Our flight from O’Hare to Washington, DC was cancelled Friday afternoon, but after re-booking and enduring Two additional flight delays, we finally arrived in DC at midnight.

Nine hours in an airport provides a couple with a lot of time to come up with great ideas about housekeeping, budgets, writing, Academy award nominees, work, Facebook, Hackney’s, Flo, the upcoming baseball season, the 2016 Presidential election, books, dog names, groceries, Fresh Air interviews, jazz music, bartenders, aquariums, business ideas, and…blogs!

And so, here’s the thing: Mike enjoys writing guest blog posts, and we get oodles of positive comments on my Safe & Sound blog when we publish his posts, so while sitting at Gate B19 with Seeing Eye dog Whitney lying patiently at our feet, we got to thinking, hey, why not have Mike Knezovich write a post once a week, and the decision was made. Starting February 3, 2014, readers can look forward to our Mondays with Mike segment every week on the Safe & Sound blog.

Before the feast: That’s Michael and Susie Bowers, Pick, and moi. Hank’s in the kitchen….

As for the weekend trip to visit our dear friends Pick an Hank in Washington, DC, the wait at O’Hare Friday was well worth it. Visits with Pick and Hank are always a joy, and the highlight of this one was dinner at their condo with mutual friends Mike and Susie Bowers. Hank prepared a fresh salad with homemade dressing, followed by scrumptious filet mignon with roasted brussel sprouts and beautiful russet baked potatoes. And then? Cheesecake for dessert. Pick provided musical entertainment, and if you link here you can hear me joining him for a blues number on the piano. It was as cold in DC as it was in Chicago over the weekend, but it’s amazing how much being with friends, and especially, playing music together, can warm the heart.

Mike and I were invited to a costume ball for Mardi Gras last month, and when I found out the theme of the party was “Hollywood” I asked my young friend Nicole Dotto to

That’s me as Annie, thanks to Nicole.

help with my costume. Nicole and I met as volunteers for Sit Stay Read here in Chicago. She runs a vintage clothing shop on Etsy and generously agreed to write this guest post about picking out a costume for me.

Wait til Beth feels what I got her!

by Nicole Dotto

Put together an outfit for someone who will not be able to see it?

Oh not daunting at all.

One of Beth’s memoir students cleaned out her closets recently and gave her two really beautiful designer suits: one bright red and one stunning green. Beth asked if I could think of any movie characters who wore either of these—that way she could wear one of the suits and dress up as one of them for the party. I found a photo of Ava Gardner in a red suit. Rear Window’s Miss Lonelyhearts wore a green dress that could have passed. Beth would have looked amazing as Tippi Hedren in The Birds, though Tippi’s suit was pale green. When we realized that my Hollywood characters would require some serious explaining at the party (“No, remember? the lady he was watching across the street? Lonelyhearts”), Beth shrugged and said she’d be happy to go as Annie Hall.

The more I started to share Beth’s real deal crush on Annie Hall’s look, the more we decided that this was the only way to go. and bonus: it was a little less daunting to complete that outfit. I perused the men’s section at two different thrift stores and found khaki pants, a white shirt, green tie with polka dots, black suede vest, and felt hat in less than two hours. the thrift store is my battleground.

I’d never been a personal shopper before Beth asked, although technically I’ve been personal shopping multiple times a week for the past three years. But that’s just for people that I make up in my head. I run an online vintage shop called DOTTO, and even though I have a whole lot of handsome and classic items for sale there, I carry a number of interesting train wreck pieces we can all thank the 1980s for, too.

That’s Nicole modeling the ‘WHO WOULD WEAR THIS?’ kind of thing she carries in her online vintage shop. (sorry, folks. It’s sold.)

I grew up with a slight aversion to shopping but then discovered it’s pretty fun when I am searching for everyone else in the world but myself. I try to vary what I offer in terms of size and style and BRIGHTNESS. I cannot physically stop myself from heading straight toward anything neon or overloaded with sparkle. My true test for items has always been this: if I can’t imagine someone wearing it, it’s just right for DOTTO. Those are the sort of items I am secretly really happy to offer the world.

But back to Beth as Annie Hall. Let’s be honest here. Beth would have loved the outfit even if I’d gotten all of the colors wrong or hadn’t been able to find the right vest or hat, but watching her feel each item and put everything together while I explained just how dapper the high waist and cuffed pant looked and how the tie had to be worn as long as possible, well, that was icing on the cake. The whole time I was there we kept talking about just how cool Diane Keaton is, but I was kind of thinking, huh, don’t you think the same is true for Beth in general?

