Darla Nunnery - Artistic Instructor St. Leo Prodigy

Darla Nunnery is a visual artist specializing in professional henna body art, painting, and multi-media collage. She received her Bachelors Degree in Fine Art from the University of South Florida in 2001 and began her henna business, Starlight Mehndi Studios, that same year.

Darla has worked in children's art programs at the Tampa Museum of Art, AmeriCorps ArtsUSF, Hillsborough County's Artists in the Schools program, and is presently employed as a Cultural Arts Instructor with Saint Leo Prodigy. With over 10 years experience as an artist working with young people, Darla's gift is encouraging students to tell their personal history through their artistic creation. Her ideas for projects to create with her students bring together influences from our living environment and cultural history, while at the same time emphasize community perspectives and personal growth.

Darla's work has been shown at the Tampa Museum of Art, University of Tampa's Scarfone Gallery, and the Globe Coffee Lounge in St. Petersburg, Florida. Additionally, she has been curator at many art events and gallery showings for her students over the years.
Currently site director for Saint Leo University Prodigy Program.

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This is my Goth Other Chile, Darla that I'm so proud of! I've known Darla since her much younger years and have costumed for her during her reenactment days in some beautiful regalia.

She does more than painting and teaching art to children. Darla has a thriving business of doing traditional Mehndi. She's so good at it, making her own henna pastes from scratch and being a purist that the Bay Area Indian and Middle Eastern families use her for their traditional wedding rituals. She's beginning to experiment with henna on cloth as well. You can take a look at some of her Mehndi art on her MySpace page.

She's been featured in articles in The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, Newsday and was chosen in Tampa's annual Best of the Bay for best body art.

Descended from a real French princess (she acts regal!), she also boasts a rarity in Florida: A real Florida Native from a long line of Floridians.

We're celebrating our birthdays tonight - mine past and hers coming up. Rituals are important to her as is family.

I'm giving her a reading from Madam Zucchini and she's taking me to dinner.

Quickie

Just a quick flybye to let everyone know I'm alive and doing well. Very busy and trying to reconstruct my computer which has been on the blitz for over a week - one of the reasons I haven't updated Deepwater Journal. The repair cost me $2.64 for a can of techie air. Note to all: If your fan is running overtime and your computer screen just goes to black and shuts down, try pulling off the access panel and cleaning out the felt pad of cat fur and dust which is choking it. Saves destroyed records and docs. I lost all of them trying to play Mr. Wizard and 'fix it' myself.

Finally got over to visit Apatz and his wife Josie. What beauties! Wonderful art and a gorgeous sanctuary of a garden in back of their townhouse! I came away with a great Ott magnifying lens to do my close up work and tried a wonderful Italian wine.

We talked art, politics, spirituality nonstop.

My biggest joy is my son Chris. I think we've started to mend our hearts once again by agreeing to leave the past in the past. He made the first move which I felt was his right so he could set limits with me. We've burned up the phone lines talking for hours. Feels like it did long ago when I told people that even if he wasn't my son, that I'd like him as a person. I'm also proud of the progress he's made in his life choices. He's going to college, works as a deputy for his county, and is a solidly good man. I can die happy now.

I'm starting on a new fiber piece when I should be working on other commissions. But I just have to do this one piece or at least, get it started.

(The flying jack rabbit photo is by Desert USA. I just love it.)

Missed

So. I've had two blue days. I missed a wonderful evening of conversation and wine with my friend Apatx Latorre. Now. I've told you about him before. I met him at Gala Corina in the Fall when we both had works displayed. I told you about how taken I was with the womanist symbology in his painting "The River".




He wanted to show me a commission painting completed before it went to its new home in Puerto Rico. We were supposed to get together this past Saturday to share wine and ideas. I have a car. It is a free car. The story is too long to tell except that it has been a good and dependable car. Up until about 3 weeks ago.


Overnight it develops this burp fart car thing when I try to start it. Sometimes I'm lucky and can get it to run so that I'm not totally a home bound agoraphobic. Most of the time it's a dud start out of the gate. So I missed my evening with Apatx after 40 minutes of cussing and pleading. I didn't get to see his new painting in person. I didn't get to uncork my most favorite red wine I bought for us to share, Rex Goliath pinot grigio.

