turquoise beads

Gallery Los Olivos will feature two artists, jewelry designer Patricia Watkins and watercolorist Peggy Fletcher, in April.

The public is invited to an artists’ reception from 2 to 5 p.m. Sunday, April 1, at the gallery.

  Watkins has been designing beaded jewelry for 15 years. She started with Zarah Company who used artists for designing, but later found working for herself more flexible. She is known for her classical feminine touch in her pieces and will have many of these on display.

 Watkins uses sterling silver and gold filled findings for the bulk of her work, but occasionally uses brass and copper as well as vintage beads.

For this show Watkins will also include one case of whimsically themed jewelry as a tribute to a wonderful friend from the past. This jewelry is sure to use costume pieces from the past such as clowns, dogs, cats, and faces.

Fletcher brings inspired work to this show from her past travels as well as current passions. Some of these passions surround us everyday: dogs, cats, butterflies, fauna and flowers.

Fletcher’s work remains gentle and fluid while bringing important details into focus. Her work looks and feels serene due to a soft fresh color palette balanced  by soft value changes.  

Fletcher enjoys doing animal portrait commissions in her spare time.  

“I have seen many of these in progress and they are always impressive,” said Watkins. “As animal lovers know, a cat is not just a cat. Sometimes they have nine lives. Peggy seems to capture that quality.”

An excellent new episode of The Good Wife caught the audience's attention this week through a lot of events which started with Kalinda's IRS mess, moving on to Diane asking Alicia to partake in a blue ribbon panel on her behalf, as it would be good for both her career and the firm. With the annoying panel chair Mike Kresteva, superbly portrayed by guest star Matthew Perry (Friends), Alicia has a lot on her plate. As she still tries to buy the old Florrick family house, the episode reveals, through a number of flashbacks, some of the most wonderful as well as awkward moments the Florricks shared in that house. And hats off to the Alicia-Jackie cliffhanger! That would sure turn into one hell of an exchange in the next episode.

Back to the male-oriented panel that was investigating a police shooting of a civilian, Alicia—the token female—manages to irritate the other members including Kresteva, while she kindly questions the victim's son about the undercover officers who shot his father. The boy denies they identified themselves before shooting. Judge Dunaway, one of the panel members, tells Alicia there's no need to impress and reinvent a wheel that works just fine.

She also learns that a gun at the crime scene was used in a jewelry robbery and confiscated later by Officer Zimmerman. When Alicia asks whether the gun had been planted, Kresteva cuts short her interrogation of an expert witness, but Pastor Damon (played by Charles S. Dutton, whom L Word fans might remember as Dr. Benjamin Bradshaw), grants Alicia his allotted five minutes to finish what she started.

Later at Kalinda's IRS meeting, she has to deal with a more arrogant male bureaucrat who wants more evidence on private investigator's case. Kalinda notices a laptop with the webcam on, placed behind the IRS people and shares this with Alicia as they walk out of the room. This only fuels Alicia's frustration who gets back in and walks straight to the said laptop telling off whoever was behind the cam. That was Julianna Margulies' best scene of the episode.

At Lockhart/Gardner Eli, David and Julius continue their quest to oust Will. Diane tells Will they are like three children who didn't get the toy they wanted and she's sure once they have it, they'll destroy it. And out of loyalty for Will, she wants to keep his seat until his suspension ends.

Eli and Julius even toss a coin to decide who will be nominated for Will's seat. Julius wins and Eli will support him. Diane and Will decide to nominate instead Howard Lyman, a pushed aside partner with the highest seniority, who's still wondering around the firm asking Will if he knows any good porn sites.

The lovely and mysterious Kalinda gets to meet again an old acquaintance, the FBI agent Lana Delaney who already paid an unannounced visit to Alicia as the person behind the webcam during the IRS meeting. For an unknown reason yet, she has IRS on Kalinda's back. Whether it has to do with Lockhart/Gardner's drug dealer client, Lemond Bishop, or with Kalinda refusing to accept Lana's offer to join FBI, the agent's motives are still unclear.

MUNCIE -- Nights like Saturday night were made for Muncie Gras.

With ideal weather for the 11th annual downtown Muncie event, it didn't take long for the streets to be packed with those in pursuit of a good time.