Nicole asked me to let you blog readers know she’ll give a 10% discount20% discount discount at DOTTO to anyone who tells her they read this Annie Hall post. Look for the discount code here in the comment section, and shop away!

People stare at my Seeing Eye dog and me sometimes. Who can blame them? We’re an unusual pair! But as long as they’re watching, I want to look good.

So when I heard that the Segal Design Institute at Northwestern University was looking for projects to help people with disabilities, I suggested they have their undergraduates try to come up with some easy way we blind folks could identify the color of our clothing. Right now I put a safety pin in the tag of anything I own that is black, and a paper clip on anything white. I wear other colors, too, and I memorize what color those other things are by the feel of the clothing.

My proposal got a thumbs-up, and one of the students agreed to write a guest post to explain what the design experience has been like from his point of view.

Design thinking

by Nadhipat “Ebay” Vaniyapun

My name is Ebay and I am one of the engineering students at Northwestern University working to create a color identification system for Beth. Design Thinking and Communication is a required class for engineering students, and I believe that it is required for a very good reason. There is no other class that gives you real design experience while putting the fruit of your hard work back into helping the community.

I actually chose to study at Northwestern partly to take this class. I went to Concord Academy in Massachusetts and did a number of engineering projects in high school, including a custom physical therapy walker for a toddler who has cerebral palsy. Our walker had the same functionality as a commercial walker, but it can be disassembled, it’s adjustable for his growth, and it includes a board for him to play with his toys. It was really something to see a little kid being able to walk and play without falling over, and to realize that he didn’t have that kind of freedom until we made that therapy walker for him. You could say I was hooked from the get-go.

I admit I didn’t know much about blindness before starting this project. The last time I had any real contact with someone who was blind was probably when I was around 8 years old living in Bangkok, Thailand. I visited what could be called a nursing home for the blind as part of a school service trip. Everyone there was blind from birth and could read Braille. They got most of their income from crafts, giving lectures and receiving donations. I didn’t see their wardrobe, but I remember that the speaker wore plain, dark colored clothes while the kids wore something with mismatched colors.

With that vague recollection in mind, I couldn’t quite connect the dots with this project prompt until I met Beth for the first time. I just didn’t expect her to have a large wardrobe of clothing that wouldn’t go well together. I didn’t expect patterns or a lot of colors. I was also completely unaware that there were so many people who went blind later in life, and that not all of them read Braille. I just never thought blind people might put this much thought into the clothing they wear.

Students observed Beth sorting through her closet, looking for ways to make it easier.

This project is very different from my high school projects where I worked with tools I was used to and could easily imagine how I’d solve the problem. I guess I do miss using lots and lots of power tools a little. Fabric is not a very common engineering material, and all of us on our team even learned how to sew in order to speed up the mock up process. You also really have to use your head to make the color identification system as intuitive as possible, knowing that the user’s perception and priorities are different from you. Even if you pretended to be blind, you wouldn’t be able to pick up small details from touch or know what features of the clothing a blind person would use to pick it out from the rest.

Working with Beth has been a pleasure. There were even times when we felt uncomfortable ourselves asking difficult questions but she had no problem answering us. Thanks to that, we got a lot of unexpected data and are now incorporating everything we learned into our designs. Two things that still get me every time we visit her is how dark her room is and how many articles of clothing she can identify quickly through touch. I’m sure we wouldn’t be able to do the same without lighting.

We’ve gotten close as a group through this project. We usually meet twice a week, have a team dinner on one of the days and occasionally hang out even when it’s not about class. Every time we visit Beth, we also eat together at the restaurants in the area. I know my team a lot better now not only as colleagues, but also as friends. I have enjoyed everything I’ve done so far, and I have no doubt that we will deliver an excellent prototype.

Other Design Thinking and Communication classes at Northwestern are working on different projects to help people with disabilities, and all 50 teams will present their completed projects on Saturday afternoon, March 16. Awards for design and communication will be announced that day, too.

Last week I asked my memoir-writing students to pick a song, any song, and use that song title as the topic for their next essay. Take “All Shook Up,” for example. With a title like that, you could write about living through an earthquake. Or about a startling event in your lifetime that really left you shaken. Or, hey, if you just love Elvis, you could write about him!

