All hail Theadora, Queen of Nonsequiturs

"Oh, just say OUTHOUSE and be done with it!"

Gramma has just finished her late-night vacuming spree. As she puts her machine away, she argues with her belongings in the closet, saying, "Now YOU get in there, and YOU move over there. I know it's no use talking to you. You just do what you want. The perversity of inanimate objects. They can't be inanimate, the way they HOWL when you use them!"

One day I told Gramma about the emergence of my wisdom teeth . She began to laugh and said to me, "I guess that means you've got your brain. They're being pushed out to make room for your brain! Can you imagine your brain growing down there in your mouth?"

Gramma told me a story one night. When Thea was a young woman studying in Manhattan, she commuted from Elizabeth, New Jersey. She'd take a ferry to a train to a bus to get home. One evening she was wearing a rabbit-fur coat and boarding the bus in New Jersey. It was dusk, just before the street lamps went on. She handed her ticket to the driver. As he touched the ticket, sparks of static electricity threw out a circle of blue light at the front of the bus. The driver overcame his startlement, shook his head and said in awe, "What a woman!" The entire busload of passengers burst out laughing. The following evening when Thea boarded his bus and offered him her ticket he held out his driver's cap and said with a grin, "Drop it in here!"

Thea says this to Relani and me in a phone conversation:
"Oh, you two indians, it's nice hearing you both at the same time. It makes me feel like you're sitting here in the living room with me. But you're not. I'm just looking at two ghosts."

Thea sits and begins to remove the plastic wrapping from her mail-order edition of Into The Unknown, and she says with a look of consternation directed toward the large, hard-bound book, "This hasn't even pecked its way out of its shell yet!"

"Beg your pardon, grant you grace,
Hope the cat will lick your face."

Upon seeing bruises on my arm I got in a slam-pit, Thea asks me, "Don't things give you a warning when you get too close to them?"

When she's gotta go get a tissue to blow her nose or spit, Thea says:
"I've gotta go get a four corners thing."

Thea's conversations with her granddaughter, Relani

Relani - So, so you want to read some more stories tonight?
Thea - If the baby doesn't cry.
Relani - So you think she's going to cry?
Thea - She always cries when we start doing something.
Relani - Does that bother you?
Thea - Well, I think she has a little spirit that follows us around, and whenever we're going to do something, she rushes to the baby and whispers in her ear, and she starts fussing.

Thea - That baby is a SHOT!
(Everyone turns and looks at Thea, startled and curious.)
Thea - ... in the arm of this house!

Relani - I've got to get into that coffee now.
Thea - It'll be cooled off by now!
Relani - Do you think so?
Thea - No, I don't think so.

Thea, to the dog, Jolie blonde:
"Oh, your tail makes such a SWISH when it beats!"

Relani, to the dog - Jolie, are you licking my toes? Talk about subservience!
Thea - Do they lick your toes?
Relani - Jolie! Jolie's licking my toes.
Thea - She wasn't talking about Serbians.

Relani - People usually take baths every day or every other day.
Thea - I don't know WHAT they took.

Thea forgot Relani's name one day. Our mother said her mother Thea was embarassed for forgetting.
Relani - Are you embarassed?
Thea - At the way you're dressed?
Relani - For forgetting my name.
Thea - No, I just eat my breakfast and get it down.

Thea tickles the sole of my foot with her thick fingernails then tells me to write a poem about how that feels. I write, Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!

"I can't gold-plate my fingers. If I put honey on all my fingers it would stick."

"Nobody is ANYthing today if he's not a tousled, unmade bed."

Thea - August 17, 1966. That's the anniversary of Grampa Ray Wilbur's death. Well, there's your rags for polishing the car in this basket. Good night, Binky. That's how he sleeps all the time, Suzy, curled up like that. Can he tell we're talking about him, Suzy?"
Suzy - "No, not while he's sleeping."
Thea - "I wonder what messages his whiskers tell him. Do you think they're like antennas? Oh, I think this gramma's going to go to bed. Well, you're some kitty cat, Binky. Even his turds weren't messy. I think he must've buried them somewhere. Look at his ear."
Suzy - "Rub his belly and see what he does."
Thea - "No, I don't want to disturb him, I want to go to bed. You were curled up just like him by your mother."
Suzy - "I'm writing down what we're saying."
Thea - "Like a typewriter ... that's by hand too, the way fingers go like this. I think every kid should learn to type in Kindergarten. If you live to be 78 like me you'll have a beard like his too. Whiskers like villians in a movie." She wants me to put denim elbows on her couch arms. "Just baste it on tight so he's got something to scratch. And you'll be my ally. Maybe you should use bark from outside!"

The idea of capturing the spirit of the local newspaper struck Thea during a tour of The Staten Island Advance building in 1964. So she picked up various discarded items, such as teletype tapes, lead slugs, and the wire used to bundle papers, metal strippings, and clippings. She gathered as much as she could fit in her handbag, and used them in her collage, "Words."

My grandmother Theadora Wilbur worked for decades as an artist. She was the founder and president of the South Shore Artists Group in NYC, and led a women's painting group. Thea was active in the Staten Island Historical Society, the Art Section of the Staten Island Museum and the South Shore Garden Club. She wrote poetry, fashioned costume jewelry from discarded items, made prints with my grandfather Ray Wilbur (who painted for the Coca-cola company), lectured on art,, and won awards for her paintings and collages. She showed in Manhattan and sold hundreds of original abstract and modernist works.

House Victorian

through the house Victorian
through the phone lit night
she found a napping sofa
settled biscuits on her saucer
sound asleep on her couch
the whole system sings
the ice box hums
in the satellite dish a lullaby swims
she swallows the pale blue light
she nods she sighs
shrugs her cardigan shoulders
Thea's still alive, awake
Theodora's talking
leaves sit up and sing
furniture complains
wallflowers dance across the papered wall
in the phone lit hall
a whole system undone
the chandelier shone
the ten fifty-nine bays by lacing slip her soft and doucement so
she meant what all she laughing said
all the moment true
with a blue light lapping
onto angora shores
through the house Victorian
through the phone lit night

Tottenville

Mr. Cody wants to live in this house.
He has no where else. He used to live
in Tottenville with an old woman.
He kept her house and grounds in order,
and fed her when she became really
old. But she died. It's nearly a
quarter to ten.

Intrigued? Come back to read (and hear!) MORE quotes from THEADORA, the Queen of Nonsequiturs, and to see some of her paintings. I'm going to Gramma's with a tape-recorder this time!

Back to GRAMMA'S house!