WELCOME  TO  MY  AUTHOR  PORTFOLIO

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This year’s Tribeca Film Festival features a seven minute film called The Mayfly, “an animated short film about the brief life of Megalyn Mayfly that touches upon the essence of life, passion, and defiance of societal norms.”

 

Adult mayflies generally live only one day, a lifespan of 0.019 years (or 0.0027 dog years) so there’s not much time to fool around, although fooling around is about all they do, quite frankly, and then they die afterwards—that is, if they’re not eaten immediately by a fish or a bird after emerging from their larval nymph stage. So hurrah for Megalyn taking seven minutes of her short life to sing and dance her way across Manhattan.

 

The mayfly is in the order Ephemeroptera, the ephemera part derived from the Greek word ephēmeros for lasting only one day.

 

The plant kingdom also has some examples of fleeting existence, such as the spring ephemerals. One example is the jack-in-the-pulpit. Jack-in-the-pulpits (or is it Jacks-in-the-pulpit?) are dioecious which means some plants are male and others are female (Jill-in-the-pulpit?). Interestingly, they can change from one gender to the other, although from now on the government will no longer be paying for it.

 

The group Mayflies USA just put out their first new song in 23 years this past January, so maybe they should call themselves Cicadas USA instead. Their album, Kickless Kids, is set to release this month on the sixteenth.

 

Ephemera, particularly paper ephemera, refers to bits of material that might be called “trash” by some and treasure by others. The Ephemera Society of America came into being in 1980. You can become a member for only $80 a year, $35 if you’re a student.

 

Maurice Rickards, late head of the British Ephemera Society, defined paper ephemera as “the minor transient documents of everyday life.” Which I understand to mean used tickets, receipts, programs, etc that accumulate in neat scrapbook pages of the organized few and crinkled up in the pockets and on vehicle floors of everyone else. There’s one good reason to become famous—letting the ephemera collectors carry off your overflowing accumulations.