"I've definitely been surprised by the crowds," said Dustin Rhoades, who was attending his first Muncie Gras with his fiancée, Jessica Murray.

"It's great to be out with Muncie's finest," Murray said with a laugh.

Cheryl Crowder, event director for Muncie's Downtown Development Partners, said she thought Saturday night's weather -- at about 56 degrees with clear skies at 9 p.m -- could be responsible for the largest crowd in Muncie Gras history.

"It's absolutely perfect out," said Crowder, who was wearing a zerba-inspired outfit. "At this point, it's as busy as I've ever seen it at 9 o'clock. We've really expanded our space quite a bit, and we're already seeing it being filled in."

Vendor Arttacgo Luckett said the city needs more events like Muncie Gras to get partygoers together in one spot.

"It's fun," Luckett said. "We need to have more events like this for the Muncie folk. We don't get to hang out like this too often."

Luckett was running an eyelash extension booth for those looking to enhance their looks as they roamed the streets of downtown Muncie.

"People like to be beautiful all the time," he said. "People like to enhance their beauty, and I'm the man for the job."

Muncie Gras is about the party, but it's also about the food.

Vendor Ruby Woods of Ruby's Kitchen said business was good Saturday night as she handed out her famous tenderloins and Ruby's chips.

Woods said there's a simple plan of attack when running a food operation at an event like Muncie Gras.

" You have to have it all ready," Woods said. "I do all my grilling and everything at home. Because people want it now -- they don't want to have to stand in line and wait for you to grill up something."

Yes, partying and good eats and drinks are the backbone of Muncie Gras, but it wouldn't be the annual celebration without its famous beads.

Mary O'Hare can offer many reasons why she thinks downtown Aiken is the best place to shop, eat and play.

Recently, the owner of M.B. Jewelry and Beads on Laurens Street, was asked by the Aiken Downtown Development Association to serve as the chairman of the marketing committee. O'Hare accepted, continuing her five years of volunteer work with the ADDA.

"I love volunteering for the Aiken Downtown Development Association," she said. "There's so much that the ADDA does for the Aiken community to keep us (downtown businesses) unified."

ADDA committees are made up of local business owners who volunteer their time to help with the various aspects of keeping downtown Aiken vibrant. O'Hare also serves as the co-chair of the membership committee.

O'Hare said one of her goals as the marketing committee chairman is to change the misconception by many residents that it's too expensive to shop downtown. She cited a resident she knows who set a $20 budget for each loved one that he was purchasing a Christmas gift for, and he was able to do all his holiday shopping in downtown Aiken.

O'Hare said she wants to promote the fact that there is a level of customer service residents can receive in downtown Aiken that they can't find anywhere else. She remembers when her family came to Aiken to visit and stopped in Chris' Camera Center on Laurens Street. The employees of the store not only took their photograph but also made sure each family member got a copy.

"You can't get that kind of service at any of the large stores, but you can get it downtown," O'Hare said.

O'Hare wants more residents to come and explore the businesses in downtown Aiken. She's recently met people who have lived in Aiken for decades but never shopped downtown before. She wants residents to know that Plum Pudding sells not only cookware but also wonderful spices, candles and more. She wants them to be aware that 3 Monkeys has a bridal registry and the Aiken Center for Arts offers various classes.

"People don't realize what's here, and they don't realize what their missing," she said. "We want them to get off their computers and come out of the big box stores and come downtown."

Lastly, O'Hare said almost everything anyone could possibly need can be found in downtown Aiken from home furnishings to even a few groceries.

"We may be small, but we are packed with all the conveniences of big cities without the commotion," O'Hare said.

The reason she is so passionate about the downtown area is because of the sort of community it has become. O'Hare moved her store to downtown Aiken eight years ago from the basement of another business located on the corner of Pine Log and Silver Bluff roads. She said the business owners assist each other and are quite neighborly.

"There isn't a single downtown business that doesn't care about Aiken," O'Hare said. "We take pride, we're a neighborhood and I really want to market that neighborhood feeling."

