Tag Archives: Travel

Tripping in Richmond

20 Monday Aug 2018

Posted by in Clothing, Events, History, Museums

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Visiting the Stately Home: an early touristic diversion

Friday night, Drunk Tailor and I waited until the worst of rush hour in NOVA was over and headed south to Richmond, surprised not to be engulfed in a terrific thunderstorm of the kind we are becoming accustomed to driving in. We had planned a weekend trip to see the Napoleon: Power and Splendor exhibition at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. It’s a traveling exhibit, but this is the first time I’ve been close enough to see it, and we had the added benefit of being able to attend in costume with the Regency Society of Virginia. (Reader: I required a new outfit.)

The idea of visiting a museum in costume is incredibly appealing, and all the more so when you can visit galleries of objects from the time period your costume replicates. Add to that the layer of traveling on the weekend in the clothes from the time when tourism first became a “thing” (at least among the monied classes), and you have a recipe for an excellent adventure.

(Somehow, while often at events together, Drunk Tailor and I are rarely seen “together,” so images like this are nice to have.)

If you are going to play the tourist, especially if you are visiting the “spoils” of the former emperor, you have to dress appropriately. American tourists today may travel in camo crocs and backwards baseball caps, but people in the past dressed for touring and it seemed appropriate to dress for this trip.

Admiring the panorama. (Cropped only to enhance periodicity)

This trip, with the fun of visiting in period clothes, reminds me of the books still in storage, and the books I have yet to read — one on early country house tourism— that document the changes in how people spent their time and consumed goods, and the reasonably concurrent rise of both the museum and the department store.

Raptures about the mounting, I think, but we might as well we shopping.

Peale and Zola have more in common than you might think, or at least Mr. Peale and Mr. Selfridge. These compendia of material goods are similarly structured — both organized around themes or types, whether ladies’ lingerie or Oceanic art– and have similar aims of edification and [cultural] consumption.

When your hat sees its cousin in a case….

All in all, an excellent trip, with much to see and talk about. After finishing our tour of the Napoleon exhibit, we lunched (another experience similar to the department store) and toured more of the museum, and had a day well spent.

Of Chamber Pots and Train Seats

26 Tuesday Apr 2016

Posted by in Events, History, Living History, personal

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Why yes: I was able to carry all my loot.

The Northeast Regional: Bane and delight of my existence, for while the night train at least allows you to sleep through the agony of an eight hour trip, and although the quiet car allows some solid time to for reading and writing, one’s seat mate can be unpredictable.

I am not a good seatmate. My legs are long, and I have a marked tendency to cry through several station stops (or states) when leaving someone I love. But the foolproof way to maintain seat independence is writing: reading over someone’s shoulder is rude enough that I feel little guilt in writing all the things I write about. On train 86, it was chamber pots.

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How fantastic will that look with blue?

Part of my southward trip was to the Market Fair at Fort Fred, where I was pleased to visit old and make new acquaintances in addition to shopping. Handkerchiefs: can you ever have enough? I think not, and was delighted to find one pretty much guaranteed to clash with any blue gown.

You can never have too much to read.

You can never have too much to read.

Thread is always useful, and I find it easier to purchase in the flesh, when I can get a better sense of gauge and color. I’d had a request for a period-appropriate notebook and a replacement pocket knife, and was delighted indeed to find one (I bought two) that will hurt less to lose.

But, reader, best of all was the pottery. I possess enough self restraint to know I cannot venture near the mocha ware, for I might take leave of all common sense and purchase more than I can carry on the train, fit in my already full cupboard, or reasonably afford. Still, there was a custom punch bowl to see, kindly ordered for me some months ago, and, by the same potter’s hand? A chamber pot.

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Because I can, that’s why.

Not for me the lighthouse coffee pot (though of course I covet one). No, sir: the blue floral decorated chamber pot caught my eye, and have it I must. So I do.

I realize I have a bit of an obsession, and that one might consider this an unholy interest, but the utility of the device is not lost upon me, having had occasion to use one. Whilst staying in a 1787 house that remains unplumbed, I woke one Sunday at 2:00AM to pouring rain outside, and the urgent call of nature inside. Privies don’t faze me, but I lacked adequate rain protection and a fireproof light source. Happily, I had discovered a chamber pot in the house when I poked around it, and was able to find it by candlelight.

Two hip replacements make some activities more challenging than others, hence my tip: put it on a chair. Your floor will thank you.

