December 28, 2007
Last one in the office. It's four P.M. on Friday and everyone's taken off for the New Year's weekend. Kind of quiet and nice here. Cold out (have my jacket on). Cleaned off my desk this morning. Carole stuck her head in my office and said, "You've been robbed!" She's so funny.

Went home for lunch and had a ham sando and two pickles and an apple. Sat out by the pool in the sunshine to get warm. Been working half-days, going into the office in the morning and then coming home to work in studio, and then back at four to close up shop.

I'm really enjoying the Charlie Schulz biography. He and his first wife Joyce (smitten by The Lone Ranger, she ran away to New Mexico at 18, got pregnant by a charming cowboy named Bill Lewis in Glenwood, New Mexico, got married in Silver City, then he left her. Note to self: I am practically related to a whole gaggle of Lewis's over in eastern New Mexico, actually Crow Flats, and I wonder. . I may know this cad, or his kids?) So, anyway, Joyce goes home to Saint Paul and has a daughter and she's practically ostracized by her snooty Saint Paul relatives. In the meantime she meets Sparkie and they fall in love and get married (she wears black to her wedding, since her family won't let her wear virgin white!) and they move to Colorado Springs to get away from these snobs, where the daughter, Merideth, inspires Schulz to create Lucy Van Pelt, the lynchpin to the whole comic strip he is just getting his sea legs on, but he's such a woosie, he misses his father, so after nine months they move back to Minnesota, and he's just on the verge of becoming a very rich cartoonist. But Man, what a haul he had (and hey, I'm only about half way into the book. We still have a couple more wives and alleged mistresses and a boatload of money to go. Ha.

Having just read the Steve Martin memoir, Born Standing Up, I'm thinking of doing a series on "Hitting It Big: What it takes to make the Big Time." I am very intrigued by the journey these guys made. How did these guys get there? How much was the sacrifice, what was the discipline and exactly what was the originality that made each of them an icon? That is the journey I am interested in. What did they do prior to hitting it big? And what was the breakthrough?

Gee, I wonder if Ol' Whistler has anything to say on this?

An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision.
—James McNeill Whistler