SISTER PAIGE WAS COMPLETELY CHARMED the other morning by a profile she heard on NPR of Asha Bhosle and Lata Mangeshkar. Three guesses as to who they are. And if you’re a Bollywood connoisseur, sorry, you’re disqualified. Get the scoop from Paige.
From the category archives:
Kinship
TSP SISTER MARION IS NOT the only one who’s got Oscars, and Oscar hairstyles, on the brain. The impending threat of a weekend of red-carpet coverage of a zillion visions of celebrity loveliness has Sister Paige thinking, too, about yes, her hair. “My hair, it seems, is a metaphor for grown-up life, which is messy and unpredictable and full of twists and turns,” she says. Read on, sister.
OSCAR HAIR. C’MON, you know you want some, says TSP’s redheaded Marion. How many people do you think contribute to pre-Oscar lifting and spraying, mussing and fussing, and, more to the point, how do we get us some of that slavish attention? “I can picture me now after just a bit of it,” Marion says, “scrubbing out the slow cooker while looking ever so much more like Julianne Moore; appearing in front of my front-load clothes dryer with just a smidgen of Streep-like casual-ness to my coif. Are you in, sisters?” Get Marion’s hair do’s and don’ts.
YOU PROBABLY KNOW by now that here at The Sister Project, we can’t resist a good sister story, and we love the sisters known as nuns, but this particular piece of news took us by surprise. Bill Murray is one of our favorite actors and comedians (seen his hilarious turn as himself in last year’s Zombieland?) but we didn’t know that one of his eight siblings is a Catholic nun, and a dramatic one at that. Our Sister Paige has the story.
WE TRY to keep track of notable sisters’ birthdays, so that we can remind ourselves (and you, of course) of all the women we admire, and acknowledge them on their special days. But as we were putting together our plans for this month, we noticed that an awful lot of spectacular sisters were born this month. This Friday is the birthday of Indy car racing pioneer Janet Guthrie, and next week, we’ll be celebrating actress Lynn Redgrave, Civil War heroine Harriet Tubman, singer Liza Minnelli and photographer Diane Arbus. That’s a whole lot of talent packed into seven days. As with everything around here, Sister Paige has her theories about why.
THE NEW MAMMOGRAM GUIDELINES are confounding, TSP’s Sister Marion says; she thinks we can agree on that. Ever since that government task force reported last November that most women don’t need mammograms in their 40s, that they should get one every two years starting at 50, that breast self-exams do no good, and that women shouldn’t be taught to do those exams, Marion has been dismayed as well as confused. But after developing some pain and tenderness, she scheduled a scan and, as if in response to all this unsteadying noise, a steadfast sisterhood was there to greet her. Read her story of the sisterhood of the breast.
NOT ONLY DID MEG WAITE CLAYTON WRITE THE BOOK on sisterhood, she’s done it three times–two already published novels and the third just sent off to her editor. “The emotional turf I seem to go back to again and again is sisterhood in the friendship sense,” Meg, the author of the national bestseller The Wednesday Sisters, told TSP’s Sister Marion. Marion’s profile of Meg is here to enjoy.
SOMETIMES WHEN SHE’S HOMEBOUND with cabin fever, Sister Paige says, she finds friends and sisterhood in unlikely places. Where does she go for a sense of community with hobby chicken farmers and collage artists and writers and other moms–all her kinds of people–when she can’t leave the driveway? Get the roadmap here.
I LOVE THIS SONG BY RICHARD THOMPSON, called “1952 Vincent Black Lightning” after the bike model, and every time I hear it, I think of my red-haired sister, Marion. I don’t even know if she knows the song (or Richard Thompson, or his ex-wife, Linda Thompson, or their son, Teddy Thompson, glorious musicians all). Do you, Marion? But as Richard’s cult hit says…Red hair and black leather, my favorite color scheme…(Get all the lyrics…)
{ 0 comments }
AS SOMEONE WHO HAS PREVIOUSLY purchased Aristotle, you might like…” Thus began a recent email Sister Marion received from Amazon.com. She’s thinking of printing it out and pinning it to her dress to wear while she watches The Simpsons, the combo of the two influences really kind of summing her up. Or does it? She’s not sure. Who is she, again? (Singalong now: “Who are you? Who, who, who who?”) Shall Marion ask Google, or ? A hilarious case of sometimes-mistaken identity: Read all about it.
OUR SISTER MARION LIVES ON A GRID. She calls it The Grid. It’s a character in her family’s lives to some extent, and everyone who knows it makes fun of it, and she is good with that. Printed on a large white board, written in erasable dry marker, The Grid sits on Marion’s desk, in full view as she writes, mapping out the seven days of her week, incidentals to big chunks. It’s not her sister Margaret’s digital grid, but it’s Marion’s and it works. Want to know more?
By Marion Roach Smith
OUR FAVORITE NEW BOOK is the exquisite Monday Hearts for Madalene by San Francisco disc jockey Page Hodel. The images in the video above are from a series of handmade hearts created by Hodel in memory of her partner, Madalene Rodriguez, lost to ovarian cancer. Each Monday, Hodel, 53, makes and photographs a one-of-a-kind valentine crafted from everyday objects, and then emails them to friends and family as a reminder and celebration of their love for one another. The result? This book and website, as well as other products, a portion of the sale proceeds going to The Women’s Cancer Resource Center in Oakland, California. Now that’s all heart.
{ 2 comments }
W HAT GOT ME STARTED LOOKING AT GEISHA PHOTOS, I do not know, but I suppose that all this sister talk on TSP has me seeing sisterhoods everywhere. When I first discovered the breathtaking vintage-photo collection of Rob Oechsle, or Okinawa_Soba as he is called on Flickr, including many images of geisha, I knew that without question the women depicted were a sisterhood: “the solidarity of women based on shared conditions, experiences, or concerns,” as defined by Merriam-Webster. Yes, the geisha definitely qualify on all fronts. See a geisha slideshow in vintage photos.
First time here? Here's the idea: TSP is a network of blogs about the many facets of the word sister, and the concept of sisterhood. A sisterhood of sister blogs, you could say. Whatever sister means to you, from identical twin to sister-in-law (or in-friendship or in-feminism), we’ll make room to listen in about it or express it on TSP. Like the slogan up top says, “Don’t you have something to say to your sister?” We've got galleries of art and literature by and about sisters, and a Sisterpedia of sisterly trivia...but now we're getting ahead of ourselves. The quick study: 
As the suffix of its name suggests, 
No surprise, really, that sisterhood, often life’s longest relationship and always one of its most important, has been the Muse for so much creative self-expression by women, and also by men. 
