We Are the World

I just have to mention this: in my day job, I end up reading a lot of on-line newspapers from different countries. After my rant about internet dating sites, I started seeing “matrimonial” sites as sidebar ads in several of the newspapers. If you are interested in finding a “bride” or a “groom” in the UAE, look to shaadi.com, or in India, go to bharatmatrimony.com. Kind of a contrast to lavalife.com. Ever wonder if Americans' priorities are screwed up?

Walking, walking in the rain

As I walked the dogs this morning in the mist that had a hint of salt and honeysuckle scenting it, I was swept back in time and location to Monhegan Island, ME, 1973. I was with my family and paternal grandparents. Because it was gloomy, we did jigsaw puzzles at the inn instead of going to the beach, and picked wild strawberries on the hill. We took a mail boat to Matinicus Rock (which I would later learn about in the context of Abbie Burgess, female lighthouse keeper, hero) to look at puffins, which we saw in great quantity. At one point, the boat pitched, and I stepped on my grandmother’s foot, rather hard. Although she was nice enough about it, I felt just terrible. Shortly after that, she had a stroke and died. When my father told me, I cried and cried, not because I was sad that she died – I didn’t really know what it meant then, and we weren’t that close – but because I blamed the foot-trodding incident.

There Once Was a Man from Nantucket

In this case his name is Harvey, and he is, as Rabbit Junior said, “a totally awesome guy”.

Limericks aside, Harvey demonstrated what I have consistently tried to teach to the young rabbits and anyone else who will listen: it is not that hard to do the right thing. Of course, sometimes that’s subjective, but often, it’s pretty straightforward. This was.

On Sunday night, Rabbit Junior left the Red Sox hat that my late husband had bought for him in a movie theatre. I tried not to get upset, it was only a hat, after all, and I tend to place too much importance on the handful of things we have from my late husband, for they are just things. I did a pretty good job too, but we kept checking back to see if there was anyone at the cinema all the next day so that we could try to retrieve it. Like all island movie houses, resurrected from days of yore, the Dreamland Theatre is not staffed until shortly before their first showing. This did not occur before our ferry would be leaving the island.

As we headed down to the ferry dock, the bicycle shop owner who had been part of the whaleboat crew my team had crushed the day before hailed me and the rabbits on the street. We joked for a few minutes, and then I asked if he knew how to reach the theatre owners. He said they were impossible to reach, asked what we needed, and proceeded to take detailed notes on the hat, my son’s name, and our phone number.

Last night he called and said simply, “Where should I send the hat?”

Post Script: I will also tell you that Harvey gave complimentary bicycles to the members of my crew on the morning of the whaleboat race. Now he may just have been hoping to tire them out so that they would lose . . . but I don’t think so.

I Went There: Nantucket Whaling Museum

The Nantucket Historical Association boasts 24 properties that they manage ranging from a fountain/boulder/bench to the Whaling Museum, which just reopened this past weekend after a major renovation. The last time I was at the museum, pre-expansion, I noted that they had an amazing number of artifacts, but that they were laid out in such a manner that they were hard to take in. The lighting wasn’t especially good, and the labels in the galleries were not always well written.

The change in the museum is quite dramatic. The rabbits and I were encouraged to go right in, as a short movie was beginning in a central hall that links the two older buildings and houses a whaleboat set up as it would be in a Nantucket Sleigh Ride (the part of a whale hunt where the animal drags the boat behind it as it swims along the surface at high speeds), and above it is the whale skeleton from a sperm whale that washed ashore at Great Point in June of 2002. Having the skeleton above the whaleboat is an excellent illustration (as it is meant to be) of how large the animals were that the whalemen were dealing with. The movie talks about how the NHA and the community responded to the whale that washed up, which is a great way to introduce you to the notion of whaling, which to our 21st century marine mammal protection act sensibilities can be a difficult thing to do. People don’t want to believe that there was an entire enormous industry based on the slaughter of marine mammals. So they talk about one that was already dead, and in doing so, can address the tools of the trade and the economy without being offensive. The best part about the movie is that it doesn’t go on too long, and it isn’t at all hokey.

The spermaceti candle factory that had been chockablock full of unlabeled artifacts is now a well lit area dedicated to instructing about that part of the industry. The building itself has been renovated to reveal the structure, as it would have looked in 1847, when it was built. They have the beam press for producing wax from oil set up with excellent descriptions of the different seasonal pressings and examples of lamps and candles throughout the room. Upstairs are revamped exhibit galleries that showcase NHA’s superior collection of scrimshaw, Nantucket baskets, oriental artifacts collected from whaling ships, and the like. The top floor opens out to a patio that allows you to look down upon the town and harbour as you might if you had one of the homes with captain’s walks that are so prevalent in town.

There are a surprising number of interpreters at the museum. Each gallery has at least one, and there seemed to be more roaming. Whether this had something to do with the new opening, or this is standard practice, I can’t say. What I can say is that not a single one tried to engage any visitor in conversation. For the most part, they don’t need to; the labels are informative, and many of the artifacts speak for themselves. There are also scheduled talks, where an interpreter will give a topical presentation, such as on the whale hunt. Although I didn’t receive a schedule when I arrived, the talks are broadcast over a public address system that allows all visitors to be notified.

All in all, for a history museum, the new Whaling Museum gets high marks – open spaces keep visitors from feeling crowded in; good labels give appropriate information without being verbose; and the new galleries allow for the display of far more of the museum’s artifacts than were showcased before the renovation.

Pops; A Poem

This weekend, I sing with my Chorus in a big Pops concert in the park. My kids are in the chorus too -- as an alto, I stand high and in the back so I can peer down and see the tops of their heads as they are singing, and I am filled with a rush of warmth, and so much happiness that tears nearly spill out of my eyes.

I can't say the Chorus, a big dysfunctional family, saved me at a time when I needed saving, because it's trite, and also an overstatement. I wasn't saved. I didn't need saving. But I needed and got support at times when I felt like my legs were buckling underneath me, and that's all a girl could really hope for, don't you think?

