RAINY DAY REMEMBRANCE

July 2, 2023 ~ LouLou ~ Leave a comment

Published in The Saratogian April 1, 2001

With last names like Smiley and Funk, you know there’s bound to be something creative going on in the imaginations of this Ballston Spa duo. The couple, both natives of San Diego, Calif., purchased a house at 63 East High St. last May. Luellen Smiley and Rudy Funk have turned a once-ramshackle 1860’s structure, now known as The Follies House, into three furnished apartments oozing with zany charm. Smiley’s brochure touts the place as a “playful vacation residence designed to inspire.” On the wide front porch, a sign offers visitors “Free Records,” paying homage to one apartment’s main decorative inspiration: classic stage musicals. Called the Broadway suite, its walls are adorned with record covers, programs, ballet slippers and even a dance costume. There are dice on the end tables, a life-sized poster of Humphrey Bogart, colorful paper parasols and peacock feathers. For tenants who bring their own films, there’s a projector screen and, tucked into an alcove, a working Victrola. Vintage Broadway memorabilia is everywhere. Then there’s the nearly ceiling-height replica of a bass guitar. “This was actually a costume someone wore,” said Smiley, pointing out the head and arm holes. “These are the kinds of things we like, the really unusual and unheard of.” Growing up in California, Smiley aspired to be a dancer and maintained an interest in the arts.

In recent years, she became keen on the idea of renovating and decorating an older home, although the village of Ballston Spa was not first on her list. “When we first came here, I wanted to be in Saratoga, and when I drove through Ballston Spa I said, ‘I’d never want to live here,”‘ Smiley said. “But then we rented here, and I didn’t want to go back on the road. We loved this street. We think this village is really starting to happen.” The couple went to work feverishly last spring to ready the apartments in time for the track season. While not a bed and breakfast, the apartments are designed for temporary tenants — people new to the area or vacationers. Smiley’s off-season rates are $800 a month for the Broadway Suite and $700 for the Boomers Pad. The one-bedroom Boomers Pad is designed with vintage ’50s and ’60s furniture. Smiley said she and Funk combed area antique shops, including those in the village, for many of the offbeat pieces, including the vinyl records and oversized pink sofa. The house’s history mirrors the eclectic style the couple has brought to the home. “It was built by a man actually named Dr. Doolittle as a wedding present for his daughter,” Smiley said. “You can see the little touches everywhere. There are butterflies and sun rays carved into the woodworking and doorknobs. It’s a love house. It was built with love.” Smiley said she and Funk have combed files at Brookside History Center looking for old photographs of the house in order to decide what color to repaint the facade. “The exterior of the house is next on our list, and while we haven’t located any photographs, we’re thinking pastels,” Smiley said. “Inside, we used a lot of pistachio and pink.” While Funk commutes to and from California for business purposes, the pair weathered their first winter this year, relying on the kindness of neighbors for jobs like snow-blowing. “We’ve never seen winters like this,” Smiley said. “I’m from the other side of the world. But this is a very supportive community. That’s one of the things we love about the village.”

Smiley has immersed herself in the closely-knit community, joining the Ballston Spa Business & Professional Association, the local chamber of commerce, and helping promote an upcoming Art Walk. The Follies House recently was given a beautification award for significant improvements during the past year. In her brochure for potential tenants, Smiley points out area highlights including the Saratoga Performing Arts Center and destinations within the village, such as the museums, the glassworks studio, Art Ink., and the new gallery and loft spaces on Low Street. Smiley said she also recommends people take a stroll along East High Street, a historic district known for its Victorian homes. “I’ve seen little villages, big villages — but what I see here is the most beautiful village,” Smiley said. “The potential is here. There’s a sense of magic here and the transformation will happen. I’m certain of that.”