Getting Cultured

25 Saturday Apr 2015

Posted by in Art Rant, Museums, personal

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Mark di Suvero at Storm King

Mark di Suvero at Storm King

Cats don’t like travel. You might, therefore, expect that Kitty Calash would prefer to stay home, but I’ve had a few travel adventures, and the hardest part is usually finding decent and strong coffee early in the morning, though sometimes dinner is a challenge: like my cats, I like my own bowl.

Happily, we’ll be cooking our meals for real tomorrow, boiling roots and meat and slabbing cheese on bread. Thank goodness for the 10th Massachusetts’s own John Buss and his love of cheese, but why did I forget the Massachusetts man who carried a pound of chocolate in his militia knapsack? We could have had drinking chocolate!

We’ll be at the New Windsor Cantonment tomorrow, but today, the last blustery snow-squally day of April School Vacation, we spent at Storm King.* The Young Mr enjoyed our visit last year, so we went back again.

 

Fun with framing

Fun with framing

This year, we did another quarter or so of the park, mostly di Suveros but also Magdalena Abakanowicz and Andy Goldsworthy. It was an interesting exercise in scale, and specificity. I used to joke that the worst part about making sculpture was that once it was done, you’d have to dust it forever, but Storm King presents another issue: the sculpture that must be weeded.

In St. Louis, we experienced Mark di Suvero pieces at Laumeier Sculpture Park , but not on this scale. They’re more interesting together; as with so many things, mass makes a difference—though with di Suvero, acres of ‘gallery’ are required for mass.

Goldsworthy at Storm King

Goldsworthy at Storm King

Goldsworthy has long been a favorite, the site-specific and temporal nature of the work appealing and similar to the kind of immersive, living history performance I prefer. Here, the wall wraps the trees and runs through the lake like a low, grey and solid version of Running Fence .

It’s a funny thing, walking the acres of art, and thinking about the kind of parkland gentlemen used to maintain—Pemberley and Stately Homes—and how yesterday’s folly is today’s site-specific sculpture.

Mozart's Birthday: another di Suvero, with snow. Snow!

Mozart’s Birthday: another di Suvero, with snow. Snow!

*Not for nothin’ is it called Storm King, as they would say in No’t Providence.

The Report: Sorry, No Pictures.

03 Monday Jun 2013

Posted by in Events

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We came, we saw, we sewed. Next year, if we go, I would teach (lead?) one class only. It was just too busy to enjoy other classes and prep for my own, so it’s a rational decision.

 It was fun to see the same people again, to meet friends made a year ago. And it was really fun to see costumes and costumers. It’s a different world. And while I’m not saying that re-enactors don’t have fun, or a sense of humor, one finds that the sense of humor is a little…different…and that sometimes, a weekend of all women is a fine thing to have. In two weeks, I will be part of a weekend of mostly men, and I will look back at the air-conditioned hotel nights and hot showers with real longing. (Having just realized that I am about to spend two hot sweaty nights camping and then drive home to New England from New Jersey with a load of stinking kit in the car, I am seriously questioning my sanity. But, onward, to Happy Father’s Day in the miasma of New Jersey.)

So. The conference was smaller this year, but still busy. We skipped the crepes (prep!) and the tea, as my friend cannot eat wheat, and that was OK. I made significant progress on some required overalls, and that was amazing. (PDF files of the classes I taught are on the Dress U Handouts page above.)

On Saturday, my mother took us to dinner at a Thai restaurant in Haverford, which was delicious, and such good company! Ever evangelistic about her hobby, my mother gave us both plants to take home.

Before dinner, we had tried to go swimming in the hotel’s silly pool (it is a curious shape). The pool was nearly at its capacity by volume of guest with an exuberant extended family playing hotel pool volleyball with three inflatable beach balls. After my friend was hit on the head the third time and glared at, we decided to leave.

Glaring and staring continued on Sunday when the Golf Guys arrived. We rode the elevator down with a possible father-and-son duo after dropping off the iPad and projector so we could get some dinner before we donned tiaras. Golf Guy the Younger stared hard: that was the filthiest look I’ve gotten in a long time, and I have a sarcastic teenager at home. He seemed offended by my green silk bonnet (I know, I used almost slub-less dupioni and not taffeta for my Anne Carrowle bonnet) and the notion that I was hoping to get it rained on. Golf Guy the Younger stormed out of the elevator ahead of us, while Golf Guy the Elder held the door, smiled, and said, “After you.” He was the original owner of the thick white leather belt that held up his mint condition mint-blue polyester trousers, possibly purchased with the leather belt. The meatiness of the leather belt reminded me of the thickness of the bayonet belts worn by the Second Helping Regiment, belts which are probably of an age with Golf Guy the Elder’s belt.