After Pops is over, there is the sense of loss until the fall when we start up again.

This is old, but relevant:

I am like a geyser –
love dripping from my fingertips;
then suddenly without warning
exploding upwards and showering down
upon all around me.
The scent is pervasive in my presence,
offensive to some,
not rain, not summer, not green,
but love pouring out unchecked
like an open fire hydrant
on a day when the air shimmers with heat.
And I worry, as you might imagine,
that if it keeps up at this rate
I will run out of love as
I once frivolously frittered away my cache
of hope.

7/17/04

The Best Years of Your Lives

One of the things that made me really mad at my son’s DARE graduation was when the chief of police from my town got in front of the crowd and told the kids that the next seven years would be the best years of their lives. I almost stood up and shouted, NO! You’re WRONG! But did not for fear of embarrassing my children, and seeming even weirder than I already do to my neighbors.

I realize that he was trying to impress upon the students the importance of making good choices over the next few years (and in that vein, I wish he would have added the college years as well, but in my town they don't assume you’ll go to college). But there would have been better ways to send that message. For the Chief, who probably played football, drank beer underage, and was popular with the girls, those likely WERE the best years of his life. The same might be said for men I used to teach high school with, young men I work with, and the town’s high school principal whom I pray will be gone before my children reach those grades. I don't know any women who might say that.

For the vast majority of us, life gets better as you get older. I can count seventh through ninth grade as the unmitigated worst years of my life, and I’ve had some pretty hefty tests since then. I’m not alone. When I taught high school myself, I tried to preach this message: yes, with adulthood comes more (but mostly different) responsibility, but oh, there’s so much more you get to do. My job was to unconvince the kids that life was downhill from age 19 on. My job was to teach them not to peak at 18 or 27 or 90, but to keep reaching higher. And I was supposed to teach them biology too.

In my town where an individual holds more status from having gone to hairdressing school than college or graduate school, I wish THIS was the message that was getting out there: these next seven years will be difficult ones, and will go a long way to shaping who you turn out to be; choose wisely now, so you can enjoy your adulthood too.

More Fancies

When my great-aunt died, my cousin said in his eulogy, “she was lucky in love”. I had always perceived her as being kind of unlucky, so this was an interesting interpretation of the facts that I knew. Gloria’s first husband (and the one she chose to be buried with) died quite young. That always seemed pretty tragic to me, the more so after I experienced that kind of loss myself. After Jack died she remarried, altogether too soon, for some people’s liking, but she divorced that next husband. Then, over the years nearly up until she died had a series of relationships that sometimes ended in the demise of her partner (through no fault of hers, let it be said) – more frequently the case, the older she got.

Gloria was a hot ticket. Despite the fact that she had lupus, she kept active with water aerobics and walking, not letting the disease debilitate her or her friendships with a plethora of both men and women. I was always amazed at her ability to rebound and bond with someone new when a relationship ended for one reason or another.

Now that I know better, I understand what she was up to. She was referred to as “having a big heart” which usually implies generosity. While she was indeed generous – extending welcome and compassion, she also had a tremendous capacity for love. Figuring out that she and I shared this trait held by so few others in our family made me understand my own circumstances all the better. I wish I could say I got it from her, but she wasn’t a blood relative, being married to my grandmother’s brother.

But I can say I “got it” from her. And what I already knew, which was that it really is better to have loved and lost, her life, my cousin’s eulogy, the memory of her scent when she would give me a real honest-to-goodness hug and mean it when she said, how ARE you,” has been reinforced. I don’t have quite the track record she had, but then again, I’m still young.

It’s Summer When a Girl’s Fancy Turns to Thoughts of . . .

There’s almost no better feeling in the world (except a hot shower after being on a boat for a week) than having a crush in a fledgling relationship that coincides with the onset of summer. The night air is soft and warm, and it smells wonderful. And there remains that anticipatory feeling, 20 years after it is relevant, that exams have just ended, and in the two months ahead, something wonderful might happen.

Of my handful of meaningful relationships over the years, more than half of them began as spring wended its way into summer. It’s no coincidence – with flowering plants thrusting their sexuality out there for all to see, mammals and insects doing various mating dances, the air is fairly charged with hormones from every species.

With nature helping a girl along, it has been easy in the past to fall fast into the sticky depths of a relationship. The loamy smell of a spring rain will always remind me of walking downtown at age 16 to meet a boy I thought I loved. It is a reminder to exercise caution, for he did not love me back, and furthermore, he would have been a terrible boyfriend. But the scent also stirs up the already overwhelming love I have for my children, my friends, my parents and sibling until it is once again pouring out of me in a veritable flood that makes the wary leap back so their feet aren’t covered; nor is the sand underneath them shifted by the tide.

I DARE you to smoke this

Tonight we are going to Rabbit Jr.’s DARE graduation, something the fifth graders in his school are “encouraged to attend, because it really reinforces the DARE message”. The school wants parents to understand that they share the responsibility for their children’s education about drugs, but I’m not sure that giving up my Monday night is going to do that for my son, any more than watching the slide show or taking the class will ultimately keep him from doing drugs.

For now, my son is at that righteous black-and-white time of his life where he can make statements like, “I will NEVER do drugs”, and believe them. And I’m glad he feels that way at age 11. But I know that is his sense of morality because of whom he is, and not because a police officer came and talked to his class. It’s not because he wrote an essay in order to graduate from DARE where he expostulated on the reasons for not smoking, drinking, doing drugs, or responding to peer pressure, because truly, they learn by example (positive OR negative) not by having Officer Olson tell them not to smoke.

There isn’t a kid who doesn’t know about the ill effects of drugs and alcohol by the time they get to middle school. But they do know if their parents, siblings, guardians, friends, are doing it. There are already other kids in his grade who are smoking, who probably are using drugs – their parents do. My children don’t have strong feelings about not using alcohol because they see me drinking wine or even a martini from time to time. But I don’t smoke or use drugs, so they are quite vehement about that.