Judith McPherson, the plucky heroine of Grace McCleen's debut novel, “The Land of Decoration,” is a smart but extremely literal-minded 10-year-old English schoolgirl. She grows up, as Ms. McCleen did, in the midst of Christian fundamentalists. She has been raised with the guarantee that Armageddon is near.

To deal with this prospect Judith develops elaborate coping mechanisms. She imitates her absent mother, who was very adept at crafts. She imitates her father, who is methodical and dour. When she wants to understand why her father does not love her, for instance, Judith makes a careful outline and ticks off each individual reason.

But Judith's main feat of mimicry is the book's biggest selling point. As she narrates even the opening chapter, she speaks in a 10-year-old's version of the voice of God. And her one-room version of Creation is the model world that she builds in her bedroom. She uses brown corduroy to make fields, wire and beads for the sun, a mirror for the sea, tinfoil for rivers and cookie boxes for houses. She also fills this tiny place with human and animal populations.

“And I looked at the people and I looked at the animals and I looked at the land,” Judith says, in junior Biblical fashion. “And I saw they were good.”

She borrows from Ezekiel 20:5-6 (“a land flowing with milk and honey; it was the decoration of all the lands”) to name her mini-world the Land of Decoration. So far, so good. But at school she spooks her classmates. When Neil Lewis, a standard-issue bully, warns on a Friday that he plans to humiliate her on Monday, Judith is afraid to return to class.

So she builds her fears and hopes and dreams into the Land of Decoration. Realizing that snow will close the school, she uses cotton and feathers and all kinds of other stuff to coat the model world in white. And when Monday arrives, guess what happens? Flakes fall. School closes.

Lonely, neglected Judith suddenly feels very powerful. Did she make it snow? Did she wreak a miracle? She will gather more evidence, she tells herself, “and then we shall see.”

Then Ms. McCleen writes this line: “ ‘We certainly shall,' no one said back.”

All of the book's promise rides on that one sentence. At the point when it arrives it has been hard to tell whether “The Land of Decoration” is merely adorable verging on treacly, or will become something more. Judith's hearing an actual voice raises the question of whether she is divinely blessed or scarily deluded.

(Note to fans of the Library of Congress's classification system: Cheating won't help you. The Library has hedged its bets by classifying this book as both “Religious fiction” and “Psychological fiction.” The novel falls into the categories “Girls,” “Fathers and daughters,” “Good and evil” and “Miracles” too. Somehow a book featuring precise instructions on how to make people out of clay, beads and pipe cleaners has not been cataloged under “Handicrafts” as well.)

Anyway, Judith's faith in her omnipotence starts to grow. She devotes herself to fighting the Neil Lewis threat, and her efforts seem to work. Her father is the only person who might notice, but he is too distracted. In a plot twist so tidy that Judith might have invented it, he is a laborer embroiled in a factory strike, and his troubles at work parallel Judith's at school. The book even gives Neil a nasty, skanky father who is as mean to Mr. McPherson as Neil is to Mr. McPherson's only child.

Where is Judith's mother? This too is one of the story's unsurprising aspects, and it is hinted at very early. Let's just say that Judith has reason to view Armageddon as a happy time of reunion, and that when she hears God speak, she is drawn closer to something she deeply desires.

Ms. McCleen uses Judith as a conveniently uncomplicated young mouthpiece for big questions about faith and doubt. “All the important things, like whether someone loves you or something will turn out right, aren't certain, so we try to believe them,” Judith says precociously. “Whereas all the things you don't have to wonder about, like gravity and magnetism and the fact that women are different from men, you can bet your life on but you don't have to.”

“The Land of Decoration” doesn't get more nuanced than that. Yes, its voice of God evolves into a slangy, wisecracking, child's-eye version of divinity. (“Well, this is a busy time in heaven right now. Four horsemen are straining at the bit, there're some winds that are very restless, and there are a lot of locusts that are getting under everyone's feet. Oh, and some seals that have to be opened.”) And yes, the question of where this voice comes from remains a teeny bit open.

But the book's tensions mount in a simple and schematic way, with danger escalating on cue and Judith's mental state getting scarier, until it's time for them to stop mounting and for Judith's little world to become a better place. Then it finds resolution. This particular apocalypse is not what it's cracked up to be.