Cari Scribner

RELOCATION…SENIORS

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My direction is following Lawrence Durrell, “Spirit of the Place,” and living where I would never expect to live. I wish I could control my impractical, impulsive, and annoying spirit of adventure. I think about architecture, Jewish deli’s, Italian restaurants, at one movie theater built in the 1930s, and neighborhoods of unfamiliar lighting, expressions, and conversations. Gambling on yourself is how much you can adapt, change, influence, and accept the days of your life.

In my syndicate, there must be a dozen pals with the same unsolved equation. Is it age that blocks me and maybe you from relocation, or is it the trauma and stress? What liberation to just pack a suitcase and board a plane like in the movies. Separation from the familiar. The spirit of adventure has arrived. My home sold and so relocation isn’t a muse any longer, it’s reality. Today, coincidently is Independence day and so am I. It is a day of nostalgia. The Rudster painting Follies. It took two summers to remove the aluminum siding, scrape, caulk, prime, and paint my chosen seven colors to resemble a wedding cake. Mr. Doolittle built the home in 1883 as a wedding present for his daughter.

The Rudster painting Follies. It took two summers to remove the aluminum siding, scrape, caulk, prime, and paint my chosen seven colors to resemble a wedding cake. Mr Doolittle built the home in 1883 for his daughter as a wedding present.

EXCERPT FROM MY NEXT BOOK. UNKNOWN TITLE

July 3, 2022July 3, 2022 ~ LouLou ~ 1 Comment

Page 525. Terrified to post this but it is Sunday and I’m brave on Sunday. The book is fiction, first-person, and close third person so you’ll need a jogging suit to read. Based on true events.

Greta let the moment of the village rescue stay with her, like a new pet for as long as she could hold on to its beneficial ointment, away from what she calls her immersion into self. She gives me examples that illustrate her obsession with matching outfits in her closet.

It’s a bedroom she converted into a dressing room. There’s a single bed against one wall, a cabinet where she stores the winter boots, and an eight-drawer French nouveau dresser and mirror. She sits on a chair facing the windows so she can watch the trees live through sun, wind, rain, and snow. Across from the chair is the bed. She diligently arranged her summer pastel skinny jeans on the bed, and next to that row she arranged the T-shirts, camisoles, and shorts. It’s quite practical considering Greta as she has admitted to me half a dozen times, that she was born without common sense or practicality. At the base of the bed, she lined up her shoes, the slip-ons, the flats, the pumps stuffed with tissue paper to preserve their shape, and the wedges. After a breach of sanity, she goes into this room and visualizes outfits and color matching like someone might play chess. ‘ It does have a purpose, this way I visualize without wrangling with hangers and you know it just takes too much time when you’re in a closet.

‘”These days I look at them as if they belonged to someone else, I mean the red suede with gold heels that I wore on a New Year’s Eve of gaiety and not since, the black velvet pumps that always make me feel dainty and light. What care I give to all these garments when in the other part of the house, Dodger was descending into a financial coma.”

Greta did not acknowledge the few months before his departure that he was riddled with abject unfulfilling tasks, bills, and construction jobs that no longer fed him purpose and accomplishment. She did not notice that his slacking posture on the front porch, head lowered and staring out without any body movement was a sign, she in fact despised it and walked away. In the last few months, all of this seemed to rise up like a curtain before a play, in a theater and she witnessed his insolence and his silent howl for help.

The irony of her activity is that she doesn’t go to the events that she plans on going to wear the outfits.

LOVE FOR HISTORIC VICTORIAN HOMES

May 28, 2022June 2, 2022 ~ LouLou ~ 2 Comments

Looks like an open dragon mouth, in a way it is. Follies House is begging for a brace. The horrors and hahas of owning a 137-year-old home. We’ve had twenty-two years of sustainable wood, but this year is the end of luck. A dear and wise friend once told me this, ” Don’t love what doesn’t love you back.” As a woman of insatiable imagination and impracticability, I do love her. So I spent a few weeks interviewing masonry contractors. The first four said this, ” I wouldn’t park your car under there.”
“What? The carport is going to collapse?”
“It could.”
” And that costs?
” Fifteen thousand at minimum.”
” What about a temporary fix.”
” Too much liability. Sorry, mam.”