By the time RJ is done at his middle school in 8th grade, the percentage of users will have skyrocketed to match the levels of children giving blow jobs on the school bus and having sex behind the music room. How has DARE helped these kids? More kids are using drugs and having sex at an earlier age than when I was going to school. And plenty of kids were doing it then. As liberal as I am, I’d rather see my local tax dollars provide more police officers to crack down on the dealers so the kids can’t GET the drugs, than try to forge this ineffectual preemptive strike.

The message to my children has been consistent in my house since before they were old enough to process it. Don’t get in a car with someone who has been drinking or if you have been – call me. Don’t get in a car with someone who has been using drugs or if you have been – call me. If you are ever in a situation where you feel the least bit uncomfortable or like you can’t trust people, call me. My kids know they can call me at any time day or night and get compassion and understanding. That’s the message the parents should be giving to kids. Maybe all of us attending the DARE graduation will help accomplish that, but I don’t think so.

Gettin' Me Some Religion

Tonight we went to temple. Which I love. It might come across as a little freaky that I love going to temple since I’m sort of left wing, and not a religious nut, but I’ll explain why. First of all, being that there are hardly any Jews around, it’s a tiny congregation that meets only once a month in what looks like an old New England church tucked between a bank and old Town Hall. Until you look closely and see the shofars in the stained glass window instead of crosses. We are so small, we don’t even have a rabbi. The head of the Southeastern Connecticut Jewish Federation (or some group like that) has been leading our services for as long as I’ve been going (12 years now). Although not a “real” rabbi, he embodies all of the social and political roles that I would expect a rabbi to honor, but can’t chant in tune to save his life. Except for the fact that he is trying to sell me on sending my kids to the local Solomon Schecter (just a step above homeschooling, as far as I’m concerned), I think he is great. It’s a strangely conservative service considering the lack of rabbi and transient congregation. But it meets our spiritual needs.

Secondly, I’m fascinated by organized religion on all sorts of levels. I blame this on hybrid vigour, not having ANY religion imposed on me growing up, and an overwhelming exposure to renaissance art which heavily favours crucifixion, resurrection, and annunciation as themes when quite young and impressionable. I’m willing to accept almost any theory, as long as I agree with it. Makes sense, huh? For instance, on a recent trip to Egypt, I was all set to get behind Islam till they got to the part where they don’t believe in evolution. They lost me there. But I do like the idea of prophets. It’s kind of like standing up for the rights of lunatics.

I asked my son, Rabbit Junior, if he understood what it meant to be Jewish – a tough question since we three are the only ones in town, and I’ve been derelict in the small rabbits’ religious education other than my own bizarre interpretation based on the above. To his credit, he said, “Jews brought the message that there was one God.” Whether or not he’s right, it was a pretty darn good answer. And it gets us off the arrogant hook for all that “chosen people” stuff.

Here’s why I can dig Judaism (besides the fact that it is my cultural background:

Take responsibility for your mistakes. If you screw up, you have to admit it. To the person you screwed up with, not some anonymous priest type guy. If you say something mean about someone, you HAVE to tell them (according to Jewish law), and you HAVE to apologize to them. And they HAVE to accept your apology. Isn’t that GREAT? Nothing like taking the bull by the horns, or the goat by the scape, or whatever. Yom Kippur is just the best for that very reason.

Don’t pick the corn at the edge of your fields. Got that? You have to leave snacks for the poor. Tzedekah, we call it. Which loosely translates as charity, but it is an expected charity, not the kind you get to take off on your taxes. Also mitzvot (performing good deeds). Doing good is part of our culture. Cool, huh? So let that person pull out in front of you at the merge. Or run after the lady who let her bag of groceries sit on the counter. It's what you're SUPPOSED to do. You don't get bonus points. But you don't get any taken away either.

Our prayers are nifty. Like the silent Amidah, which is part of every service: “guard my tongue from evil and my lips from speaking guile. To those who curse me, let my soul be silent; and let my soul be like dust to everyone. Open my heart to Your Torah, then my soul will pursue Your commandments. As for all those who design evil against me, speedily nullify their counsel and disrupt their design.”

And it’s not JUST about what you say (although adhering to those principals has cut way down on my cattiness), it’s about what’s in your heart. It’s all about choosing good over evil (look what happened in the Star Wars sextet), and not pawning it off on someone else, or hoping to confess about doing something awful like cutting social security, or bombing Iraq, and then feeling a sense of righteousness because you’ve been saved.

There are high expectations for Jews. It’s not about heaven and hell and what happens later, it’s about the here (and hear) and now – you’re supposed to behave well all along. So I try to. And intermixed with my weird feeling that I’m sometimes IN a renaissance painting, my love for the Requia written by every classical composer, my holiday tree, lights, and gingerbread construction in December, my belief in a Karmic Bank, and my lone Ranger status in town, I am as good a Jew as I can be.

Alvenu Malkenu (our Father, our King), frustrate the designs of my enemies.

Poor, proud, clean

I earn about $20,000 a year. For my family of three, this puts me far closer to the poverty level than the median income for my country, my age, my state. If you add in the weekly child support I receive mandated by state guidelines, I still don’t begin to approach the median income. I am telling you this because I am writing now about poor people. I am going to make some hideous generalizations based on my observations, but I am also reminding you that I fall into the same income bracket.

On the days that I am too lazy to go for a run, I justify the large lunch I ate by taking my dogs for a long walk through my neighborhood. I rationalize that an hour of walking must be as good as 35 minutes of running, plus I get to carry around bags of poop, which makes it all the more fun. I live in an old mill town that hasn’t been resurrected and gentrified. At least ¼ of the properties in my neighborhood (all built between 1830 and 1930 except for the odd ranch house that crops up here and there) are multi-family. They are usually not owner-occupied, but sometimes the owners live in another section of town, most usually the 1990s development up the hill that I refer to as Stepford. The single families are owned by working-class people who have lived here for 40 years, or people such as myself, who came in the last 15 years looking for the last bastion of affordable suburban housing.

