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1. As my final post for National Hispanic Heritage Month before it concludes next Wednesday, I'd like to draw your attention to a new exhibit at the Tucson Botanical Gardens, Frida's Garden, a recreation of the garden from artist Frida Kahlo's Mexico City home, La Casa Azul.
2. In Philanthropy, I'm featuring the Lapan Sunshine Foundation, a Tucson-based organization dedicated to helping underserved students achieve academic and professional success.
3. In my Literary Corner, I invite you to visit the New York Public Library online or in person for their exhibition celebrating one hundred years of The New Yorker.
4. In this week's Book Corner, The New Yorker has released two anthologies of works that have appeared in the first 100 years of the magazine—one a collection of fiction and the second a collection of poetry.
5. In the Artist's Corner, I'm featuring caricaturist Al Hirschfeld and the Met's retrospective of his career as preserved by the Al Hirschfeld Foundation.
6. In Bragging Rights, I'm bringing back Kat Adams' three children, Georgia, Emma, and Harvey. The family took a trip down to Tucson, and I arranged a special tour of the Reid Park Zoo for the kids, where they had a great time.
7. In Reaching High, Polish mountaineer Anfrej Bargiel tells his story of climbing to the summit of Mt. Everest and Skiing all the way back to base camp without supplementary oxygen. After that, I revisit Aspen's own mountaineering legends, the Marolt brothers.
8. In the Pet's Corner, I'm catching up with Fern, the Flock's favorite high mountain mouser.
9. We close this week with a philosophical metaphor pondering the singular whole that we are all a unique part of in Bindu's Corner.
I hope you will pick and choose, and read what might touch your heart, and that in a small way, I have been able to add a bit of comfort to your day. Please feel free to share the Flock…
| | Now, to this week's Flock. | | 1. National Hispanic Heritage Month 9.15.2025 – 10.15.2025 | | This week, for my final post in observance of National Hispanic Heritage Month, I want to draw your attention to the newest permanent exhibit at the Tucson Botanical Gardens, Frida's Garden. The exhibit incorporates both nature and art by recreating the garden from artist Frida Kahlo's famously colorful Mexico City home, La Casa Azul. The exhibit will open to visitors this Saturday, October 11th. | |
Frida Kahlo’s garden blooms in Tucson
New Botanical Garden exhibit brings La Casa Azul to the desert
| | From: KGUN 9, By: Joel Foster, October 8, 2025 | | |
The exhibit was presented in a ceremony at the Mexican Consulate with Consul Fernando Adrián Sánchez Roldán, providing a symbol of the cross-border relationship.
“We’re thrilled to be able to highlight Mexican culture as well as honor Tucson’s early culture,” said Michelle Conklin, President/CEO of the Tucson Botanical Gardens.
Frida Kahlo’s original garden at La Casa Azul, her home with fellow artist Diego Rivera, was both a creative refuge and a living expression of her artistic philosophy
| | Frida Kahlo's home, La Casa Azul, now the Frida Kahlo Museum in Mexico City | |
Rejecting colonial influences, Kahlo filled her garden with native plants from Mexico and South America, embracing the natural beauty of her culture and heritage.
“Her artistry was rejecting colonial-style painting and developing her own style based on her own cultural roots,” said Adam Farrell-Wortman, Director of Horticulture at the Tucson Botanical Gardens. “She did that in her garden as well, avoiding European plants and instead planting native species to Mexico, embracing the older cultures of the Aztecs and Mayans.”
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2. Philanthropy: The Lapan Sunshine Foundation
| | In past issues of the Flock, I have posted about all-star athlete, supermom, and CEO of the Lapan Sunshine Foundation, Jackie Vasquez-Lapan. This week, I want to point you to the foundation that she runs. The Lapan Sunshine Foundation provides support to underserved students through scholarships, mentorships, and assistance accessing opportunities, leading them to academic and professional success. It's a wonderful thing. | | Lapan Sunshine Foundation | | |
The Lapan Sunshine Foundation follows the belief of its founder, Patricia “Nana Pat” Lapan, that education is a crucial pathway to overcoming challenging life circumstances. Yet, a student’s journey to success in education requires more than just money to pay for school. Students need a more well-rounded approach that considers their families, their environment, systemic issues and their unique circumstances.
The Lapan Sunshine Foundation provides students from underserved communities with scholarship, mentorship, access to opportunities and support for their often-overlooked additional needs. Our aim is to level the playing field, and empower our students to confidently pursue their dreams.