So. Here is Apatx (isn't he gorgeous??!!), his paintings including The River and the new one that miraculously turned up on my computer in an email that wasn't there before (aren't they just stunning?), and a picture of the bottle of Goliath I bought to go share with my wonderful friend this past Saturday when the rice rocket wouldn't start. I figured if I shared it with all of you, I'll get over the black ass that ensued when I couldn't see him and share one on one.

The fancy wine glasses are from my altar. They are ritual juggernauts that I use to invoke creativity, The Quarters, Passers-by in the Cosmic Cotillion, etcetera. Mostly etcetera. The heavily beaded one is mine. The simple gold leaves and stems with vines was done by Natalya Kashalova Shanahan, my one and only ever apprentice taken on in all the years of design work I've done, my little Bear from Belarus, my Talika. I used that to represent Apatx and his soulful paintings. Symbolic digital wine sharing.

I'm in the cups. Can't bring myself to open the Rex but wanted to show Apatx I was sincere. The rice rocket goes into the shop tomorrow. I don't dare reschedule with the Padowan Artist again until I can follow through with plans to get my hands on him and his art with a car that works when the keys go in.

I also have a vase of rooting plants for him for his garden. All of it will come together sometime soon.

You know now that it was the blue moon in May, as in ‘Once in a blue moon’ - two full moons in the same month? Well. Yes. Annie, Teresa and I used this to go on a Red Eye Turnaround to Augusta, Georgia to see Sally Jo.

You’ll also guess if you’re a reader that I tend to pidge around when I have something serious to write about. Just one tiny bitty bit of chicken shit to my nature of balls out, hair afire, Mach 10, 60 MPH in one spot. So. Sally’s dying, don’t you know.

She has this shit ass illness called Progressive Supranuclear Palsy, as I've told you. It’s a wicked bad disease that mimics Parkinson’s and Lou Gerhigs Disease. She’ll die by choking. I watched her suffer through several of these spasms as she tried to eat orally on our visit. She refuses to give up the taste of food even though she’s intubated for direct meals and medications through a tube in her abdomen.

Sally always was stubborn like that. She refused to give up on me when I was a non-responsive basket case drooling on the sofa and contemplating a trip to the woods with Sara Jane, my Rueger. She and Carol Gray saw to it that I went on holiday to the hospital.

She refused to give up on her kids, too, her sisters, and any of the cases she ever worked as a deputy sheriff. Murderers confessed to her and showed her where they hid the bodies when they talked to no one else. Loonies told her about ‘Wonderment Sticks’ and I made one for her to shake at the most reprobate of speeders complete with grape root windy-ness and jewels to get them to slow down. She keeps it under the pix of me and her and Carol.

And she’s refusing this goddamn awful disease that will eat her nerve responses until every neuron in her tall ass ole body just shuts down and quits.

I told Katy and Sue to fly me up and we’ll see her out together. None of us want her to choke to death (a horrid way to go) and we hope that she’ll fall into a peaceful coma and sleep herself into the afterlife. If not, I hope the medicoes have the cajones to help her out.

I’ve thought much about the Three Norns with all this illness and dying. The Three Norns or Fates, the Great Wyrd Sisters who card and spin the skein of our life, then weave us into being, determine the length of our days, and then cut us from the weft of experience and age when we have wended our way to the other side ever recycling,

I read my mama the Book Of Fates by Z. Budapest on the stages of life – one that I was reviewing for the International newspaper, Goddessing championed and published by friend Willow Lamont - as she was dying under the aegis of Hospice in 1999. I read the last pages and squeezed the book Z wrote – something you do when a read has been so good and you could find no other words than The End or the copyright page. Ma looked up from the bed and said, ‘Just in time’. And it was. She passed very shortly afterward. I will love anything Z Budapest writes from here on out because of that book.

Now. Besides Sally Jo, I have my mentor Shirley DesRochers in a pickle in Tampa General Hospital with a hell of a hack and whack job on her colon for diverticulitis. This is the latest in several of them and she’s been fighting fistulas, infections, and you put on plastic when you go in to see her. She left me a fatalistic message on my machine before she went in over a month ago. I save it because she tells me what a good, good friend I’ve been to her. They told her there would be no more surgeries. She doesn't have enough colon yet to digest a taco, let alone take a shit.

I promised her tonight when I trudged up huffing to the 8^thfloor from a parking lot that was built in the back forty that I’d bring my cards and play straight with her when I read to say what I see. She asked me. I will. No matter how grim the news. She can take it. She has gonads, too.

