By Heidi Kim, TW Contributing Writer
Blogging from Connecticut, where I am on a research trip at the moment. I am fairly far from James Blake's hometown by CT standards, but in any case I imagine he's down in Florida at the moment where all the action is this week. This soaring small castle is the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford's art museum. They have a nice exhibit of impressionists right now; you can read a review of it here if you're interested (NY Times, login required).
This trip, combined with the Florida frenzy right now, remind me to remind you to keep me posted on what tournaments you're planning to attend if you would like to see a list to help coordinate Tribe gatherings or just get advice from each other. Please email me, rather than leaving a comment that I might not find in the thread, and it would be extra helpful if you would put the tournament in the subject line. I already know that I will be asking Ali C for advice on Wimbledon queuing at 3am and possibly meeting her there! I'm planning to go for the first time this year and am hugely excited, as is the friend I'm visiting, though I have a feeling his enthusiasm will be slightly quenched when he hears about the queues.
And as always, don't forget to keep the photos coming. I only have so many CT photos.
I was not planning on commenting on Monica Seles' dancing feet every week, but since she has, alas, already departed the show, I think we can give her a kind send-off here. Was I right or wrong about Latin favoring her tennis-trained feet? I don't even know, but she did her best. I did notice that they put her in extremely low-heeled shoes, a sure sign that she wasn't joking when she said that she was unused to all this "girly" stuff.
That was the story arc that they created for Monica in her two weeks, one of discovering her girlie, feminine side after years of focusing on tennis only. She did seem genuinely to enjoy it, but of course it raised some quibbles in my mind over our static definition of femininity and the ways that most of today's top players tap into that in ways that Seles eschewed. (Of course this debate always existed. I love the old story about Gertrude Moran's lace panties, 1949.) Pretty dresses and earrings abound on the courts these days, and the unglammed Henin, Schnyder and Davenport are the exceptions. Indeed, I'll go so far as to wonder if the focus on Lindsay's proud motherhood is a way of properly 'feminizing' a player who's always disregarded the flash and fashion. It is another dominant narrative of proper femininity, after all.
And with that last poke at the bear, I'll sign off for now. Enjoy the week of frenzied speculation about what will happen in Miami and not stay there! But this is your off-topic thread, so use it as refuge from that speculation if you like.