Asakiyume mita

Every time I get to exchange friendly words with people, it's a shot of pure joy. Every time I get to be (safely) in proximity to people, it's a rush of euphoria.

( under here find a beautiful stallion )

( under here see me talking to some kids about my apples )

( under here see some stylish motociclistas )

Anyway.

This is how I satisfy my need for connection in a time of coronavirus.

And here we are at the last mer post! I hope you’ve enjoyed spending time with the mer community and learning about making tails as much as I have. This post has Stillwater_fx’s answers to my questions about favorite things, hardest things, and the thing I most wanted to know about—can you actually swim in a mermaid tail. (Special thanks to genarti for teaching me how to make a cute Instagram tag of Stillwater_fx’s name.)

asakiyume: What’s the hardest part of tail creation?

stillwater_fx: For me, the hardest part has to be sculpting, especially sculpting big flukes and scale sheets. But it’s not the sculpting itself that makes it hard. No, sculpting is fun. It’s the hours of being hunched over or kneeling down on the floor. The pain is bad—sometimes it forces me to take a day off, sometimes two, just to rest and recuperate. And honestly, the second-hardest part for me is having to part with my babies, the tails I make, after spending so long, usually months or weeks making them. It’s so personal to me that I become attached to them.



asakiyume: What part is the most fun?

stillwater_fx: My favorite part of the tail-making process has to be designing. I have sketchbooks filled with old fin designs and styles and descriptions. It honestly looks like a mad scientist’s journal. Sometimes I like to imagine a background story for the mermaid or merman. For example, if the character is a warrior, it’s safe to say that it won’t have long and flowy fins. More like a lion fish, the fins will be looking sharp and dangerous—ready for battle. If the character is perhaps a princess, then long and flowy fins like that of a betta fish would look more aesthetic.

lion fish


betta fish


asakiyume: And is it possible to swim in a mermaid tail?

stillwater_fx: Yes, people can swim in mermaid tails. The main reason for that is the monofin. Swimming in a monofin takes a bit of practice, but once you get that dolphin movement down, you’ll be as graceful as any professional mermaid. Silicone tails can weigh up to 30 lbs. depending on a client’s size and stature. It’s also depending on how many fins they’ve ordered and the size of the caudal fins, because the caudal fin is the biggest and heaviest part of a mermaid tail.

a young mermaid—who can swim in her tail


Proof!--click for a 10-second video

I have swum upstream in rivers and against the raging seas. Swimming in a tail isn’t safe for everyone. Make sure that you are physically able to perform such a demanding task. There are always risks when in the water. Always make sure you’re not swimming alone, and if possible, that there are lifeguards on duty. And always tell someone where you’re going to be before any nature exploration, be it above or below the seas. Stay safe, guys, and I hope you enjoy this interview!

One of the people I got to know when I was tutoring in Holyoke last fall was stillwater_fx, who has an amazing side job: he makes tails for merfolk. They’re incredible works of art, and you can actually swim in them, if you’re skilled.





( Interview under the cut )

Here you can listen to stillwater_fx’s remarks about the community as therapy.

STAY TUNED FOR PART 2: CREATING A MERMAID TAIL

This week just past, the week between the two semesters of my jail job, we visited the Robert E. Barrett fishway again, to show the healing angel the fish elevator, and this year there was a marvelous docent there, Walter, a retired professor who grew up around here and leapt and jumped his way from rock to rock across the shallows below the dam when he was young.

He told the story of fishing for a lemon shark when he was a young man--he had wanted the jaw of the shark as a souvenir. But when he did finally catch a lemon shark, it was so beautiful that he was ashamed of having wanted to display its jaw, and he let it go. Then, some years later, he was snorkeling in the Caribbean, swimming near a pod of dolphins who suddenly took off when he got near. He returned to the boat only to be told that a giant shark had been dogging him--but not attacking him, he felt, because he had let the lemon shark go.

He loves fish, you could tell. It was mainly lampreys and shad being transported in the elevator that day (see murky pictures below), and he had a phone video of a lamprey that attached itself hopefully to the glass wall of the elevator, revealing its terrifying mouth--like the sandworm mouth on some paperback editions of Dune.