Five interviews later talking to a man whose been in the business thirty years, ” I cannot restore the entire job, is there a temporary fix?”
“Well, we could bring in a platform plank to hold it up.”
” How much would that cost?”
“Twenty-five hundred tops. You should really let us remove the foundation above it, that’s rotted and sinking. Is there a room above it?”
“Yes, a bedroom in my unit. How much would that cost?”
” Between ten thousand and fifteen. We have to get in there and see how much water damage.”
” No, I can’t do that, no impossible.”
” I understand. I’ll do the temporary fix, the house is so gorgeous, and I’ve seen them all.”
” Thank you, I have tenants and have to be responsible for their safety.”
” Would you like to see the bedroom?”
” I’m in a rush.” I smiled a lot and walked up the stairs and opened the front door so he could see.
“Wow, this is incredible.” Once he was in the house he was in love and granted me a discount of five hundred dollars. Do you know why? He said he’d love to be a part of her history after he’s gone. Historic homes are leaving our country, replaced by what he called tinderboxes that only last thirty years.

THE FOLLIES HOUSE

February 26, 2022February 26, 2022 ~ LouLou ~ Leave a comment

SHE IS ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-SEVEN YEARS OD.

In December 2018, I relocated to Ballston Spa, New York ( like the Adirondacks) from Los Angeles, for a temporary stay. I checked out of my charming Kleenex box studio in Westwood Village with bougainvillea, assorted flowers, squeaky clean green lawns, and shiny MBZ, Porches, and Maserati’s racing up Beverly Glen Boulevard. I met eccentric neighbors with prominent film, TV, and Tech careers. The homes sell for 2-8 million. My four-hundred-square-foot studio rented for sixteen hundred-plus utilities, and street parking. Moving y car twice a week for the street cleaner was an annoyance. I didn’t understand why he came twice a week, the street was living room tidy, no trash or cigarette buts, and very few leaves.

The last time I was driving along these rolling roads past farms, fields, shabby chic barns, horses, and the forest was in 2012 with my co-owner, renovator, best friend Dodger, and my fiancé Jay. Now I am a subterranean single, with a belt-tight debit card.

As the driver swerved into the driveway, my mouth dropped, frozen for a moment. Follies was frayed, peeling paint, the cracked driveway got worse, the flower beds were now weeds, and dried fall leaves all around. Dodger and I spent twenty years maintaining her glory and, provenance until the last six years. She needs a face-lift, a porch lift, a stairway replacement, an entirely new coat of paint (we used seven pastel shades on all the trim) on the five thousand square feet three-unit home. The swell of guilt emerged when I discovered what I’d ignored did not take care of itself.

Until I procure a tenant for the vacant three-bedroom apartment, I’ll move in and attempt to repair and maintain what I can afford. A pang of overwhelming sadness emerged into a sobbing session. Afterward, I felt a lot better! I’ve never understood why so much argument is against emoting-where else can it go? Into hiding, only to pop out at the wrong moment.

I opened the wooden front door with stained glass inlay and dropped my luggage. Where the fxz$% is all the furniture?’ When I was here in 2012, I had just redesigned the rooms, polished the wood, and shined our antique mid-century furniture collection. The salon captures everyone’s attention, with its cherry wood ceiling and baseboard trim, leather embossed fireplace, and the floor-to-ceiling original windows were stripped of the drapes.

The last time Dodger was here, I think in 2015, he made repairs and replacements over two months. He must have sold the furniture or what? We are not in contact any longer. In the Salon one tattered pink swing 60s sofa, all the tables and chairs the roulette table, stereo, TV, porch bar set, and photography absent. Upstairs, to the bedrooms, I entered the guest bedroom, stripped, except the gorgeous three-panel engraved black and ivory divider.

