Unit 1: Vocabulary from Readings 2

I was like the Christ child lifted out of the straw manger, crying with holy indignity.

In all of my imaginings I was filled with a sense that I would soon become perfect: My mother and father would adore me. I would be beyond reproach.

So now when my mother presented her tests, I performed listlessly, my head propped on one arm. I pretended to be bored.

I got so bored that I started counting the bellows of the foghorns out on the bay while my mother drilled me in other areas.

She seemed entranced by the music, a frenzied little piano piece with a mesmerizing quality, which alternated between quick, playful passages and teasing, lilting ones.

And then he would play the C scale a few times, a simple chord, and then, as if inspired by an old unreachable itch, he would gradually add more notes and running trills and a pounding bass until the music was really something quite grand.

He balanced pennies on top of my wrists so that I would keep them still as I slowly played scales and arpeggios.

And Old Chong kept conducting his own private reverie.

I had assumed that my talent-show fiasco meant that I would never have to play the piano again.

“I’m not going to play anymore,” I said nonchalantly.

The occasion encapsulates as much as it culminates this extraordinary woman's career.

It testifies, in fact, to many of the qualities that marked Kahlo as a person and as a painter: her gallantry and indomitable alegria in the face of physical suffering; her insistence on surprise and specificity; her peculiar love of spectacle as a mask to preserve privacy and personal dignity.

She dressed in flamboyant clothes, greatly preferring floor-length native Mexican costumes to haute couture.

She dressed in flamboyant clothes, greatly preferring floor-length native Mexican costumes to haute couture.

Painting herself bleeding, weeping, cracked open, she transmuted her pain into art with remarkable frankness tempered by humor and fantasy.

Painting herself bleeding, weeping, cracked open, she transmuted her pain into art with remarkable frankness tempered by humor and fantasy.

With very small sable brushes, which she kept immaculately clean, she would carefully lay down delicate strokes of color, bringing the image into precise focus, making fantasy persuasive through the rhetoric of realism....