When I was at the Ohio State University as a graduate student, I taught a few art classes ranging from basic drawing to a course that dealt with real and recorded time in art forms. I had both bright students, and some dim bulbs. The inconsistency in student quality made it hard to tell if my students were being straight with me, or if I was just involved in a strange performance art project that they schemed up.

A young woman in on of my classes was a good artist, but a mediocre student. She had a tendency toward sporadic attendance and had missed one Friday morning class, returning to school on Monday with apologies for her absence. She began, “I’m sorry I missed class on Friday. I had Anthrax.”

I began to think, “Where would she get Anthrax?,” “When is she going to tell me the punchline?,” and “Is this that 24 hour Anthrax bug that can be remedied with some Nyquil® and good night’s rest?”

She then followed that up with a tale of working her waitressing job that Friday night (obviously a quick recovery) where she was picked up by Jim Jarmusch and whisked away to a strip club, where Jim spent the night sucking on cigarettes and contemptuously exhaling streams of smoke while seething, “Corporate strippers.”

It’s too bad she didn’t try to pass that off as a performance. She may have received a better grade in the class.

I.

There is a story. It begins with a young boy. His attempts to court a certain young girl are continually thwarted. He knows that she spends her evenings knitting on a balcony overlooking her estate’s lake. The boy devises an infallible plan to win her heart. As evening approaches, he removes his clothing and dives into the lake beneath the girl’s balcony. He arranges for a meeting in the lake between himself and two gorgeous swans. He embraces the swans and strikes pretty poses with them in the moonlight. He sees something mythic and majestic about his aquatic posturing with the birds. His knitting maiden sees him swimming each evening with the swans and her heart swoons. They soon marry.

II.

There is another story. A woman finds her home dull. She decides to purchase an ottoman to chase away the domestic doldrums. She opens a Pottery Barn catalog where she finds a picture of the “Sullivan Leather Ottoman” sitting robustly on a Persian rug and surrounded by tasteful, yet subdued décor. The hardwood legs have a walnut stain, and the cushion is aniline-dyed top-grain leather. It looks like it could have belonged to her grandmother and therefore appears meaningful. It was manufactured three months ago. She buys the ottoman and has it delivered to her front room. When friends come over, they marvel at her purchase and ask from which quaint antique shop the ottoman was purchased. The woman just smiles.

III.

There is one last story. A young man enters an art gallery. He surveys the field of art ahead of him before carefully considering each piece individually. Assuming a posture of contemplation, he massages his chin with his hand to show that he is seriously pondering the work in front of him. He spends the afternoon under the gallery lights, posing in front of each artwork. He sees his in-depth focus on the work as highly intellectual and refined. He catches the eye of the gallery guard who has been quietly sitting in the corner attending to her knitting. He questions her about purchasing the artwork made up of a small tower of matchsticks. She swoons at his appreciation of the finer things in life. They soon marry.

Note: These three stories are excerpts from the Lori Miles exhibition brochure I’m working on.

My mother is of strong Wyoming stock. As the daughter of Depression Era parents, and the granddaughter of rugged pioneers, she never wastes anything (every scrap of tissue paper from a Christmas present is carefully flattened, refolded and saved for next year) and her recipes are hearty and basic. A staple food of our household growing up was boiled chicken. Some diced onions, celery, salt, and chicken parts were seemingly always steaming on the stove. The boiled chicken could then be used for sandwiches, salads, enchiladas, or a myriad of other dishes. The remaining chicken stock would then be stored in the refrigerator to be used for soups and stews. When there are a couple quarts of chicken stock to store, a normal tupperware is usually too small and causes spills when pouring liquid back out. So my mom would opt to store the stock — laden with onions, celery, chicken pulp, and fat — in a drink pitcher.

Many a time, I or my siblings would go to the fridge in search of a nice cold beverage. We would scan the milk jugs and pitchers filled with various types of juice and settle on the lemonade. We would pour ourselves a nice tall glass of the golden pulpy liquid, take a gulp, pause for a second while the flavor registered, and then spew it over the counter top. You see, expecting a frosty, sweet/tart citrus flavor, we would find ourselves swigging chilled chicken fat.

I was walking along the tunnel between the Blue and Red lines at the Washington “El” stop when I was passed by a young man who was running and screaming for all to hear, “Remember my name is Sean Davis! Remember that because I am going to be famous, dead or alive! Sean Davis! Remember that!”

My friend Stacza and I agreed to help our friend, Dario, move to New York City during the summer of 2001. We packed up Dario’s belongings in Stacza’s minivan and endured the ten-hour drive to New York City where we dropped him off. We stayed with some of Stacza’s friends for the next few days while we explored the ins and outs of the city.

Trying to find street parking in Manhattan for a minivan was just shy of impossible. We spent, on average, about three hours a day driving around the Upper West Side in search of an open spot. We circled block after block and double-parked on a street for a spell in hopes that someone would move their vehicle. Eventually we would surrender and drive to the nearest and cheapest parking garage we could find, hand over forty dollars, and be on our way, three hours poorer and forty dollars lighter.

On one of our parking excursions we were circling near Amsterdam Avenue when Stacza cried out, “That was Albert Brooks!”

“That wasn’t Albert Brooks,” I said. “He didn’t even have an afro.”

“It sure looked like Albert Brooks,” Stacza insisted.

I replied, “Everyone looks like Albert Brooks at 40 miles per hour.”

My grandmother, Clea, spent the last few years of her life in a nursing home in Lovell, Wyoming. She refused to leave the town in which she raised her children, but she could no longer take care of herself. She had a small room to herself with a rocking chair, a bed, a television, and photographs of her progeny.

When she died in February 2000, my father and his siblings set to the task of sifting through her belongings in her room and in storage. There were hand-made quilts to be distributed to grandchildren, kitchen utensils to be donated to thrift stores, and family photographs to be divvied up.

My father told me of a few paintings that my grandmother had done while in the nursing home. She participated in weekly classes where the seniors learned to paint. The canvases were store-bought and mounted to board, the paint was acrylic, and the subjects were imagined - invented landscapes and fictional floral still lifes. Since I was the only “artist” in the family, my father thought that I might like to have them. I asked him, “Didn’t grandma have pretty bad cataracts before she died?” He confirmed that she did. I said, “So do each of the paintings have a big blob in the middle of them?”

I grew up at the base of the Wasatch Mountain Range in Utah. The valley in which I lived was hedged on the north and east by towering peaks while on the west a lake and more mountains fenced us in. This scenic vista was very commonplace to us and rarely drew our attention.

During the summer of 1992, the mountains caught fire due to the careless antics of juveniles with fireworks. Day and night the fires blazed, turning the sun red, casting a dense smoke over the valley, and blanketing our cars with a thin film of ash. As the sun set and the valley darkened, the fires glowed on the crests of the hills creating a strange show of pyrotechnics.

My neighbors laid blankets on their roofs, set out lawn chairs on their grass, and watched the blazes. Typically we would only do this for the fireworks displays of July Fourth and Pioneer Day, but now we had a reason to look at our environment.

Note: My MFA thesis is housed on a zip disk. Since I haven’t had access to a zip drive for the last year and a half, I haven’t even peeked at my thesis since I handed it in. This is an excerpt from my thesis.