Golf Guy the Younger found costumed women so horrifying that he would not even take the door we held for him, though GGtheE attempted to speed up to catch the door. At the Outback Steakhouse (ugh, but handy and with a gluten-free menu and cold beer), more staring happened. It was full of tables of Golf Guys, as weird as the day we drove home from Philly when there was an Eagles-Giants game at the Meadowlands and were surrounded on all sides by cars full of men. Not until we saw men with painted faces did I realize we were headed for a football game, and up on the skyway part of the NJTP, small sedans crammed with large men with blue faces were a sight to behold. We weren’t re-enactors then, but if we had been, I would have put on every uniform hat in our car.

So we had the usual conference mix of meeting people, learning things, and shocking the locals, interspersed with a trip to the Exton Mall for a power cord lost from the projector case by an errant colleague and a couple of tiaras. We were sparkly this year, but had to announce that we had stolen our mistress’s jewels, as the excuse for wearing paste with peasant clothes.

Next year, CSA is in Baltimore at the same time…time to look into train tickets. But now, packing and loading the car for a drive back in the rain. And just like last year, we’ll take 287 instead of 95. 

Adventures in Public Transit

22 Wednesday May 2013

Posted by in Museums

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The backdrop for Imran Qureshi’s piece

Occasionally, I get a slightly wild idea and actually act upon it. My son probably has the best sense of when this is about to happen, so I no longer tell him my wild ideas plans. Of course, if the MetroNorth train collision hadn’t happened just in front of my Amtrak train, I wouldn’t have had the extra eight-block walk and the two-and-a-half hour line wait for the bus…and then I wouldn’t have ended up leaving the MFA two hours earlier than I wanted to on Tuesday.

Qureshi

Credit: Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

It began with the trip to New York: a slightly whimsical, spur-of-the-moment trip to see Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity before it closed, and everything else I could manage, including lunch on the roof. (It is weird to see children, babies, sitting, sobbing, on Imran Qureshi’s bloody chrysanthemum painting. The work itself is beautiful, though a reviewer asked if it is out of place. If you have ever walked past the site of a murder or bar fight and seen the stained pavement, this piece might creep you out. And once upon a time in Providence, I saw the blood-stained pavement near the bus stop whilst taking my dog to a vet…)

So, trip: all good, hop on the 6:42 Acela and get into Penn at 9:42, up to the Met by 10. That leaves all day for exploring, until about 4:15, when I had to beat it for the M1 back to Penn. One unfortunate act of vandalism of a Beaux-Arts railroad station later, we’re chugging along on the 5:43 Regional back up to Providence. We’re not even to New Rochelle when the train stops…and remains stopped. By 7:11 I’d figured out that there would be no trains up, and had purchased a bus ticket online thanks to my iPad with a rapidly depleting charge. By 8:00, we were back at Penn and I was fast-walking up to 40th Street where I got in line, got the ticket printed, and then trotted downstairs to get into another line: the line of no movement.

Eventually, a bus appeared. And then another bus appeared. The first bus left for a town in Pennsylvania that sounded like “West Coastville” but was probably Coatesville. A third bus appeared: rumor spread that this was the bus from Providence.

“Where have you been?” we interrogated the disembarked. “What took so long?”
“Bumper to bumper traffic,” someone said. And the line of no movement groaned.

No one dared move out of line if they did not have a blood relative to hold their place. Scouts from family groups were sent out to discover which gate had a bus, and intrepid men with girlfriends to hold their place went forth to count the line. I was in the low 40s, thank you, with about 60 people stretching behind my spot. Agitation behind me rose as line-cutting appeared to happen. Scenes from Lord of the Flies came to mind as I heard a mild wheeze from a fellow-stander. Cell phones began to die.

A typical Green Chariot, in Kennedy Plaza.

But, at last, 75 minutes after the alleged 9:30 PM departure, we were able to board the bus. I found a seat in nearly the last row, but it was a seat. At 10:56, I called home to report that we did in fact have forward movement, and were now leaving the PABT…for a short tour of Harlem. Eventually, we were on the highway (I love the quaintness of the sign for New England) and by 3:15 AM I was home, 22 and a half hours after I’d gotten up to start my day.

Now, just because I wrote the story in this tone doesn’t mean I don’t think that the people injured in MetroNorth accident, and inconvenienced in their commute since Friday, have had a far worse time than I did—I do. I’m both stunned and pleased with how quickly train service has been restored, and I have real sympathy for the anxiety of people who take the train to work every day, thanks to my husband’s daily 100-mile-roundtrip on the MBTA. Which, in a fitting moment of transit ironyy, found him delayed last night behind a broken-down Amtrak train, finally headed south…