I grew up thinking Elizabeth Taylor was my cousin.

“Poor Liz,” my mom would say with a sigh. “She’s back in the hospital. Her back’s acting up again. And she’s divorced another husband.”

Elizabeth Taylor was my mother’s favorite actress. From the time mom was a teenager, she’d hurry to the drugstore after school to pick up the latest fan magazine and read every word about the movie stars.

She wanted to know all the details about her favorite stars – Jimmy Stewart, Susan Hayward, Spencer Tracy and, most importantly, the queen herself, Elizabeth Taylor.

Mom talked about Liz so much and with such familiarity, I thought she was related to our family, and we should light a candle at church to atone for Liz’s wayward lifestyle.

These days, we don’t have to wait for the latest magazine to show up in the grocery store check-out line to find out about the lifestyles of the rich and famous.

All we have to do is click around on the internet, and we can find out every secret about every star in every country.

Besides the fact that most of that information’s untrue – just as it was in the 1950s – the juiciest tidbits on the Internet come with the headache of clickbait.

According to the Urban Dictionary, the bait is a link that makes readers want to click on it.

“You won’t believe what this guy does after he works out…”

“Big companies hate her…”

“Four thousand ways to reuse a plastic bag…”

Just like the fan magazines, we want to know the answers to these questions. Could a shark really eat a Navy helicopter? What truths did Pam and Jim from “The Office” teach us about love? And how could we pass up an article telling us all the ugly truths about “Gilligan’s Island?”

That’s the trick – they know people want to look behind the curtain and find out the real reason Ethel was always a few pounds heavier than Lucy.

Clickbait does everything it can to reel readers in, and some of the articles are practically impossible to resist, especially if it’s midnight, you’ve got insomnia and the fridge is empty.

I’ll admit it – I click on those ads, even though I know I shouldn’t. The last one I clicked on was the before and after photos of a North Carolina town that showed the impact of Hurricane Florence’s flooding.

I had to click through four articles and four photos to get to the flood pictures. They looked familiar to those of us who experienced Harvey – flooded streets, houses with water up to the roofline and elderly people in boats carrying their cat or dog.

There wasn’t any news, however, about the condition of the people in those towns, their homes, the repair effort nor up-to-date information on water and rain levels.

There were a lot of ads about making scrumptious mac and cheese dishes and 13 legit ways to scramble eggs.

And here I thought there was one way to scramble an egg – melt butter in a frying pan, crack an egg in a bowl, stir it with a fork, pour it in the hot pan and stir until the eggs are the consistency you like.

So I didn’t click on that ad because I don’t care if there are 12 other ways to scramble an egg. One is just fine with me.

Sorry, Madison Avenue – or wherever your clickbait offices are now located – this consumer has learned her lesson and won’t be clicking on anything that looks suspicious.

Unless the article’s about Elizabeth Taylor.

That I gotta check out.

Liz is, after all, family.

This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald. 

They say a picture is worth a thousand words.

In the case of photographer extraordinaire Russell Autrey, there’s a double treat.

Russell takes the best pictures, and he has a great story to go with each and every one he captures.

I’ve been lucky enough to hear quite a few of those stories over my 20-year history with Russell.

When my family moved to Texas, we settled in Pecan Grove. One afternoon, a neighbor told me my son Nick was pictured on the front page of The Herald-Coaster newspaper.

I went to the newspaper office on Fourth Street, bought a few papers with Nick’s picture on the front and signed up for a subscription.

Over the years, I’d open the paper and see incredible photos of every-day life. Sure enough, the photo credit was attributed to Russell Autrey, and I found myself looking forward to the next day’s paper to see what he’d come up with.

Now people can see a collection of his favorite photos and pen-and-ink drawings in an ongoing exhibit at the George Memorial Library.

Dozens of Russell’s photographs are beautifully and tastefully displayed. The exhibit includes pictures from his early newspaper days, and the black-and-white photos captured life as it was when people lived off the land and their wits.

Many of the photos I remember seeing on the front page of the newspaper, and I smiled as I looked at them, remembering the circumstances surrounding the photo of the little girl holding an icicle and the elderly gentleman kneeling in a wooden church, his eyes closed in silent prayer.

Not only did he catch moments with his camera, he also recreated daily life with a pen and ink.