I like walking through my neighborhood, especially at this time of year. Even though it hasn’t decided to be spring in earnest yet, everything is in bloom, the air smells good in the evening, people’s lawns are green. The dynamics of the neighborhood change from block to block. Here I live amongst multiple family homes, but a block away, there are mostly single family gambrel-style houses. A block to the west, you find a section of 1930s bungalows. In these houses live the families I see walking their dogs, whose children go to school with my children. They have barbeques, and go to church, and vote Republican. Sure, there’s the occasional orange flowered sofa on the porch, but mostly they have flowers along their front walks and smile and comment on my dogs when I walk by. They are not like me, and they almost assuredly earn more than I do, but they are generally good people.

On the third floor of the house behind me lives a woman with her boyfriend and her two kids. Her son was in Rabbit Junior’s class last year. She had Aaron when she was sixteen, and is proud of never having been on welfare. Because she earns more than I do by working at the casino, I am a little surprised that she considered welfare, but then I have apparently more pride than she and the other poor Joes in my town. Aaron is often left home alone (he is still a year too young for this to be legal) but he stays in the smoke-filled apartment, watching TV or playing X-Box. He used to invite Rabbit Junior over, but stopped after RJ kept offering to have him come over here to play outside or with legos.

When I walk down towards the river, two blocks east from my house, it gets worse. Here there are vacant lots so overgrown with poison ivy that you can’t actually walk on the sidewalk (isn’t someone responsible for that, like I have to shovel my sidewalk every time it snows?) and multi-family buildings that look like they are growing trash as a cash crop. How can people live like this? Rubbish pours out of the torn screens that don’t quite fit in the window sashes. Broken bottles and cigarette butts litter the walkways. Cars sit up on cement blocks with refuse coming out of their windows. Who told these people that being poor means you get to be dirty, and you get to inflict it on everyone else. Where are the slumlords for these buildings?

It is often said that poor is a state of mind, and to be sure, as trite a statement as that is, there is some truth to it. Because I often feel like my life is getting away from me, I like my house to be clean (though it will always be cluttered), my yard to be tidy, my gardens pretty. I can’t afford to get my porch fixed, and I don’t have the time to do it myself right now, but I try to make the rest of my environment as inviting as possible, not just for me and my children, but for anyone who is exposed to it. But on Mechanic Street, it is not just a question of being exposed, we are imposed upon.

Ironically, there is a new streetscape project for the first block of Mechanic Street. It ends just before what seem to be crack houses. Residents stand in their underwear, knee deep in garbage watching the earth moving equipment. It would probably require similar apparatus to clean their small area. The worst of the properties are for sale, and I entertain a small fantasy about buying them, fixing them up (right, since I haven’t fixed my porch) and teaching the occupants about hygiene, respect, and how poor doesn’t have to mean deprived or pitiable.

Lookin' for love . . . or whatever

So I did a search on Amazon.com/books for “internet dating” and got back 39,331 results. One of the features I’ve always liked about Amazon is the ability to “search inside” even though it’s a misnomer since you can only browse the covers, table of contents, and one page of text provided by the publisher. Still, this is sometimes enough to glean appropriate information (although I do favour browsing in my local indy bookstore before purchase). I didn’t bother going through all of the pages of hits, you won’t be surprised, but I wonder if anyone really reads them. Actually, I wonder if a man would ever read them. A man looking for a woman, that is.

I knew there are more and more internet dating sites, not because I belong (2 was enough, thank you) but because I have a hotmail account I use for e-mail at work, and they are always presented as banner ads along the side and top of my page every time I refresh my in-box, along with better mortgage rates, weight loss plans, and cell phone companies (all related, don’t you think?). So which to join? My initial findings suggested that you can find lots of hip, adorable, bright people in any urban center, and none in SE Connecticut. It doesn’t matter which dating site you join. But I already knew that. Regionally, we seem to have an unusually high proportion of misspellings and typos.

It also doesn’t matter which site you join, because you will find many of the same people on each of them (which gets expensive, btw). I investigated the major ones: Match, eHarmony, True, Nerve, Lavalife, and Yahoo personals (and J-date for a little ethnic flava). Each one tries to come up with their own thang. Nerve is a little hipper. Lavalife lets you search for relationships OR just sex (with pretty detailed description checkboxes (fewer profile pics for the folks just looking for sex)). Then I found this link: http://internetdating.net/ and got a little overwhelmed. Between personals posting sites, same-sex sites, swinging sites, just looking for sex but not dates sites you’d think the market would be flooded, and everybody would have found their match. Wouldn’t you? Well, wouldn’t you?

Interpreting something means helping people understand

I started to pontificate a bit on bad interpretation in my description of Plimoth Plantation, but decided it needed a separate post, because though my recent experience was there, WHAT I experienced was not specific to that location.

Museums are important. If you don’t agree with that basic tenet, don’t bother reading on. When I am King of the World, instead of just the rabbits, which I plan to be someday, all museums will be open free on the first weekend of every month, and everyone in the world (dispensations made for those hospitalized or on the space shuttle) will go to A museum once a month and e-mail me one thing that they learned. I realize it’s a lot of e-mail, but I’m a fast reader.

As stated in the last post, I travel to museums under three guises: museum professional, single mother of Rabbit Junior and Bunny Regina, and chaperone for whole grade of whichever of the f1 generation is requiring. Just like, having been a waitress, I prefer to be a good customer than an annoying one when dining out, I prefer to be the sort of museum visitor that interpreters want to interact with when I go to a museum.

As a museum professional, I inevitably get good service (with the notable exception being the USS Constellation where the staff had enormous chips on their shoulders). Interpreters like to talk (that’s why we do it), and they like to share how much they know (that’s why we do it), and good ones want to learn stuff from other interpreters, so they can be better. And that’s fun.

