Dona, You probably would have gone to the Home Ec classroom or the locker room outside the Gym. I had forgotten that when I wrote last. Those were the places that were dominated by the girls. I was crazy to be on the the Air Base. Of course I was still built like a boy. But I did enjoy the attention I did get. Our friends had two daughters much younger than me. So they didn’t know how to treat a 13 year old. They treated me like an adult. Took me to the officers club for dinner dances etc. It was quite lovely. I even got to use the dances I’d learned in Grade School. I started high school thinking I was pretty grown up. I remember that weekend in SF. We had dinner at the Top of the Mark and stayed in that hotel. I remember the busboy just served our table. Keeping our water glasses full and filling the butter dish etc. I was so impressed. He had a white towel over his arm. We had a beautiful breakfast the next morning with same kind of service. Then we toured Chinatown. We had lunch in a Chinese restaurant on the second level so we could look down on the people on the street. I was fascinated by the number of people who were in native clothes. Then finished the day at fisherman’s wharf. I wasn’t impressed by the seafood, growing up eating on the Oregon coast but was mighty impressed by the bread and garlic butter. The last day was spent at that huge zoo, Flyshacker I think. I fell in love with that city. We almost landed in Northern California when we moved back to the coast in 1970. My husband wanted to commute, he was a Delta pilot. But we just couldn’t afford the real estate in the city. I looked at Halfmoon Bay but we decided he couldn’t fight the fog to get to the airport. So we ended up back in Oregon. But I made a decision to treat us that first year which was a trial to see if we could even do it. I rented a log cabin up on Mount Hood in Rhododendron. I was a hoot. We skied our head off that year.

Happy New Year to you, too, Lena. Seems like Matisse had the right touch for colors. In this exhibit there were mainly portraits and in some of them he used the most amazing shades of GREEN. My sister and I dubbed him the “Master of Green”. If I had to choose my top three I think it would be 1. Egon Schiele: I didn´t know much about him at the time but was an instant fan. What got me was his portrait of his dying wife- so emotional. 2. William Turner: One of my all time favorites since I was a kid. 3. Wassily Kandinsky: a monster exhibit from his early works to his last. It was hosted in three museums because there were so many paintings. Oh, and then there was this Cézanne exhibit which was so popular we had to wait for five hours to get inside. And then there was … oh, well, I can´t just choose three, but I stop here anyway because it would definitely qualify as blog-hogging if I went on.