Additionally, we invest in services, programs and organizations that serve our students and create opportunities for their potential.
| | 3. Literary Corner: 100 Years of the New Yorker | | The New Yorker has long been one of my favorite magazines. Issue to issue, they maintain a high standard of writing, and always have the cutest cartoons. The first issue of The New Yorker was published on February 21, 1925. In celebration of the magazine's centennial year, the New York Public Library has assembled a special exhibition on the magazine from the NYPL's extensive archives. If you can't get to the library in person, you can explore the companion website that the NYPL has curated. | | A Century of The New Yorker | | |
The New York Public Library's major exhibition A Century of The New Yorker draws on NYPL's collections, including the magazine's voluminous archives and the papers of many of its contributors, to bring to life the people, stories, and ideas that made The New Yorker.
Over the past 100 years, The New Yorker has created a world of its own. Guided by the founding vision of Harold Ross and Jane Grant, and built upon by generations of staff, the magazine has set the bar for effortless style, thought-provoking prose, journalistic rigor, and playful art—delivered with a dash of snootiness, and a wink…
| | The story of The New Yorker—and the brilliant, funny, obsessive, imperfect people who made it—is told, in part, in the pages of the 5,057 issues that have gone to print in the magazine’s first 100 years. But a deeper history can be found in the magazine’s archives, in the collections of The New York Public Library. Through correspondence, manuscripts, memos, artifacts—and yes, cartoons—A Century of The New Yorker uncovers the unsung stories of prickly editorial relationships, diligent typists, fastidious fact checkers, and talented artists. | A Century of The New Yorker | | 4. Book Corner: New Yorker Centennial Anthologies | | Celebrate the magazine's first hundred years with two anthologies of remarkable short stories and verse, selected by the fiction and poetry editors, including works by J.D. salinger, Shirley jackson, vladimir Nabakov, jamaica Kincaid, Dorothy Parker, Langston Hughes, W.S. Merwin, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Sandra Cisneros, and more. | |
A Century of Fiction
in The New Yorker
| | Edited by Deborah Treisman | | There is simply no A–Z like the alphabet of fiction writers who have appeared in the pages of The New Yorker in the last hundred years. The book boasts inarguable classics like Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain,” and Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” alongside stunners to be rediscovered. Some stories defined a moment or a now-lost world (Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “The Cafeteria”); others showed us a whole new way fiction could sound and feel (“The Red Girl,” by Jamaica Kincaid). | |
A Century of Poetry
in The New Yorker
| | Seamus Heaney, Dorothy Parker, Louise Bogan, Louise Glück, Randall Jarrell, Langston Hughes, Derek Walcott, Sylvia Plath, W. S. Merwin, Czesław Miłosz, Tracy K. Smith, Mark Strand, E. E. Cummings, Sharon Olds, Franz Wright, John Ashbery, Sandra Cisneros, Amanda Gorman, Maggie Smith, Kaveh Akbar: these stellar names make up just a fraction of the wonderfulness that is present in this essential anthology. | |
5. Artist's Corner: Al Hirschfeld
| | Caricaturist Al Hirschfeld was a regular contributor to The New Yorker and a mainstay in the Sunday drama pages of The New York Times. Hirschfeld captured the stars of film and theatre with his flowing calligraphic style, and enthralled readers who pored over his illustrations searching for his daughter Nina's name hidden in each drawing. From November 2020 through January 2021, the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibited a retrospective of his drawings. After the exhibit closed, the Al Hirschfeld Foundation published an online version of the exhibit on its website. | | A National Insanity: 75 Years of Searching for NINA | | |
75 years ago, Al Hirschfeld began to hide his daughter's name, NINA, in the designs of his drawings when she was born in 1945. According to the artist he put it "in folds of sleeves, tousled hairdos, eyebrows, wrinkles, backgrounds, shoelaces —anywhereto make it difficult, but not too difficult, to find." Over the next half century Hirschfeld tried to end what he called "a national insanity," but he "learned, the ghard way, to put Nina's name in the drawing before I proudly display my own signature."
Sunday mornings looking for NINAs was a custom shared by New York Times readers, a game played with children and grandchildren. Finding NINAs was an unspoken initiation into the worlds of Broadway, Off-Broadway, and Hollywood. For Hirschfeld, drawing NINAs became second nature, and they appeared spontaneously as he worked, forcing him to count them at the end like everyone else. At a reader’s suggestion in 1960, he began to put a number next to his signature when there were more than one NINA to hunt for.
