Princesses

Princesses crossed the street.

Steve

 I met Steve at Starbucks.  His shirt said "Whitehead 1901."  I asked him what that meant.  He didn't know; his son gave him the shirt.  

By the time I came back outside after ordering a coffee, Steve had looked it up.  Whitehead was a man who claimed to invent manned flight two years before the Wright Brothers.

Steve grew up in the wealthy nearby town of Darien.  His father was a successful lawyer and his brother was a good scholar, but Steve didn't like formal education.  So, he became a machinist.

An interesting guy.  We had a good conversation.

Deaf and Hard of Hearing

I showed this mural in an incomplete form a month ago when it was being painted.

The artwork highlights the legacy of Deaf education through an image of Laurent Clerc in the upper left.  Clerc is historically regarded as the founder of deaf education in the United States.  

 In the early 19th Century, along with Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, Clerc founded what is today the American School for the Deaf in West Hartford.  The mural illustrates a variety of ways that deaf and hard of hearing individuals have been taught to communicate.  Michael Rice painted the mural.

Linked to Monday Murals.

SummerFest

 Yesterday was SummerFest in Ridgefield.  It was unbelievably crowded.  

Tents were massed together along Main Street and adjoining streets for crafts, artists, politicians, school groups, businesses, civic organizations, and more.

Children at ACT's summer camp sang in front of Town Hall.  Their parents took photos and videos.

A lion sat next to the Lions Club's tent.

Barbershop singers waited for their turn.

And a very attractive and glittery young woman walked through on stilts.

Chanin

 I met Chanin -- pronounced "Shannon" -- at Starbucks.  She is the payroll manager for a nonprofit that helps foster children.  She was working on her laptop while waiting to pick up her daughter from camp.

I enjoy talking to strangers, learning a bit about them, and then doing some portrait photographs.  But, ever since the COVID pandemic, I have got out of practice.  I need to start doing it again.

Newtown

 Newtown is maybe half an hour east of me.  I visited not long ago.  What impressed me most was the long run of traditional and classic New England structures on Main Street.

The two-tone paint job on this Victorian residence caught my eye.  The style is what I think of as a Carpenter Gothic.

This red saltbox is the kind of 17th century home still found occasionally in southern New England.

This is a relatively simple Second Empire home, but a lovely one.

And here we have a Colonial property, with some embellishments around back.

OK, I give up.  It is a handsome house, but I can't identify the style.

I shouldn't have tried to give the architectural name of each of these properties.  I have no idea what the style of this remarkable commercial property is either.

Donald M. Kendall Sculpture Garden - II

 Some more statues from the PepsiCo grounds.

Our guide was especially impressed by Isamu Noguchi's Energy Void.  It is constructed from Swedish granite, with very fine chisel marks.  

During the 1960s, Henry Moore produced a series of increasingly abstract and monumental sculptures. Works from this period include multi-part sculptures with forms that repeat or interlock, and so-called ‘knife edge’ works that incorporate thin, flat forms with sharp edges.   In Double Oval, Moore combines and develops both of these interests.  

Ásmundur Sveinsson was an Icelandic sculptor whose 1977 scuplture Through the Sound Barrier stands beside a pathway on the Pepsico grounds.

Robert Davidson's Haida Totems, installed at PepsiCo in 1986, are the last works added to the PepsiCo sculpture garden.  The Haida people are Northwest Coast Indians, of which Mr. Davidson is a full-blooded member.  The three totems, which Mr. Davidson described as ''legend totem poles,'' have as a common element the Killer Whale, Chief of the Underworld.