Death doesn’t scare me personally. I just hate to leave a mess. And. I hate to be left behind by all the enormous Goddess women and men my life has wrapped around. Doesn’t seem quite right, although the sidekicks and good guys always get whacked in the movies.

When I gack, I hope some friend will write a line or two about me saying that they missed whatever quality about me that struck them as worthy. I know that I shall miss my girls and their faces.

Leaving....Losing

I'm losing friends. By attrition, mostly. But a few by death.

You see. I've come to what the French call un femme de certain age - a woman, mature. There's a point where we all start to watch the obituaries to see if there are familiar names. Sometimes, we hit the jackpot by attention. Other times, if we keep our friends close, we know when their bans to the Pearly Gates will appear in the paper.

I have three of my girls on the edge of check out at this time. Oh. There is always the occasional surprise where one of us 'young chicks' will phase out before our time in a sudden accident. Like SIDS, the mature can go too, unannounced, unexpected, and unwarranted.

I have one in hospital. Critical care unit in town. I'm too chicken shit to call and find out her status because I've promised her that if she dies, I'll kill her. Afraid I'll have to follow through because her son, a NASA scientist, tells me she's fatalistic. Another is in full term adult care, wasting away of a disease that struck her down. Like the Gaelic Boddicia of old, Sally is six foot tall. She was a cop - twenty years worth of manhandling the bad side of life. I have her marked on the doorpost on the archway in my living room to the dining room of my old house along with my child; his friends, my friends, and whoever made enough impact or asked to be tallied up to stature here.

So. Sally Jo was part of the conversation at the whenever number next get-together of The Committee. This is a group of us women that have been meeting since we all gathered for the first meeting of a Codependents Anonymous group I put together back in the 80s. We all bonded. Only one of us dropped the ball for a spiritual quest at Ba'hai. The rest of us have more or less kept covenant with each other since.

Sally has an incurable disease called Supranuclear Progressive Palsy. It will end up choking her as her throat muscles give up the ability to clamp down and loosen. Sal is sixty something. Awful shitting young to have to say adieu. I have told her sister Katy that I did not want her to strangle. Katy agreed. I will be second in the duel if needed. You understand what I'm saying.

Shirley, on the other hand, is as hard as rocks and as fragile as a lotus in her seventies. She's spiritual leader and divine hag and crone for at least three hundred seeking individuals she guides from her quaint book and herb store where there are resident spirits. She has worked hard all her life. She is integrity exemplified. She has taught me how to use my mean bones so that I wouldn't get stepped on. In her seventy-somethings, she still has the best gams around left over from a modeling career where she sported Russian Wolfhounds down a runway. She's had the umpty-umphth operation on a recalcitrant colon in ex many years. All leave scar tissue, a little less colon, and this time, fistulas.

Fistula. Sounds like a Roman Emperor, a Caesar that rampages through the good land of a body that was once brave and strong and beautiful. She is the one that I can't seem to bring myself to follow up on. I've talked to her son. He gives me news that isn't welcome. There is something in his reports that tell me she has given up. Fatalistic. Or almost. Either way. Almost is too close.

The third chasing Death is Miz Miriam down the street. She walked up to the house here about two months ago to tell me in person that she has CML - some kind of chronic leukemia that strikes later in life. Miriam is 82. She has raised her children. She's raised her grandchildren. She's also raised her GREAT grand children. She gardens. She curses. I've seen her dive in the creek to rescue a child overboard on a bike like she was 16 years old. She asked me to try to help her find some cannibus to treat the awful pain that she cannot take opiates for. She gets ill on pain meds. I am a friend. The mission was unsucessful. That's all I have to say about that.

So. What do I have to say to you tonight? Wisdom? I don't have any. I am wallowing in my own insecurities and skitters at being left with three less good women. I will be losing these very special people from my life. I don't know how to do anything other than honor them by kicking my own ass in gear and getting on with the Cosmic Cotillion that we sign onto when we check onto Planet Earth.

I believe in an afterlife. I must. Neither the purported rapture nor glory calms my soul as much as believing that I will have the chance to touch the ones I love, have loved again. Or that I will have the chance to come back and make it a little better the next time. I hope to see Miriam, Sally Jo and Shirley on the next taxi back to planet Earth. They are good company.