happy birthday, bink!

 It's bink's birthday today--as often, it's falling during Rosh Hashanah. A fresh new year would be nice...

bink & I have been friends for forty years, since we met in a reading group the fall I was nineteen. For thirteen of those years, we were partners. 

Most of my pictures of us are on paper--I should do a big scan one of these days.
Meanwhile, here's a brief round-up.

BELOW: 1987, bink's thirtieth birthday party in Chicago. We lived there while she got her MFA in painting. (I was working first as a cook at a whole foods deli (before Whole Foods), then in the library of Columbia College Chicago--an arts college.)

Below, a page from bink's graphic memoir, Reliquary (2017?), about walking Camino---a reminder that the 1980s were hardly easy times.
More of bink's art on her website.

BELOW, 2010: bink & me the opening of bink's "DVD to ART" project--"made in collaboration with Catholics who received DVDs sent out by [then-] archbishop Nienstedt urging them to oppose same-sex marriage".

After the archbishop made DVDs opposing an upcoming vote to make marriage legal for all, bink collected thousands of the DVDs from parishioners and made a sculpture and a prayer wall out the the discs and their slipcases:

This led to one of my personal favorite things in bink's life:
an opinion piece in the Washington Post by Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo: "Of Bully Pulpits and Bully Bishops". [Darn--no longer a live link! Just a reminder of how fleeting this online stuff is...]

Stevens-Arroyo compared archbishop Nienstedt to Hollywood's fat-cat bishops (or corrupt sheriffs):

While medieval labels like “Robin Hood” no longer apply, the age-old temptation to make deals with the rich and powerful have not gone away. I don’t know if John Nienstedt, the Archbishop of St. Paul, Minnesota, has succumbed to this temptation, but if you substitute “same sex marriage” for “rights to hunt deer in Sherwood Forest” you’d have enough for a movie.

More on the project on bink's blog from the time: dvdtoart.blogspot.com/2010

2015: L to R: bink's partner Maura, bink, me, at our friend Jill's wedding:

 The March for Science in 2017:

Below is a favorite photo, from summer 2018--it shows bink's sensitivity and intelligence. She is discussing with Penny Cooper how a bread warmer might be used to heat a doll swimming pool:

And here she is the other day, with Astro:

Happy birthday, binky!