What I Did on My Holidays: Baltimore/Washington DC, Part 4

Friday M and I were still sore, but L made sure M put on a pair of Spandex shorts to alleviate the chafing.  It did, too.  We all walked over to the Hyatt for breakfast, which L had paid for as part of our conference registrations.  It was . . . a hotel-banquet breakfast.  Not outright bad, but certainly not good.  We sat through a certain amount of obligatory award-presenting, then split as soon as we could, going back to the hotel to kill a little time until rush hour was closer to being over.  (Once commuted, twice shy.)

Since we’d found the Magic Rabbit Hole yesterday, M and I walked directly to the Metro station through the Crystal City shops, which was both quicker and cooler than what we did Wednesday.  The train was still crowded, but not nearly as sardined as it had been.

Our first goal was the National Museum of the American Indian, which hadn’t even been built the last time I was in Washington.  We walked past beds planted in traditional Native crops—pole beans, corn, squash, gourds, and tobacco—to reach the entry.  The building looks remarkably nice for a Modern style building; the rusticated limestone facing blocks and wandering, wavy wall profiles, combined with the less-than-regimented plantings and a pleasant little waterfall/water garden running along the north side of the building to give it a more relaxed, Southwestern feel than the Greek Revival porticoes and graceless International Style facades of the surrounding buildings.

Once inside, we looked at a collection of boats in the main rotunda:  a Hawaiian outrigger, a Netsilingmiut kayak, an Aymara totora-reed boat (it looked more like a fancy bodyboard).  They are part of an ongoing program where the museum brings in Native boat-builders to make the traditional craft of their tribes.  M was particularly taken with a bronze statue at one side of the rotunda representing a Chiricahua warrior shooting an arrow into the sky, to carry the tribe’s prayers for rain to the gods.  She said later this was the most memorable thing she saw in the entire museum.  Farther along, M noticed a theater with a film running, and she insisted we go sit down and watch.  The movie turned out to be about the opening festival for the museum in 2004, and had clips of the parades, drumming, dancing, food, exhibits—all the things you do to open a museum these days!  Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, a prime mover behind getting the museum relocated from New York to Washington and the current building constructed, marched in the parade in full ceremonial dress, matching equally resplendent museum director Richard West.  (Both are Cheyenne chiefs; Campbell is a member of the Northern band and West of the Southern.)  Watching the movie let us save our feet for a few minutes, and by now that was becoming a consideration.

After the movie ended we went up to the second and third floors and looked at the current displays.  M had fun playing with the interactive touch screens that described the artifacts in the cabinets, as well as giving you 360° views of the ones where you could only see one side.  I was most impressed by the beaded everything, particularly a Lakota woman’s deerhide dress with its yoke completely covered in a geometric design of blue and red seed beads.  I also liked a collection of dolls from contemporary tribal makers in their various styles; I would say “traditional” styles, but I just can’t figure out how a voluptuous blonde female soft doll in a purple string bikini, made by an Oneida artist, is traditional, exactly.

As always, there were just TOO MANY things to see, so we gave up and moved on.  The main staircase was designed so light from a southeastern window with several prisms mounted in it shone across the steps, and as we walked down the sun through one of the prisms was just right to splash a huge rainbow across them.

When we got out it was more or less time for lunch, which we ate at the Air & Space Museum next door.  Air & Space’s cafe turned out to be run by McDonald’s, which pleased M no end because she’d been jonesing for McDonald’s the whole trip.  As usual, the entire museum was a mob scene so I didn’t even try to go through it with her, confining myself to taking her in to see the Wright Flyer, which now has its own dedicated gallery.  (Didn’t used to.)  I explained this was the first airplane that had ever been ever, and how little time had gone by since the first time it flew, adding that all Daddy’s grandparents were born between 1898 and 1902, before it ever left the ground.  I don’t know how much of it registered.  Maybe a little bit.  On the way out, I stopped and lifted her up so she could touch the piece of moon rock that’s mounted in a “touch-me” display at the entrance.

We hiked back across the Mall yet again, to the National Gallery for the Henri Rousseau:  Jungles in Paris exhibition.  The exhibition is only being shown at the National Gallery, and will not travel.  As with the Vermeer exhibition I saw there in 1995 (that’s another tale for another day, that is), I knew that if I didn’t take the chance to see them now I never would get to.

The exhibition was far more varied than I’d expected; besides the “jungle” paintings for which he’s so well known, there were Sunday-art street and country scenes, portraits, promotionals, allegories, and more.  Rousseau, who probably never left France in his life, used published photographs and visits to zoos and botanical gardens extensively for source material, and some of the identifiable sources he used were displayed next to their paintings.  M especially liked Surprised! (Tiger in a Tropical Storm), while I was enchanted by his late work The Dream, completed the same year he died.  The only major work I would have wished for that wasn’t included was The Sleeping Gypsy, but I suppose they couldn’t persuade MOMA, to whom it belongs, to let go of it.

By now I was inCREDibly footsore, to the point I suspected I had huge friction blisters on the ball of my right foot.  (I didn’t after all.)  M, who’d been very patient through the National Gallery, was ready to go do something more her speed and had been lobbying hard for another carousel ride.  I decided that yesterday had already ruined my Curmudgeonly, Old-Fartish reputation beyond hope, so we went and rode the carousel again.  This time M wanted a “regular” horse instead of a zebra, so she had that.  The trip back on the Metro was—well, better than Thursday.  We rested at the hotel until L got back from the conference, prouder than a purple pig of the new bra she’d made in class that actually fitted her properly!  When you wear a 42B cup, finding a proper fit is a Really Big Deal and usually means you have to make your own to get it right.  She intends to use this one as a muslin for making others, once she’s gotten the final tweaks done on the fit.

The conference’s style show was Friday evening, so we got dressed (and I Got Dressed, in full kilt but leaving the Prince Charlie jacket in the garment bag in favor of the poet’s shirt, which L thought was better geared to the level of informality) and went across the street to dinner at Chili’s.  On this trip I’ve discovered that Chili’s can usually be trusted to have SOME clue about proper spicing and what you use chiles for, and thank the ghods they put enough cilantro in the pico de gallo for you to taste it!  The restaurant was busy though not slammed; even so, we were late finishing and getting down to the Hyatt, where the show had already started.

The fashion show?  Well, it was a fashion show.  I really liked a few of the pieces, some of them were just utterly opposed to my taste, and we got the occasional dose of makes-yer-teeth-itch sweetness/cuteness.  And of course the committee couldn’t resist telling the DJ providing the music bed to end with Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA,” complete with obligatory party-favor flag waving all over the room (and if you believe it wasn’t obligatory, you didn’t see the crowd).  That brand of jingoist, know-nothing, hyper-patriotism disgusts me.  Jingoism wasn’t right in Queen Victoria’s time, and it still isn’t right now.

Next: George Washington’s gristmill, Robert E. Lee’s house, and leaving Cheyenne Washington.

An asteroid redirects the lawn in platypus-blossom time.  Fnord.