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How many of us have a front and back porch on which to ruminate? This activity is a past time of days gone by. Living in a house which was builit in 1926 offers much. Currently, living in the 21st century abode requires a person to maintain multiple distractions composed of depending upon an electronic source. Composing a list about all of the electronic devices in one household, bores me more than possessing them. What excites me is a screened in porch; situated on both the back and front of my house, located right in the heart of a small sleepy metropolis. The houses with attached porches, built in the era of the 1930's offer a luxury which are antiquities in the suburban and urban housing market. Money earned from my endeavors goes to accentuating the porches which are a connection to Nature, revered in the both Egyptian times and in the revival of Greek Classicism, lasting only a short time between "Craftsman" and "Art Deco" periods of American archite...

Opting for a big, green salad is my usual fare in both restaurants and at home, but the force of Arkansas roots in my genetic composition lured me to the Oyster Bar last night. My definition of getting wild is eating anything fried. So last night, I got rebellious and had dinner with a friend at the Oyster Bar on Markham Street in Little Rock. For all of you sophisticates reading this, musing, and wondering, "Well, yeah, we all know how good the Oyster Bar is, country girl, where the hell have you been all these years?" "New York City," I say. Why did it take me so long to go out to eat in Little Rock? Four years to be exact. I blame it on Manhattan cuisine, where you can get a tofu burger, sushi and sashimi at the corner deli, with an Italian espresso, and a German pastry, for a nominal fee. Snobby? Me? No. Just practical. I mean, like a good friend of mine once said, who quoted his dad, "Why eat hamburger, when you can eat steak." (This is possibly a mis...

There is a belief strongly held by both artists and the artists' audience; society, that one must suffer in order to produce great works of art. Tracing this belief is a complicated process. Have you every pulled weeds from your garden? As you dig more deeply to uncover the weed's root, one discover's more offshoots, growing horizontally, and vertically. And so on and so forth. The roots of the starving artist myth is shaped by cultural ideaology movements, economics, psychological positions, theology, and simple human nature. In Tom Wolfe's, The Painted Word , he says, "By 1900, the artist's arena-the place where he seeks honor, glory, ease, success-had shifted twice. In seventeenth-centurey Europe, the artist was literaly, also psychologically, the house guest of the nobility and the royal court (except in Holland); fine art and court art were one in the same. In the eighteenth centurey the scene shifted to the ' salons' , in the homes of the wealthy ...