You know that Bare Naked Ladies song “If I Had a Million Dollars?”

Well, if I had a million dollars, I’d spend it the way Maxine and Jonathan Marshall did. Their Marshall Fund brings smart book authors and well-versed poets to town on a regular basis. And twice a year, the butterflies come, too.

The butterfly pavilion at Phoenix’s Desert Botanical Garden is among my favorite places in town. Yesterday the girls and I met our dear friend Trish there — and while we didn’t have nearly enough time to enjoy everything the garden has to offer, since I screwed up and had to whisk Annabelle away to dance rehearsal — we did spend a hunk of time with some enormous monarch butterflies.

I looked at the sign in the butterfly pavilion as I always do, and silently thanked the Marshalls. And I thought about Jonathan, who died earlier this year. He was one of my earliest heroes, the owner and editor of the Scottsdale Daily Progress, my hometown newspaper. He was a liberal among conservatives, an opinionated guy. Wicked smart.

By the time I finished grad school and applied for my first newspaper job, the Marshalls had sold the Progress — after that, it was never the paper it once was, suffering multiple big owners and eventually shutting its doors, gobbled by its parent company – but I was still proud to work there. And even prouder when I was invited to join a “multi-generational” book club that included Maxine among its members. We often met at the Marshalls’ home.

Yesterday was Day of the Dead, and the garden had a big party. Fitting.

And too fitting for my taste is the news just this morning of another death. The East Valley Tribune, Phoenix’s “second” daily newspaper (the Arizona Republic is the first), is closing.

Jonathan Marshall wouldn’t be pleased about that at all.

Finally, success with a classroom craft.

There isn’t time to go down the list of turds I’ve dropped in the artistic punchbowl over the years (the time my mom and I tried to get first graders to emulate Picasso and Matisse comes to mind) but I must say that I’m feeling quite proud of the sugar skull decorating that went on in both girls’ classrooms, the past two days.

(Sugar skull?! you ask. Check out some dia de los muertos/day of the dead history here.)

The key was keeping it simple — we ditched the royal icing and authentic but hard-to-maneuver colored tin for glue, pipe cleaners, tissue paper and googly eyes, then let it rip.

The kids were so creative, and borrowed ideas from one another. It was wonderful to watch. (And easy to do yourself, as long as you don’t mind the time-consuming task of molding sugar skulls. Some tips: Skip the backs, just do the face of the skull; don’t do it rainy weather, or the stuff won’t stick together; be sure to include the meringue powder everyone says you’ll need; order molds at www.mexicansugarskull.com.)

Funny, I thought the first graders would have a hard time, but in the end I decided they were more successful than the third graders. The little ones have more joie de vivre — they don’t self-edit as much yet, at 6. The 8-year-olds were much more careful about where they placed the sequins and tissue paper, and as a result, their skulls were more precise but not as much fun.

I’m going to try to remember that when I decorate my own skulls this weekend.

Of course, my own children’s skulls were the most beautiful:

Here are some examples from that site:

No, ours did not look like that. And true, I had some help (OK, a lot of help) with the royal icing (and be sure that’s what you use — the stuff really is like cement) but I’m still shaking my head over how simple those skulls were. The girls loved it. So did Ms. X, who joined us.

And really, just about anything in your craft cabinet will do! (Not sure Martha would say that, but I’m sure my friend Kathy Cano-Murillo, would. Check her out: www.craftychica.com — and bow down. The woman has HER OWN LINE OF GLITTER. A goddess.)

Here are ours. See if you can figure out whose is whose. The photos don’t do justice to the 3-D nature of the skull.

I’ve owned those darn molds for years, and never made the skulls. (As is the case with much of the contents of the craft area, the only organized place in the house, mainly due to non-use.) But this year I was determined. There’s been a lot of dying going on. The other day, Sophie came home with a beautiful drawing from a kindergarten friend, and Ms. X explained the little girl drew it for her because Sophie announced that her cat had died.

Yeah, in June.

So it’s nice to do some honoring, although Sophie clearly wasn’t think about Ernie when she made her skull. (That’s fine, it’s too early for her; ditto for Annabelle.)

But not for me. I didn’t have time to finish a skull, but I did put some bright blue royal icing eyes on one — just the shade of my grandfather’s eyes — and put it aside for a late night alone. I wonder if I can find some teeny tiny playing cards and poker chips to tuck in there somewhere?

Grandpa would not have known what to make of a sugar skull. To be fair, it wasn’t just him — I had no immersion in Latino culture before I moved home to Arizona as an adult. In the early 1990s, the Day of the Dead made its way into pop culture and I remember visiting an Arizona State professor who “studied” it, to learned about the holiday and its icons and write a story for the local daily paper, my first job out of school. Today an editor would likely poo-poo that story idea as over done.

Mostly, Day of the Dead is kitschy and fun (aside from the pesky death stuff); and the crafts are spectacular — and you can get the stuff for a song. So I filled my apartments and then my house with grinning skeletons and sparkly skulls, and I would have topped my wedding cake with a skeleton bride and groom couple if my mom hadn’t stopped me.

Making those skulls didn’t just remind me of loved ones who’ve left, it reminded me of my struggle to find stuff to love about Phoenix. I still maintain that the coolest Mexican import store I’ve ever seen was on the border between Little Italy and Chinatown, and I did recently travel to Amsterdam almost entirely to visit Kitsch Kitchen, where they do things with Mexican oilcloth that you can’t even imagine, but it’s nice to be close to the source of the craft action, too.

Someday — maybe in 2009 — I’m going to travel to Mexico with one of my Latin America-obsessed gringa friends.

But now I have to reorganize the sequins.

I have two gringa friends — tall blonde women who have long been inexplicably obsessed with all things Latin – but one is living in Puerto Rico, so I called the one who lives across town. Kathleen has more sugar skulls in her collection of Latin American art than a Oaxacan cemetery the day after Halloween, and she’s damn crafty (has an entire room at her house devoted to beading) so I figured she’d been around the sugar skull block once or twice.

“No way have I ever made them,” came the quick reply. The subtext: You might have been able to get me to drive to LA to see Crispin Glover’s horrible movie starring people with Down syndrome killing snails (a story for another day) but no, I’m not coming over to help you shove wet sugar into plastic molds.

Normally I would have said screw it, but this damn election has created so much work it’s caused me to miss most of the Halloween/DOTD season, and I’ve always wanted to make sugar skulls. So I forged ahead.

And let me say that it’s amazing how well you can do at a project when you actually read the directions on the back of the package. They’re not perfect, but even Annabelle was impressed when the first skull face slid neatly out of the mold.

We’ll see what happens tomorrow, when it’s time to decorate.