. After the opening, “Wrinkle,” quite literally, takes off. Meg Murray, with help from her psychic baby brother, uses time travel and extrasensory perception to rescue her father, a gifted scientist, from a planet controlled by the Dark Thing. She does so through the power of love.

The book used concepts that Ms. L’Engle said she had plucked from Einstein’s theory of relativity and Planck’s quantum theory, almost flaunting her frequent assertion that children’s literature is literature too difficult for adults to understand. She also characterized the book as her refutation of ideas of German theologians.

In the “Dictionary of Literary Biography,” Marygail G. Parker notes “a peculiar splendor” in Ms. L’Engle’s oeuvre, and some of that splendor is sheer literary range. “Wrinkle” is part of her series of children’s books, which includes “A Wind in the Door,” “A Swiftly Tilting Planet,” “Many Waters” and “An Acceptable Time.” The series combines elements of science fiction with insights into love and moral purpose that pervade Ms. L’Engle’s writing.

Ms. L’Engle’s other famous series of books concerned another family. The first installment, “Meet the Austins,” which appeared in 1960, portrayed an affectionate family whose members displayed enough warts to make them interesting. (Perhaps not enough for The Times Literary Supplement in London, though; it called the Austins “too good to be real.”)

By the fourth of the five Austin books, “A Ring of Endless Light,” any hint of Pollyanna was gone. Named a Newbery Honor Book in 1981, it told of a 16-year-old girl’s first experience with death. Telepathic communication with dolphins eventually helps the girl, Vicky, achieve a new understanding of things.

“The cosmic battle between light and darkness, good and evil, love and indifference, personified in the mythic fantasies of the ‘Wrinkle in Time’ series, here is waged compellingly in its rightful place: within ourselves,” Carol Van Strum wrote in The Washington Post in 1980.

Madeleine L’Engle Camp was born in Manhattan on the snowy night of Nov. 29, 1918. The only child of Madeleine Hall Barnett and Charles Wadsworth Camp, she was named for her great-grandmother, who was also named Madeleine L’Engle.

Young Madeleine’s mother came from Jacksonville, Fla., society and was a fine pianist; her father was a World War I veteran who worked as a foreign correspondent and later as drama and music critic for The New York Sun. He also knocked out potboiler novels.

The family lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan; her parents had artistic friends, Madeleine an English nanny. She felt unpopular at school. She recalled that an elementary school teacher – Miss Pepper or Miss Salt, she couldn’t remember which — treated her as if she were stupid.

She had written her first story at 5 and retreated into writing. When she won a poetry contest in the fifth grade, her teacher accused her of plagiarizing. Her mother intervened to prove her innocence, lugging a stack of her stories from home.

When she was 12, she was sent to a boarding school in Switzerland, Chatelard, and at 15 to Ashley Hall, a boarding school in Charleston, S.C. She graduated from Smith College with honors in English. (She took no science, often a surprise to readers impressed with her science fiction.)

Returning to New York, Ms. L’Engle began to get small acting parts. She wrote her first novel, “The Small Rain,” in 1945 and had several plays she wrote produced.

She met the actor Hugh Franklin when both were appearing in a production of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard.” They married in 1946, and their daughter Josephine was born the next year. In 1951, when Ms. L’Engle became pregnant again, they moved to the small town of Goshen, Conn., where they bought and ran a general store. Their son, Bion, was born in 1952, and in 1956 they adopted another daughter, Maria.

Mr. Franklin died in 1986 and Bion in 1999. Ms. L’Engle is survived by her daughters, Josephine F. Jones and Maria Rooney; five grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.

Ms. L’Engle’s writing career was going so badly in her 30s that she claimed she almost quit writing at 40. But then “Meet the Austins” was published in 1960, and she was already deeply into “Wrinkle.” The inspiration came to her during a 10-week family camping trip.

That was just the start. She once described herself as a French peasant cook who drops a carrot in one pot, a piece of potato in another and an onion and a piece of meat in another.

“At dinnertime, you look and see which pot smells best and pull it forward,” she was quoted as saying in a 2001 book, “Madeleine L’Engle (Herself): Reflections on a Writing Life,” compiled by Carole F. Chase.

“The same is true with writing,” she continued. “There are several pots on my backburners.”

Her deeper thoughts on writing were deliciously mysterious. She believed that experience and knowledge are subservient to the subconscious and perhaps larger, spiritual influences.

“I think that fantasy must possess the author and simply use him,” she said in an interview with Horn Book magazine in 1983. “I know that is true of ‘A Wrinkle in Time.’ I cannot possibly tell you how I came to write it. It was simply a book I had to write. I had no choice.

“It was only after it was written that I realized what some of it meant.”

What turned out to be her masterpiece was rejected by 26 publishers. Editors at Farrar, Straus and Giroux loved it enough to publish it, but told her that she should not be disappointed if it failed.

The family moved back to New York, where Hugh Franklin won fame as Dr. Charles Tyler on the popular soap opera “All My Children.” For more than three decades, starting in 1966, Ms. L’Engle served as librarian and writer-in-residence at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine. One or two of her dogs often accompanied her to the cathedral library.

Much of her later work was autobiographical, although sometimes a bit idealized; she often said that her real truths were in her fiction. Indeed, she discussed her made-up stories the way a newspaper reporter might discuss his latest article about a crime.

When her son, then 10, protested the death of Joshua in “The Arm of the Starfish” (1965), she insisted that she could not change the tale, which was still unpublished at the time.