As Rabbit Family, we get okay service. If I manage to slip into a conversation that I work with so-and-so who used to work at your museum, it usually opens doors, but it’s unfortunate to have to do that. Usually complimenting the interpreter on the museum warms them up, but I shouldn’t have to do that either. Sometimes the small rabbits are so interested and ask such good questions that THAT warms them up. Often though, they are treated as small potential criminals who would smear jelly on a painting, or make off with a large dugout canoe if only no one was looking. Usually I tell the docent that it’s okay, my peeps are museum nerds, like their mom, but it doesn’t always work. Once I had a guard at the Portland (ME) Museum of Art follow us around through a whole exhibit (which was FABULOUS, btw, American Masters and their European Influences, with a tremendous set of paintings and really good labels) because he was enjoying MY interpretation of the exhibit to my children so much, and he had learned so much, would I mind if he used some of the information I had bestowed. At which point, two small rabbits looked at their mother and said, “Mom, you are SUCH a nerd.” A fine way to talk to a king.

As members of a school group, by and large, we get terrible service. Some of it is that it is hard to deal with the sheer volume of students to be sure, but some of it is that many interpreters don’t like children. More bias is reflected in the fall, which at New England museums is referred to as “leaf peeper season” for the countless bus tours of previous generation visitors that come to the museum for 45 minutes before going on to their next whirlwind destination. I hate school group season. I hate leaf peeper season. This is what I hear my colleagues at museums far and wide say.

So I say to them, why the hell are you a museum interpreter?! Clearly you aren’t doing it for the great pay. If you don’t like children and can’t speak to them without being rude and condescending, find another line of work. If you can’t talk to the older generation without being insulting and patronizing, hit the road, Jack. And what’s to hate, really? If you take the time to interact with them as individuals, and engage them through something that will appeal to someone of their background, they have a better time and learn something. And guess what, so do you.

There are two things you need in order to be a successful museum interpreter (three, actually, if you count an outside source of revenue): a passion for the knowledge base you must grasp in order to convey factually correct information; a love of people. Sometimes you get people who don’t fit either criterion, sometime just one. But you need both. So if by chance, some museum worker stumbles upon this treatise, think hard about whether you can do both, and if you WANT to do both. Because I don’t want to go to any more museums with my kids (and we, the Rabbit Family, and the few others like us are the lifeblood of museum admissions) where we are treated poorly by the staff. It doesn’t cost any more to be nice, and there’s no better feeling in the business to end a day tired but smiling because you had such fantastic interactions with visitors all day long.

I Went There: Plimoth Plantation

Plimoth Plantation, located in Plymouth, MA, is one of those museums everyone says, “oh yeah, I remember going there as a child.” In fact, it hasn’t changed much since you were a child, depending on when you were there, but this was my third visit in 4 years, and each experience was quite different. The museum is divided into four sections, although in their website, they consider a one-room changing exhibit, dining areas, and the nye barn, a three stall structure that held only three goats to also be distinct and noteworthy areas.

The first time I went to the museum was on a professional development trip with other interpreters from my museum. It was during the winter, and the museum opened just for us. Our group of fifteen individuals received wonderful attention, and there was much sharing of ideas about ships, roleplaying, research, and interpretation of history. Because this was a totally artificial experience, I am going to focus on the museum from my other two perspectives, a single mother with two children, and a middle school chaperone.

The recreation of the Mayflower is located in downtown Plymouth, right near the rock. This floating exhibit is staffed with costumed roleplayers and present-day interpreters. The boat itself is well presented – there are three decks for exploring, and visitors are allowed into most places. On our most recent visit as a fifth grade class, we saw fewer interpreters than we saw over the summer as a family, although we had not met costumed roleplayers on our previous visit to the Mayflower, and there were a man and a woman sitting on one of the hatch covers saying things like, “Oh I do wonder when the sailors will be back on board so we can leave.” It seemed quite anomalous to have them there; they were totally out of context with the rest of the Mayflower experience. The young woman also had many unflattering things to say about some of the children in our group, which seemed inappropriate. One does not go to a museum to be insulted or for behaviour modification. Of the three non-costumed interpreters, one was quite knowledgeable. Each of the other two got facts wrong (that I KNEW about), which is as disturbing to hear in another museum as it is in my own. You can’t beat the vessel as a cool place to visit, and the fact that it is as exact a recreation as possible really makes you think about the life, the number of people packed in such a tiny space, and how ship design evolved – it really is a narrow, little thing, and seems like even the most stoic of sailors would be hanging over the rail on a vessel like that. I would have liked the interpreters to guide some of the more distracted (but mostly very good) children and chaperones toward thinking about some of those things.

At the actual museum site, you have the 1627 Pilgrim Village which is staffed entirely with costumed roleplayers, who seem to be historians and actors in equal numbers. Their research is in-depth, presentation appears historically accurate, and are really the heart of this section of the museum, because there is a certain sameness to the dwellings. Depending on the time of day, you will find more or fewer of these interpreters. When we visited last summer, there were at least a dozen roleplayers, and my children and I sat and watched the blacksmith at work for quite a long time. With our school group, we were unable to do this. The blacksmith was closed. In fact, we only saw four interpreters. One was much more interested in telling his story, and don’t try to ask any questions. Another ONLY answered questions, and didn’t provide any information on her own. Mostly, she seemed annoyed that we were in her way. The other two were inaccessible because of crowds. I was really disappointed, because our last experience with this group had been pretty good.

In contrast, Hobbamock’s Homesite, a recreation of a Wampanoag village, was full of interpreters who were really good – interested in sharing their knowledge – and here it really is sharing, because they are not taking on the character of a 17th century person, they are 20th century tribe members (where the museum found so many Wampanoag who are willing to work at the lousy wage museum interpreters make is a bit of a quandary). They are dressed in period ethnic clothing, but talk to you from current experience. Now on our last visit, we had found this section of the museum to be the disappointing one. Many of the interpreters seemed somewhat surly. But this time, we had a much better experience here.

