Andare, Partire, Tornare ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Wouldn't want to live there, but the visit was fun Just back from four days in beautiful, scenic, downtown Delaware. Ok, so downtown Delaware was neither beautiful, nor scenic, but the outskirts sure were. I was there for the Mid Atlantic Association of Museums, (Yes, MAAM!) and had a pretty darn good time, all told. The session on soft packing proved to be excellent, and I now know how to pack a one-ton T-Rex skull. Well...I know the *theory* behind how it was done, anyway. Got to see my friend E up there, who's been working for one of the numerous DuPont museums (The Hagley, Winterthur, Longwood Gardens, and Nemours, all stunningly beautiful, and I wish we had been there a week earlier to see the foliage at its peak). She's doing fine, although she doesn't much like Wilmington, which doesn't compare well to State College, let alone New York (E interned at the Met, lucky wench). She let me flop on her floor the night before I went home (train to take me home, woo). I got all sorts of goodies at the convention, including a leetle bee-person to sit on my bookshelf, and a floatie pen, and all sorts of other crap that they were handing out. God, I love freebies. Also got a nice little tote bag. The sessions were, on the whole, very interesting, and gave us some new ideas to ponder about interpretation and history and truth and lies and suchlike. The keynote speaker was a guy who wrote _Lies Accross America_ and _Lies my Teacher told me_, and he brought up some good points but seemed to relish the "kill" as he proved a museum was "lying to the public" entirely too much, and at times it overshadowed his veracity. For example, he said that the James Buchannon home was lying about the fact that the guy was straight, when clearly history shows he was gay, and therefore they're lying to the public. Well, no...he might have been gay, but there's absolutely no documentation either way that's provable, and the home does address the topic, not cover it up under the rug. The docent he heard the stuff from may not have made it as clear, but hell...trying to get docents to be uniform and 100% accurate is like trying to herd cats. Lord knows, ours are a stubborn bunch. There are gems among them, but many persist in giving the same speech they did twenty years ago. So, I had a good time, and hung out with good people, and ate good food, and saw pretty scenery in the Brandywine river valley. Not a bad four days. And tomorrow, I'm off to a workshop where they burn down a room. What fun! 4:44 p.m. - 2001-10-29 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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