“I didn’t want Joshua to die, either,” Ms. L’Engle said in 1987 in a speech accepting the Margaret Edwards Award from the American Library Association for lifetime achievement in writing young adult literature, one of scores of awards she received.

“But that’s what happened. If I tried to change it, I’d be deviating from the truth of the story.”

Her characters continued living their lives even if she hadn’t mentioned them for decades. She had gotten word that Polly O’Keefe, who appeared in three books of the “Time Fantasy” series, was in medical school, she said a few months before the library speech.

A woman wrote her to say that she herself was a first-year medical student at Yale and that she would love to have Polly in her class. Ms. L’Engle said fine, and the student went to the registrar’s office to sign up Polly as an “official” Yale medical student.

“Why does anybody tell a story?” Ms. L’Engle once asked, even though she knew the answer.

“It does indeed have something to do with faith,” she said, “faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically.”

Philosopher's Rock

nobody@flickr.com (≈ ☼ ≈ giamarie≈ ☼ ≈) — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 13:53:58 -0800

≈ ☼ ≈ giamarie≈ ☼ ≈ posted a photo:

From www.capitalareastatues.com

"Philosopher's Rock" statue by Glenna Goodacre
PHILOSOPHERS' ROCK

CAST’s first project, installed in 1994, is a larger-than-lifesize bronze sculpture of three renowned Austin writers that sits under a pecan grove at the entrance to Barton Springs Pool. J. Frank Dobie, Roy Bedichek, and Walter Prescott Webb used to meet at Barton Springs every afternoon and hold forth in what has been characterized as "Austin’s first literary salon." The men met on a rock at the edge of the pool that Bedichek dubbed "Philosophers’ Rock." The statue, by renowned sculptor Glenna Goodacre (who created the Women in Vietnam memorial in Washington D.C. and the image of Sacajawea on the new dollar coin) is an unforgettable depiction of three good friends engaged in an informal but intense discussion. A monument to friendship, ideas, the glory of nature and the joy of conversation, Philosophers’ Rock quickly became a beloved Austin landmark. The Austin Chronicle, in naming Philosophers’ Rock the "Best Public Art" in Austin, wrote: "It does what great statues do: recognize achievement, convey a sense of the community from which it sprang, and inspire us." The Austin American Statesman declared it "an irresistable connection to Texas’ literary past."

Beautiful Smiles

nobody@flickr.com (≈ ☼ ≈ giamarie≈ ☼ ≈) — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 17:53:06 -0700

≈ ☼ ≈ giamarie≈ ☼ ≈ posted a photo:

These young ladies were posing for a friend and I was standing by. @ the India Culture Association fair in Portland.

Wahoo! Boots

nobody@flickr.com (≈ ☼ ≈ giamarie≈ ☼ ≈) — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 16:35:42 -0700

≈ ☼ ≈ giamarie≈ ☼ ≈ posted a photo:

www.heritageboot.com/

Happy Monday!!

nobody@flickr.com (≈ ☼ ≈ giamarie≈ ☼ ≈) — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 14:08:43 -0800

≈ ☼ ≈ giamarie≈ ☼ ≈ posted a photo:

Some of my friends came to town last weekend. They were not bronzed, but we had a good time anyway.

Especially for Spins LPs

nobody@flickr.com (≈ ☼ ≈ giamarie≈ ☼ ≈) — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 14:34:56 -0700

≈ ☼ ≈ giamarie≈ ☼ ≈ posted a photo:

Hope you have a fabulous weekend, Spins!

Pooh says, "Dont' work too hard in your garden. Remember how old your back and knees are."

Wahoo! New Boots!

nobody@flickr.com (≈ ☼ ≈ giamarie≈ ☼ ≈) — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 05:25:48 -0700

≈ ☼ ≈ giamarie≈ ☼ ≈ posted a photo:

Our friends Leigh and Patrick treated each other to new boots.

www.heritageboot.com/

Vacation, all I ever wanted... Away for a few weeks

nobody@flickr.com (≈ ☼ ≈ giamarie≈ ☼ ≈) — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 18:15:01 -0700

≈ ☼ ≈ giamarie≈ ☼ ≈ posted a photo:

Yep. I know this is not a great picture but I wanted to capture the relaxation I had on this day---and hope to have again very soon. And sunshine!!!! It's been unusually rainy here in Austin and central Texas and I can't take it any longer! California, here we come!
And... we get to meet Steven Keylon! www.flickr.com/photos/srk1941/ while we are in L.A.

New Camera Christmas 2006

nobody@flickr.com (≈ ☼ ≈ giamarie≈ ☼ ≈) — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 16:26:14 -0800

≈ ☼ ≈ giamarie≈ ☼ ≈ posted a photo:

I gave my little friends disposable cameras as part of their Christmas gift. They had so much fun!

please see original here

Prolixsix www.flickr.com/people/71279724@N00/ recommended this separation

New Camera Chritmas 2006

nobody@flickr.com (≈ ☼ ≈ giamarie≈ ☼ ≈) — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 16:26:14 -0800

≈ ☼ ≈ giamarie≈ ☼ ≈ posted a photo:

I gave my little friends disposable cameras as part of their Christmas gift. They had so much fun! THe boy took all 27 shots in about 6 minutes.

please see original here

Prolixsix www.flickr.com/people/71279724@N00/ recommended this separation