The craft center is a place where you have 20th century craftsmen (weavers, carvers, broom makers, potters) working in an open workshop area where they can do their job and interact with visitors at the same time. Each time I have been there, there has only been one craftsman at work, and a different one each time. They are knowledgeable and reasonably friendly, and you can stand and watch them work for as long as you like without them getting annoyed at your questions.

In all, it is a pleasant day at Plimouth. There is a nice shady nature walk, a scenic atmosphere, and sometimes, the feeling that you have stepped back in time. I would recommend going early or late in the day when it is apt to be a little less crowded, and you won’t be losing interpreters on lunch breaks, which may have been how we saw so few roleplayers in the village. If you have the time, it is absolutely worth doing the Mayflower II, which I would allot about 45 minutes for and two to three hours at the Plantation. It is not the sort of museum where there are so many artifacts that you could spend hours and hours looking, but you could get involved for some time talking with a roleplayer, if you happen upon a good one. Combination tickets for the Mayflower II and Plimoth Plantation are good for two consecutive days and are $24 for adults and $14 for children, making it more expensive than it’s other local living history cousins, Mystic Seaport and Old Sturbridge Village.

My only other comment is again about the roleplayers. Indeed they are portraying extremely pious, hardworking residents of a town that was founded on unusual principles. And yet, theoretically, as they are a group that escaped persecution, ultra-Christian, who nearly to a residence open their homes to boarders to whom they are not related you'd think they might be a little friendlier. Historic, first-person interpretation is always a challenge. There are competing demands of dealing with a 21st century audience in a different setting, like hooking up the wayback machine. But even if you want to PRETEND you are using the wayback machine to your museum visitors, you aren't. There is no such thing. Therefore, it doesn't make sense to have pilgrims who are rude or abrupt because we decided as modern people looking at their writings and artifacts that's how Puritans were. Any historian worth his or her salt knows that you can only learn so much from primary sources. Just because I write like I speak doesn't mean that everyone on Blogger does, and to make that assumption would be ridiculous. Any museum administrator worth their salt knows that by having the staff be discourteous in the name of “historical accuracy” they are going to give visitors an experience that is most likely contrary to their mission.

Bored Games

Dating strategy, successful or unsuccessful, adds a whole new element to the internet thing. Without realizing I’ve been doing it, over the last 8 months of internet dating, I have cobbled together a set of rules, adding some with each new foray. Sometimes, I don’t follow my own rules though, the way sometimes a batter will ignore the manager’s signal to drop a bunt along the third base line to advance the runner and instead hits a little bloop single into shallow center field where the CF and the SS can’t get to it because they were looking for the bunt (and then the batter has to give a little so there smirk back towards the dugout). This baseball analogy is lame because I made the rules, so I only have myself to smirk at. And I can’t tell if this latest game plan will result in an easy out, or an RBI. But it’s more fun than Scrabble. And Scrabble is pretty fun.

Oh, and p.s. it's not REALLY a game to me. I'm too competitive.

That Elusive Spark

Gentlemen, before you go out on that first date, cut your fingernails, cut your toenails.

Okay, I already said I approach internet dating the same way I do buying lottery tickets. But I try REALLY hard not to have a huge set of expectations for meeting someone for the first time. I am a huge advocate of meeting right away before you’ve exchanged dozens of witty e-mails, talked on the phone at length because there are things that you need to know about a person right away that are deal breakers, that are not covered in the miscellaneous checkboxes provided by Match.com.

For instance, my eyebrows are clearly my best feature. Two distinct, nicely shaped eyebrows that never have and never will be plucked. Not offered as a choice. Instead, I’d have to check “a sweet spot not on the list” which implies something dirty. Plus, I don’t think of eyebrows as a “sweet spot”. There they are, right on the front of your face, helping to keep things from falling in your eyes.

In case you’ve never visited Match.com, I’m providing their list of turn-ons/offs:
Body piercings
Boldness/Assertiveness
Brainiacs
Candlelight
Dancing
Erotica
Flirting
Long hair
Money
Public displays of affection
Power
Sarcasm
Skinny Dipping
Tattoos
Thrills
Thunderstorms

Who made this list? I’m beginning to think I should start my own internet dating service with checkboxes for things like “no tighty whities”, “no dirty feet”, “willing to accept bad teeth in exchange for nice hands”. How can candlelight be either a turn on or off. It’s just a thing. Thunderstorms are exciting yes, but they make me want to hug my kids, not get lucky. And how often does skinny dipping actually come up? I mean are the legions of Match.com customers who like “long walks on the beach” tearing off their clothes to go jump in the water? And who would be dumb enough to admit that money is a turn-on? Good grief.

Last night I met a boy I had been corresponding with, for coffee. He seemed great on e-mail and on the phone. We spent two hours on the phone one night, and afterwards, I sort of felt like I had a crush on him, which was stupid since we hadn’t met. So I DID have some expectations going into it. I thought he would be the same funny interesting guy I’d talked to on the phone, who looked mostly like his pictures.

When I got to the Coffee Exchange in Providence, and he stood up and said hello, I thought, this is NOT the man I’m supposed to be meeting. I could get past the zit on the end of his nose. Who doesn’t get a zit or two when they are going on a blind date? But the fingernails, the TOEnails, the dirty feet, the effeminate hands, and the bad teeth were immediate signs that there would be no spark. Then the two hour description of his dissertation really cemented the fact that we would not be going on a second date.

In some respects, I was kind of relieved. Just like it’s a relief when they post the Powerball numbers, and I don’t even have one that matches. I have a job where I’m supposed to be making money. I have another ongoing e-mail flirtation. And it does feel a bit fickle to be giving e-mail to two men.

And then there was one. Keep our fingers crossed for Saturday night.

Bathroom Etiquette

I know there are a lot of things written on bathroom etiquette, so why do we need another. The fact is, we don’t NEED any of them, but it’s rewarding to get these things off one’s chest. I work in a two-floor business with 4 other people, all of them male. The four males work upstairs in the officey area, and I work in the basement in a tiny not quite cubicle in the warehouse area.

