Public radio and television often ask for contributions to
keep their stations and channels alive. We’re asked what our lives would be
like without the arts—I began to consider all the ways fine art has influenced
my career as a writer.
After washing my face, brushing my teeth and throwing on my “work”
clothes, the first thing I do in the morning—even before brewing coffee—is
adjust the dial on our radio to our listener funded classical music station. Often
a favorite composer’s work is played encouraging a quick sit-down at the
computer and prompting page after page from a now psyched up author. Weekends—a
change of pace—I listen to Jonathan Schwartz as he plays and talks about
musical comedy and jazz greats. He plays Sinatra and Clooney, the fabulous Ella
Fitzgerald and the singer’s singer Mabel Mercer and I inhale the music and
lyrics of Rogers and Hart, Kern and Hammerstein, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin,
Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim—oh what lyrics, oh what words—the
stories that are told in verse and refrain. What would I do without those
stations?
Then there are our museums where I wander through gallery
after gallery and lose myself in another land, another century, and another
time. I stop and study sculptures of character and nuance—creations that evolve
from marble, clay and metal when touched by the shaping hands of masters. Admire
and sometimes fall in love with the perfect hero—a hero that I can only dream
and write about. Self-interpret paintings that cover every taste from Renaissance
to folk to modern to impressionist and the art of early Greeks, Romans, Africans,
Asians and perhaps pre-historic ancestors whose DNA I may carry today. When I contemplate
a photograph—I receive an impression of time, place, fashions, faces and bodies—the
where, when, why, and who that germinate an idea or answer a question that triggers
a story or article.
Books mean the most to me. Words make me dream with their
brushstrokes of light and darkness, add a glimmer of hope to a sorry period in
life, encourage a smile or gales of laughter, launch a voyage into the unknown.
Words may lull me to sleep or make me think, imagine and believe. Books open my
mind to the possible and—sometimes what I thought impossible becomes viable. Writers
make use of a palette of words—words with colors vibrant and tender, charged
with passion—words that open a door to another universe.
What do the arts mean to you?