That’s percussionist Audrey Mitchell in the foreground. (photo by fellow writer Darlene Sweitzer)

The song titles they came back with were as diverse as the writers who chose them. A new student in class wrote about a memorable road trip she and her husband took to West Virginia to meet his farmer uncle and aunt. Song title? “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” Annelore chose Rod Stewart’s “Forever Young” and wondered out loud why it is that she easily regards people in their forties as equals but has a hard time looking at her 40+-year-old daughter as a grown-up.

Wanda chose the title of a Billie Holiday tune to describe what life was like when “Mama started “working in private family” – Wanda’s words explaining that her mother had to live with the family she worked for. On Wednesdays, her only day home with Wanda, “Mama” would supply her young daughter with sayings like “God Bless the Child” to help them get through their days away from each other.

We had song titles from the 1930s through the 1980s, from Doris Day’s “Que Sera, Sera” to Del Shannon’s “Runaway.” And then Audrey surprised us all, choosing the title of a current song, and writing about something she’d signed up for just the week before: a class on Afro-Caribbean and World Rhythm drumming. Audrey wrote that her only previous experience with percussion had been in her kindergarten rhythm band. “I played the bell and triangle then, and that was a long time ago!” Playing percussion must be like riding a bicycle. Audrey took up right where she left off. From her essay:

After a few preliminary instructions, Carlos had this group of 25 stately senior citizens beating bongos and conga drums, tapping bells, shaking tambourines and maracas, reviving rhythms as if we had been doing it all our lives. As we played, one energized participant called out the famous Desi Arnaz’ expression…“Ba ba loo!”

The drumming class met at the Chicago Cultural Center, the same place I teach my class. Audrey has a long commute to memoir-writing class each week – she lives on the southwest side of Chicago and drives to her closest CTA stop and takes a 45-minute bus ride to downtown Chicago from there. In her essay she admits she hadn’t slep well the night before her drumming class. “I drudged on to class and am I glad I did,” she wrote at the conclusion of her essay. “When I left to go back home, I was wide awake. AND NOW, I can’t wait for the next class!”

People sometimes ask me what gets me going, what motivates me to get out of the house and do so much. Well, now you know. I’m inspired by the seniors in my memoir-writing class. Oh, and before I forget, the song title for Audrey’s essay: “Drumming Song” by Florence and the Machine.

PS: Big thanks to my friend Janie for coming up with this song title idea. If any of you blog followers out there have a song title you think might make a good writing topic for my memoir-writing classes, please leave that song title as a comment here. I’m all ears!

My loyal blog readers will remember the tribute to our dad that my sister Cheryl wrote as a guest post here a few months ago. She’s back today with this sweet essay about Flo on her 96th birthday.

Honey Girls

by Cheryl May

Last year we celebrated Mom’s 95th birthday on the 95th floor of the John Hancock Building in downtown Chicago. It was her first time there, and she still talks about that special celebration. This year she told us she didn’t want to do anything special. “It’s gonna be special already,” she said. “The new baby is due on my birthday!”

Well, Mom’s birthday gift was delivered a little early. Her 20th great-grandchild, Addison Rose, arrived on April 13th….and what a beautiful gift. So when we gathered for Mom’s 96th birthday yesterday we raised a glass or two — in celebration of both Mom’s and Addie’s birthday.

Our sister Bev drove in from Michigan and surprised Flo at the entrance of the restaurant, and our cousin Darrell stopped in, too. Mom marveled that her first birthday phone call that morning came at 7 a.m. “Seven in the morning!” she said, shaking her head in amazement every time she said it. “Can you believe that?”

What she couldn’t know then was that a string of phone calls would be waiting on her answering machine when we brought her back to her condo, culminating with a Liberace-style rendering of “Happy Birthday” from Pick and Hank in D.C. Pick at the grand piano, of course!

A neighbor at mom’s condo had decorated her door a la college dorm room days. “The sign said 95,” Mom said. “She got it wrong. I changed the five to a six.” Neighbors couldn’t help but notice the sign, and birthday cards started piling up under her door. “So many cards!” she beamed. She didn’t take a nap yesterday, so much going on and all. I don’t feel tired,” she assured us. “But I know I will once I sit down and put my feet up.”

Some of us can never remember the name of the “new” small restaurant we meet at across from the Elmhurst train station, so we just say, “you know, Honey Girl.” Heads nod, all of us remembering the clothes store that used to occupy that space when we were growing up. And today, it was the perfect name for the place we celebrated Florence Maria Martea Frederika and her new great-granddaughter Addie Rose: Honey Girl!