I was happy to meet and talk with him.

lampreys


shad

Esmeralda Santiago is a writer I hadn't heard of before a couple of weeks ago, when J, one of the teachers at the educational program I volunteer with in Holyoke, said she was coming to give a talk at Holyoke Community College. "I was hoping you could talk her up in your creative writing session and get some of the students to come."

He handed me the sheet on her, and wow:

Esmeralda Santiago grew up in Toa Baja, Puerto Rico in a one-room shack with a dirt floor and tin roof. Her family moved to New York when she was thirteen years old. The eldest of eleven, Esmeralda learned English from children’s books in a Brooklyn library. A teacher encouraged her to audition for Performing Arts High School, where she majored in drama and dance. After eight years of part-time study at community colleges, Esmeralda transferred to Harvard University with a full scholarship and graduated Magna Cum Laude in 1976. Shortly after graduation, she and her husband Frank Cantor founded CANTOMEDIA, a film and media production company that has won numerous awards for excellence in educational and documentary filmmaking. With the publication of her first memoir When I was Puerto Rican, the Washington Post hailed Esmeralda as “a welcome new voice, full of passion and authority.” Her first novel, America's Dream, has been published in six languages and made into a movie by executive producer Edward James Olmos. Her second memoir, Almost a Woman, received an Alex Award from the American Library Association, and was made into a Peabody-award winning movie for PBS Masterpiece Theatre’s “American Collection.”

( It gets long )

The people from my class who went--three women (one in her late 20s, one in her 40s, and one in her 60s) and one man (in his 30s), all Puerto Rican--loved the talk, and I did too. And I felt a swirl of gratitude and pride, pride because if I hadn't persuaded them to come, they wouldn't have gotten to, and gratitude, because if it wasn't for their coming, I wouldn't have probably gone.

It was a Good Experience.


Esmeralda Santiago
(photo source: centerforfiction.org)

Last week's prompt for the students in Holyoke was "This cat is very strange ..." I did a couple of illustrations to go with some students' descriptions:

This cat looks like a dog. The cat ears are hanging to the floor, has a long tail but the cat skin is red and blue.

Then there was this cat:

I was in the park and I seen a cat with three eyes looking at a bird.

What did you think when you saw this three-eyed cat?

He has a better chance of catching the bird! LOL

A few students were suspicious of black cats, though when I asked one if black cats were bad luck, she said,

No, cats are not bad luck, they just cats. They are good of seeing ghosts around, though.

When looking for an image to illustrate that woman's writing, I found this fun story about Sable, the crossing-guard cat, who comes out every day to watch the kids safely cross the street to school in the morning and leaving school in the afternoon.

Sable has been watching over the students from across the street for about a year. Tamara Morrison owns the cat. She says one day, Sable just walked outside to greet the students, and he's been doing it ever since ... [Tamara] has now bought a safety vest for Sable to make him an honorary member of the Enterprise Safety Patrol.

In the creative writing workshop I'm doing, I did a version of "what is taller, higher, softer, smaller?" Some of the answers are beautiful. You can read all of them here, but here are a few highlights:

As quiet as a fish, moths, smoke (Victor D)
I'm not brave enough killing spider (Lilliana)
I am empty like a cup of juice when I drink it (Abraham)


(photo of smoke by Nur Uretmen: Source)

And I promised to link to some of the stories they'd written, too. This one is written by Victor M, who's not as old as the man pictured, but getting up in years--I feel like he had real empathy for the man in the photo: "Remembering his youth."

Laly said she picked this photo because the woman reminded her of her grandmother: "Waiting on her food."

(Laly wrote a moving piece on being transgender and choosing her own name, here.)

Yamayra liked that the couple in the photo she chose were dancing in the kitchen.

Enjoy!

Behold the powerful falls at the Holyoke dam. Holyoke Gas and Electric generates power here.



This dam is a barrier to fish that need to get upstream to spawn. There have been various means of solving this problem, but at present it's a literal elevator, a huge mechanism powered by giant turbines and with great chains that lift boxes of water, packed with fish, up above the falls. Yesterday Wakanomori and I went to see it--a marvelous experience!

It has very cute signposts:


In the informational room, there's a diagram that shows how the elevator works. You can see the giant turbines:



And a tally of how many fish have been lifted: yesterday was a record for American shad. (In the colonial days, they used to say that when the shad were running, you could walk across the Connecticut river on their backs.)



( photos and videos of fish, people watching fish, people fishing, and massive machinery )