His attention to detail is astounding, from accurately replicating weathered siding to including the faded graffitti on the side of a building. There’s the added bonus of hearing Russell describe the circumstances around his artwork, thanks to a QR code and the chance to listen to Russell on your phone.

There were no strangers in the gallery – all of us had a connection with Russell, either through family, friendships, our days at The Herald Coaster, now Fort Bend Herald, or a love of photography.

Even though most of us have a few more wrinkles and a lot more gray hair, we were excited to see each other in a happy situation, all thanks to a smiling man at the front of the gallery who was graciously sharing stories about his life behind the lens.

What we didn’t have time to tell him was how positively he’d affected our lives.

Russell’s genuine friendliness, willingness to talk with anyone, his natural ease with children and the elderly, and his gifted story-telling ability are as much gifts as the artist’s eye he’s blessed with.

His stories connect us to what’s really important and that’s the small, every-day moments from stopping to take time to watch the sun rise over Bolivar Peninsula to capturing the pure joy of children frolicking in the rain.

That’s the mark of a true artist – where others walk past something seemingly insignificant, Russell always sees the beauty in the every day, the ordinary and the often overlooked.

If you’re friends with Russell, as thousands are, you are indeed a lucky person. I’m so glad I’m one of those lucky ones.

Make sure and visit the free exhibit at the George Memorial Library, 1001 Golfview in Richmond, through the end of October.

Stop in and make sure you’ve got that QR code downloaded so you can hear the master storyteller describe his view of life through the lens.

This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald. 

“It’s time for a sister trip,” the text stated.

My sister, Diane, sent the same message to me and our youngest sister, Donna.

She was right.

Years ago, we’d take a sister trip every summer. Looking at the text, I couldn’t remember the last time the three of us got away for a girls weekend.

Life got in the way. Weddings came along and then babies and an outside-the-home job.

With those life events came understanding. Instead of seeing each other as pesky siblings, we saw each other as strong women, balancing work and family.

Years ago, we decided we needed to reconnect and decided on “sister trips” and our mom came along. One year, we all headed to Las Vegas as mom’s brothers lived there.

Our sister-in-law, Debra – who after 40 years of marriage to our brother is really our sister – and our youngest brother Jeff joined us.

We had a blast seeing the lights and action on the Vegas strip. A laser tag game was one for the books when Jeff’s only mission was to follow Diane around and blast her every time her power light came back on.

A trip to Charlotte, N.C. was one I’ll always remember. Not just because of the midnight ghost tour we took in the downtown area and touring the majestic Biltmore but because we were all together in a beautiful bed-and-breakfast antebellum home.

As our children grew into adults and grandchildren arrived, we stopped going on our sister trips. We’d promise each other that the next year would be different, but something always came up and the trip would get cancelled.

But not this year.

Diane was adamant we get together, and we settled on Houston. Reservations and tentative plans were made, but we left most of the long weekend to chance.

Our first afternoon was spent at a spa. I’ve never gotten a facial or a massage, but my sisters told me the experience would be great.

And it was.

Soft music played while the technician kneaded my tense muscles, convincing me to enjoy the relaxing music and soothing scents. The technician spent more time giving me a facial than I spend on my face in a month.

Dinner was a wonderful treat at Yia Yia Mary’s Greek Kitchen with a sinfully rich and absolutely scrumptious baklava cheesecake for dessert.

We thought we’d hit the jackpot with that, but when we happened on an 90 percent off the already-marked-down sale price at a favorite clothing store, our weekend ratcheted up to a whole new level.

It had been a long time since I’d gone clothes shopping, and I’d forgotten how much bonding takes place in the dressing room as women toss pants and shirts to each other over the doors and answer the age-old question “does this make me look fat?”

We spent our last night watching the LSU Tigers win their season opener, comparing our aches, knee troubles, wrinkles and cellulite during the commercials.

Wee reminisced about our parents, friends from the old neighborhood and reliving favorite family memories.

Driving them back to the airport, I thought about how much sisters mean to each other, from sisters by birth to those through marriage and those who’ve become sisters through friendship.

We’ve shared good times and bad, fun times and not-so-fun ones. My sisters tease me, accept me and love me unconditionally. I feel the same way about them.

I wouldn’t trade my sisters for anything, and I can’t wait until the next sister trip. Who knows what adventures await?

 

This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.