There are bathrooms on both floors. The upstairs one is filled with hair and skin care products that the boys I work with use, because sometimes their girlfriends happen to drop by. The downstairs one is filled with auto detailing products, the likes of which I’ve never seen outside of AutoZone, because the boy who details all of their cars often drops by. The subject of their vehicles actually warrants a whole other posting. I guess maybe it’s because this is the more manly bathroom that they all feel the need to come down here when they have to take a dump, instead of doing it in the perfectly serviceable and roomier bathroom upstairs. Which means my daylight-free little basement smells like a sewer about 1/3 of each day. It’s an interesting ambience -- conducive to a variety of different performance levels on my part.

I thought they might stop after the day one of them made the toilet overflow all over the basement, but they didn't.

Maybe I’ll put a box of Tampons in there.

The Bottom of the Cask is Dark

This afternoon, I was listening to one of my three bosses be rude and condescending to the only other low level employee besides me. The boss had done something sort of dumb, and the college kid working there had pointed this out, quite tactfully, I thought. But rather than admit he was wrong, the boss lit into the poor young man, which is generally his manner of communication. And I thought to myself, why is this okay?

As already indicated, sometimes I work in a museum. Other times I work in what we fondly call the “Real World”. I refer to the museum where I work as the “Island of Misfit Toys” because of the sorts of people who work there, but in my dual job mode, I’ve had to take a good look at the moniker I’ve bestowed. It seems like all museum interpretation departments have some kind of pet name for the dysfunctional environment where they work. We view our situation from the bottom of the barrel (or cask, as in this case we know from our museum work that a “barrel” is a unit of measurement, and the term “cask” refers to the generic shape) where we see the rest of our bottom-dwellers: pickles, salt pork, dustings of flour, or the sawdust packed around the bits of fine china. In fact, all of the pickles are more passionate, usually better educated, and obviously less well paid than the brine, garlic cloves, and peppercorns that float to the top, or in this analogy, the administration. And certainly that indefinable scunge that hovers above the pickles and below the peppercorns that we call middle management is something to take a good look at. Fortunately, this has already been done The Worst and Best Boss Ever so I will limit my diatribe. But only a little.

With only a few notable exceptions like the New Bedford Whaling Museum where independent creative thought is not only encouraged but expected, management in museum environments is intimidated by the underlings that outthink and outperform its members. This has a couple of outcomes. The first is that it supports a culture of bullies. Ironically, if you poll the museum underling staff, you will probably find that most of the members were, in fact, bullied in their youth, providing an enabling society. It can become a very volatile situation. Because a handful of us who were bullied as children are unwilling to take it anymore, and will call people on their actions. That is why some of us only work part time in the museum field now.

The other and related outcome is that you have a culture of managers (and some fickle underlings) who say things like, “Well, these people HAVE to work here, because they couldn’t survive in the real world.” There it is: The Real World. And with this rational, they are able to justify the mistreatment of their staff. I have aided them by giving them the name Misfits, though tongue in cheek. And I feel badly.

But because I have a job off island in the Real World, I can say that the Real Worlders couldn’t possibly survive in the museum world, because, by and large, they lack the passion and the knowledge that allow museum interpreters to interact everyday with the public in a usually thoughtful manner and do really challenging jobs, all the while not being paid a living wage. The other fact of the real world is that it is set up EXACTLY the same way as the museum world. Middle management has been promoted beyond their level of competence, and knowing this, bully their staff so that they can rationalize their position. Administration is so aloof that they are content to allow this to happen, as long as they don’t have to get their hands dirty. High staff turnover rates are shrugged off with the assurance that the bottom tier of staff is totally replaceable.

But at our museum, the tall ships are sinking, the engines don’t run properly, the once award-winning web site has been farmed out to an outside contractor and is often broken, the rigging is suspect because we have lost and not been able to replace our head shipwright, the head rigger, the leading web coordinator, the general authority on marine engines. Ironically, all of these people are making a living in the Real World. So I suspect it is probably projection on the part of management who are the ones who wouldn’t make it off island.

And in my cask in the Real World, there are only two of us little pickles left. The scunge and the pickling spices are taking up the rest of the space.

Thoughts on Women

A friend and colleague of mine were discussing some of the women we know, not necessarily in a catty manner, but in a philosophical manner. Mostly we were chatting about perceived personae versus real, and men’s reactions to women.

About a year ago, a woman came to visit her family in New England and came by the museum where I sometimes work. She spent the day following around my demonstration partner and me, and was just the sort of visitor you love to have: bright, curious, engaging. And it didn’t hurt for my partner (who is sort of a pig) and me (who just appreciates such things) that she was very attractive.

Two weeks later, she had left a corporate job and husband in France, and was training to do what I did. She had said to herself, I want a life like that woman, meaning me (which had something to do with my image-type -- see below). Later she found out how complicated my life was, and rethought that a little, but we became friends. And everyone loved her. She really was lovely to look at, and had a coy way of looking at you that made your heart go pitter pat, no matter what gender you were. Even when she was concentrating on some task, she still had those fabulous bedroom eyes. But the thing that made her most attractive was her vulnerability.

It wasn’t just men who wanted to take care of her and be adored by her. It was people like myself with an overactive maternal instinct as well. And she’s not alone. She’s just one example of a whole host of women who exude vulnerability, and make everyone want to rush to take care of them. Note: this only works for women if they are attractive, and there is some indefinable child-like quality. When she left us and her husband, she seemed hurt and annoyed that we cared so much. She made a clean break, and has been quite absent since then, and to her credit, has not tried to manipulate us. There are other women I know who trade heavily on their image and are quite calculating, despite the fact that they are actually competent, fairly secure women.

My friend Mary K, with whom I was discussing this in the first place, is an interesting case all on her own. She definitely is competent, and definitely exudes some air of vulnerability, and men always want to take care of her at first. But they quickly realize the level of her competence, and the relationships change to a bunch of boys currying favour so that she will, in fact, take care of them. And she does. The boys on her A-list are helped into college or graduate school, given plum jobs through her influence, and a host of other benefits she can bestow. Many of them, however are ungrateful. In their male arrogance, they are ashamed of how they have used her, and that someone who really does seem vulnerable could actually have been the master of their destinies, when they have been unable to take on that role for themselves. So they are rude or belittle her.

