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(211) International House 2006:

Edition of 1340 of which 125 copies are signed 1-125,
26 copies are signed A-Z as artist's proofs.

June 2, 2006

17-3/4" x 24"

7 colors

Paper: Mohawk Superfine 80# Cover

Client: Inthernational House,
2299 Piedmont, Berkeley, California.
Telephone: (510) 642-9490;
website: http://ihouse.berkeley.edu/ email: ihres@berkeley.edu

1-125: Saint Hieronymus Press, Inc.

A-Z: Artist's own use

Dedication copies: Shanti Corrigan;


Children divide the world into the "familiar" and the "different." Familiar is right; different is wrong. Not much room for grey. My first sleepover, in first grade, was spent at the house of a friend who was an only child. His house smelled wrong; it was way too fussily clean; we ate the wrong thing for supper and listened to the wrong radio show; went to bed at the wrong time and got up on the wrong side of the bed and had the wrong thing for breakfast. My first overnight was also my introduction to xenophobia.

Later in life, probably in an (entirely successful) effort to annoy my parents, I came to positively embrace the different and strange. I am not entirely sure how this came about, but I suspect that it was, in part, the result of repeated overnights at different schoolmate's homes, and the accompanying realization that there was more than one right way of doing things. Different wasn't necessarily wrong, it was just different. If you gave it half a chance you might even come to like poached eggs on pancakes or the Howdy Doody Show.

The International House offers something like a big, long sleepover at the Rest-Of-The-World's-House, where students from cultures that actively hate one another are provided with the opportunity to live cheek-by-jowl with the Different, and eat with them and talk with them and come to the realization that different is just different, not bad, and maybe even good.

Come on, world, it's time to grow up.