Praeterita

Patty and I held our latest Salon yesterday. 25 people - writers, artists, musicians, friends - came along to read from their fiction and non-fiction, play guitar and sing, and show pieces of art. A description of Gertrude and Leo Stein's salon in early twentieth century Paris: "On a typical Saturday evening, 60 years ago, one would have found Gertrude Stein at her post in the atelier, garbed in brown corduroy, sitting in a high-backed Renaissance chair, her legs dangling, next to the big cast-iron stove that heated the chilly room. A few feet away, one could hear Leo expounding to a group of visitors, his views on modern art. Among the crowd of Hungarian painters, French intellectuals, English aristocrats and German students, one might pick out the figures of Picasso and his mistress, Fernande Olivier (Picasso looking like an intense young bootblack; Fernande, almond-eyed and attractive). The man with the reddish beard and spectacles, looking like a German professor, wo...