As I roam further, my lips quiver, I am cursing non-stop, then I step into my bedroom, I call it Heaven. The room is painted the most subtle shade of wisteria, and the floor-to-ceiling windows reveal all the light against the handsome spruce, pine, oak, and evergreen trees. Wow! the room is furnished with a desk, a lamp, bedside tables, and a new comforter and pillow shams to match. It’s as if someone was expecting me. But who? To be continued.

TRIPPING ON TAOS, NEW MEXICO

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1998 WAS ALL RIGHT

AWAKENING ON THE ROADRUNNER SHUTTLE as we chugged up the steep grade highway, the red skin of Taos peeled back the imposing medieval Gorge crack. The cavity unzipped and five thousand feet below was the Rio Grande. I felt the altitude filling my lungs, and my eyes twitching from one scenic masterpiece to another. Everyone in the shuttle was giving me a history lesson about Taos. Before I knew it, the shuttle door opened, and the driver yelled, ‘Smiley.”

At the end of a two-mile dirt road the shuttle dropped me off and I was shouldered on either side by melting banks of snow. It was April. Unexpected snow storms arrived the same week.

The FBI boxes I’d shipped were in front of my casita. Darting from room to room, thoroughly satisfied with a two-story loft, floor-to-ceiling windows, and sunlight in all the right spots. I unpacked in the sedated silence. Was I all alone out here? A few other casitas were on the property, but they looked vacant. A pang of anxiety seized and then I realized, I had a cell phone, a credit card, and cash. I could always call a cab right. It was winter in April; the first time I’d lived in falling

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA — DH. LAWRENCE WRITING ROOM. TAOS.

snow. In the dining room, I unpacked the boxes and arranged them in a circle around the table. It was a heavy southwestern oak table, twelve feet long, and to the right were sliding glass doors that let the light stream across the black-and-white print. I was left to unravel two thousand more pages on Dad’s criminal life.

The trip was extended to two months. I read all the files and left Taos a different woman. I came back, persuaded Rudy to come visit, and he was hooked within minutes. He bought the Live Work Studio and fulfilled my dream of opening a Gallery of Black & White Photography of our 60s Rock & Roll legends.. One of Lou Reed shooting up heroin.

THE LEGEND LADY OF PALACE AVE

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The throw of the dice this week lands on adventures in livingness; one day at a time. People with terminal illness, suffering from a shattered romance, a death of a friend, a natural disaster, always say the same thing; One day at a time.

Walking up Palace Avenue on a day spread with sunlight, and a continuum of power walkers, bikers and runners, passing by in whiffs of urgency, I took my time. I didn’t feel like flexing, just evaporating into the shadows, and the moving clouds. I walked by a little adobe, that once was a dump site for empty bottles, cartons, worn out furniture, and piles of wood. A year later, the yard is almost condominium clean. Just as I was passing the driveway, the little woman whom I’d seen walking up Palace with her bag of groceries, appeared like a gust of history in the driveway of her adobe casita. She wore her heavy blanket like coat and a bandanna on her head. Regardless of weather, she’s bundled up in the same woven Indian coat and long wool skirt. I stood next to her, a foot or so taller, and she unraveled history, without my prompting. She told me about the Martinez family, the Montoyas, and the Abeytas, all families she knew, all with streets named after them. Estelle asked me my name, and then took my hand in her weathered unyielding grip, ‘Oh I had an Aunt named Lucero, and we called her LouLou.’ She didn’t let go of my hand, and then she told me that the families, some names I’ve forgotten, bought homes on Palace in 1988 for $50,000, She shook her finger to demonstrate her point. ‘You know how many houses the Garcias bought? Five! Then they fixed them up and sold them.’

I could have stood there in the gravel driveway listening to Estelle all afternoon. She owns the oral history I love to record; but it is difficult to understand her, she talks with the speed of a southwest wind. We parted and I thought about the times in my life when the smallest of interactions elevates my spirit. In older people, who are not addicted to gadgets and distant intimacy, I’m reminded of how speed socializing has diminished the opportunity for a sidewalk chat.