In this exhibition we have gathered drawings that all touch on some part of NINA history, from the very first drawing to the one with the most NINAs (it is probably not the one you are thinking of). These images will show the different ways he chose to hide it, and what happened when he left it out, or made the foolish mistake of trying to include other names. We wish you happy hunting for NINAs in these works, and the thousands of others we have on our site.
| | One of 15 U.S. postage stamps featuring Al Hirschfeld's work | |
6. Bragging Rights: A Trip to the Zoo
| | Back in July, in Bragging Rights I featured the three young children of Kat Adams, owner of Fitzgerald Landscaping in Aspen, after they competed in an Aspen Valley fun run. Recently, mom brought the kids down to Tucson, and I helped them get a special behind-the-scenes tour of the Reid Park Zoo. Georgia, Emma, and Harvey had a great time and shared some pictures from their trip with us. They also wrote two of the sweetest thank-you notes I've ever gotten. What great kids! | | Emma, Georgia, and Harvey help give one of the zoo's rhinos a bath. | Here's a behind-the-scenes look at where the zoo's animals are cared for. | The kids get a preview of the zoo's new Expedition Tanzania. | Beautiful thank-you note, Georgia. I love the leaf etchings. | The kids sent me some of the sweetest thank-you notes I've ever gotten. | |
7. Reaching High: Skiing Everest
| | Recently, Polish mountaineer Andrzej Bargiel climbed and summited Everest without supplementary oxygen and descended the world's tallest mountain on a pair of downhill skis. With this feat, Andrzej joins an elite group of climbers who have ascended Everest without supplementary oxygen, led by Reinhold Messner, who was the first person to do so in 1978. Bargiel is the first to ski down to base camp from Everest's summit. In the following article, he tells the story of how he planned and executed the expedition in great detail on ExplorersWeb. This article got me thinking about Aspen's own hometown heroes, the Marolt brothers, Michael & Steve, who have summited Everest without supplementary oxygen and skied down from an elevation of over 25,000 feet. | | Andrzej Bargiel Describes How He Skied Down Everest | | |
The images of Andrzej Bargiel of Poland skiing down a lonely, snowy Everest, on the first complete descent without supplementary oxygen, have made headlines around the world. However, until now, we know very little about the strategy and the work that made it possible.
Here is Bargiel’s detailed explanation of his ski descent of Everest, the future of high-altitude skiing amid climate change, and the legacy of those who skied Everest before him.
"The original plan was a fast push from Base Camp to Camp 2, then from Camp 2 to the South Col, and from the South Col straight to the summit. Unfortunately, there was a lot of snow, as the monsoon lasted much longer than usual, and it was raining almost every day at BC.
With the high temperatures, the glacier was melting, forming convective clouds that kept bringing more rain. In those conditions, it’s simply impossible to attempt a speed ascent. Of course, I would have preferred to go directly from Camp 2 to the summit — that was the original idea — but it just wasn’t possible this time."
| | This post from the Flock archives tells of the Marolt brothers' induction into the U.S. Ski Hall of Fame. | | Marolt brothers latest expedition leads to U.S. Ski Hall of Fame | | |
Ever since their dad took them skiing in Fourth of July Bowl on Independence Pass on July 3, 1977, twin brothers Steve and Mike Marolt of Aspen have experienced a natural progression as ski mountaineers.
That path will land them in the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame.
The identical twins are part of what the hall calls a “star-studded group of eight noted skiing athletes and sport builders” who are part of the class of 2017. They will be inducted and honored with a ceremony Saturday in Squaw Valley, California.
| | U.S. Ski Hall of Fame Tribute video to the Marolt brothers | |
8. Pet's Corner: Catching Up with Fern
| | Ferns is as beautiful as ever, and she sends well wishes to all of her Flock readers. She's eating gourmet and getting her last mousing in before the snows come to Aspen. | | Fern's enjoying some relaxing outside time,
but she always has her eyes out for mice. | |
9. Bindu's Corner: Waves in the Ocean
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Each wave in the ocean is different — some are big, some small; some reach the shore, while others fade away before touching it. Yet, from a distance, all are seen as part of the same ocean.
In the same way, we human beings differ in language, culture, religion, and temperament. But beneath all these differences, there is one unchanging truth — the divine presence that dwells in every heart.
When we realize that divinity within, all distinctions and dualities disappear. Then there is no ‘I’ and ‘you,’ no higher or lower — only the infinite peace of Oneness.
As the wave realizes itself to be the ocean, so may we realize ourselves to be That — the one without a second.
| | These Flock regulars are always here for you: | | Don't Be Shy: Share Your Stories! | | I'm looking forward to sharing more of your personal stories - oral, written, or otherwise, as we enter our third year. I'd so love to present them to The Flock, hit a mailbox below to share your story. | | Subscriptions & Idea Submissions
Reminder: Your submissions are always welcomed. | | |
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Your fan and friend,
Beth
| | | The information and materials contained or referenced in this newsletter are for informational purposes only and not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always consult a physician or other qualified medical professional with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or treatment and before beginning a new health care regimen. Do not disregard professional medical advice or delay seeking medical advice or care based on anything contained in this newsletter. | | | | |