The boys on her B-list are just boys, and the women in her life who do not get lettered except for the rare few tend to be the type of women who somehow just seem competent. Sometimes, they are called bitchy because of it. I fall into this class myself, so I know how extra hard a girl has to work to break the bitchy stereotype, and I still have it to some degree, because I am so brutally honest. The irony, of course, is that many of us bitchy competents are just as insecure and needy as the ones that give off the air of helplessness. I would venture to say that many of us achieve the level of competence we have to overcompensate for our insecurities, and to try to stave off the disappointment we would experience when someone doesn’t want to take care of us by simply seeming to not need care. It’s like assuming the worst so that you aren’t upset when the worst actually happens. But of course, you’re still upset, and of course, we still all want someone to put their arms around us and say, “poor baby”. But we only get it from other women in the same boat as us, rather than being adored by the masses, which is what many of us secretly wish for. I certainly want EVERYONE to like me, and this holds true even if I don’t like the other person. Silly, isn’t it?

The men all say, I can’t believe you’re insecure, you seem so confident. And because they are men, if they believe it, it must be true. Sigh.

Winning the lottery

I buy a lottery ticket about once every other year, and not more often than that because it is a silly waste of money, and because I REALLY believe I will win. That's dumb. DUM, dumb, and even knowing that, I still do it. Ironically, even though I really believe I will win, I rarely actually check the numbers, because there's no chance that I have. So I may have been one of those people with the winning ticket who never cashed it in. When I do check, and I haven't won, it's a crushing blow. Yes, really.

So you would think I shouldn't internet date for the same reasons. This will be the one -- he's got a clever screen name. Oooh, this will be the one, he's got a graduate degree AND he's Jewish. THIS one has excellent spelling and grammar. But they aren't ever the one.

The successful couples who smile at you from out of the Match.com web pages with their wonderful stories of romance (I knew the first time we met . . .) are as bad as the women's magazines that promised me the secret of muliple orgasms in my 20s. They didn't mention that rare is the woman in her 20s whose body will do that, and I would have to wait till I was nearly 40 to experience that page-turning excitement. Similarly, the Match people don't give you any notion of how many desparate 40-something men you will have to have coffee with who are looking to fall in love and get remarried TODAY. NOW. They don't mention the stalker from Rhode Island who shows up at your unlisted address (creepy!) because he thought you "had something" after spending two hours together.

WHY do men put their height and weight in the first two sentences of their profile? And then their job third. Okay, there are other check boxes for those things, don't waste valuable letters of freeform writing with that garbage. Why do they type in all caps? It seems like they are yelling at you. Why can't they capitalize their "i"s? It's not cute, it's lazy. Why don't they proofread? You never get a second chance to make a first impression. Why don't they know that "a lot" is two words? Why are they looking for a "secure lady with no baggage"? Show me a secure lady, I will show you a crossdresser. And baggage? No one over thirty doesn't have baggage. I myself have rented a storage locker in a neighboring town. I love to go in and smell the musty scent of failed marriage, unfinished graduate degrees, poor career choices. Why are there men over 40 who have never been married?

These questions have raised the bar awfully high in my quest for someone who should not be "the one" (found him before with tragic consequences) but "a one" or "an anywhere from one to ten". Go on, I'm thinking of a number.

A Dog's Life

Some people don't have children, they have dogs instead. It's important to recognize that they are dogs, and NOT children. So you can, for instance, leave them at home alone before they are twelve years old, without the fear of the police coming and giving them to your ex-husband.

Some people don't leave them at home though. They bring them. EVERYWHERE. And then, they leave them in the car, because, clearly sitting in a car wondering how to turn the radio on without opposable thumbs is more entertaining for said pet than staying at home with a bed and toys and dust bunnies.

So if you are me (and you are not, because I am, and they cannot clone me yet (thankfully)) you have guilt about the dog staying in the car, because he's lonely, and you're ethnically predisposed to feel guilty anyway. The dog comes in the house. Now, if I were smarter, I would realize that people who sometimes have jam in their hair and have perennially dirty feet, might also have a dog with fleas. But I wasn't smarter. I was just little uncloned me.

Now, just like losing the ten pounds you gained in a month takes years to lose (with notable exceptions, more later), or having your life go down the toilet takes four months, but getting it out takes years (and then it always has wrinkles), it takes only minutes for a flea infestation to occur, and much hard work and to get them out.

So, even if your feet are clean, if you are invited to a dinner party, leave the dog at home.

A Beginning

So, I've started a blog because we're considering a blog as a marketing technique at work, I enjoy reading other people's blogs (what a great way to get sucked into surfing so you NEVER have to do any work), and it's another venue in which to feel insecure (what if no one reads it?) because you can never have enough of those.

I feel I also need the pressure of an added thing to do each day, like walking the dogs, making sure the braindead amongst my children actually take everything to school that they need so I don't get a panicked call at work (Mom, I need my trombone! Like anyone actually NEEDS a trombone!), and checking the status of my life as an internet dater.

Actually, I've been using internet dating as my own sort of personal blog forum, and I find it is actually much safer and healthier (not to mention more organized, for you OCDs out there) to consolidate my whimsical musings in a place like this rather than in a series of e-mails to potentially axe-murdering stalkers with my e-mail address.

So here are some topics that I might actually cover:
Travelling and eating out with children (not as much of a snooze as you might think)
The sociology of internet dating
Museums and other cultural institutions (although this is already being covered nicely in Mu*zine, so I'll not dwell
Politics
Personal Hygiene Issues
Baseball
And an unlimited number of other things that might be on my mind at any given time

For now, I will commend Blogger on the ease of blog setup, and say that I chose "tic tac" as my template, because my daughter often tells me I need one (even though she's the one who wakes up with unbearably bad breath in the morning).