Christmas on glue

So, kind of like I finally had the birthday that my 21st should have been when I turned 25 and had 2 women make out with me at the same time while being serenaded by a blues singer in white vinyl shoes and a captain's hat, I'm having the kind of holiday season I would have liked when I was 17. I managed to avoid any sort of shopping or even thinking about Christmas until this weekend when I bought nearly all my presents online. After a fantastic, civilized round of Trivial Pursuit with some of the Baltimore blogosphere entirely free from Christmas decorations except for a Charlie Brown style pine branch, I ran for my life (from the suburbs, not the bloggers) back to the city. I went down to a holiday party featuring the first Christmas pageant I've ever watched in a basement. Ostensibly, it was based on "A Christmas Carol" featuring a cowboy Ghost of Christmas past, a talking bear ghost of Christmas present and a cross-dressing ghost of Christmas future. Best of all there was caroling in between scenes. Now good caroling is always about audience participation, but in this case it meant the basement turning into a giant mosh pit of which, appropriately, Scrooge and Tiny Tim (both women) were usually at the bottom, often on top of each other. I also found that "For Whom the Bell Tolls" by Metallica makes a surprisingly poignant holiday song.
Sunday, I ended up at the mall, but I only bought things for myself.
Monday, I went to the open practice for the Charm City Roller Girls to see my friend Emily skate. I felt like a parent watching their kids play soccer, only a lot of the "kids" had tattoos and the "parent" next to me had a nose ring. The follow-up party was at the Mojo Room. There was a food spread that as holiday buffets should, consisted almost entirely of cookies and dessert, and the only protein was the bacon on some bean salad and a couple small containers of bean dip. I wasn't the only one on a sugar high, becuase even though there were only about a dozen people left at the party, two roller girls kicked a skate-shaped pinata to death on the floor, showering glitter and chocolate eyeballs everywhere. Glitter is insidious, so I came to the executive board meeting at work today looking like I'd made out with Cyndi Lauper the night before.
The punk rock holiday won't be over until Friday when I go to the Trixie Little Holiday Spectacular at the Ottobar and see how Trixie Little saves Christmas, probably somehow by taking off all her clothes.
As I said to Emily last night, I think I'm putting the "Jesus H. Christ!" back into Christmas this year.

Baltimore, Now Sold in New Collectible Packaging

I went to the Baltimore Area Convention and Visitor's Association annual meeting this morning. I sometimes forget as I answer questions about how many stars were on the flag in 1837 or scraping gum off a 200 year old floor that I'm somehow demographically connected to all the hotel concierges and drivers of those floating duck truck tour buses in the visitor services business. We all deal with the legions of suburbanites, Shriners, high school marching bands, swimming pool sales conventioneers and Red Sox fans that strap on their fanny packs and leave behind their shopping malls to visit...... a shopping mall with dolphins and a sailing ship. Even though it was the basic ballroom meeting with round tables and lukewarm breakfast with a lot of speeches, there was an interesting re-branding process presentation (I can't wait to see what they come up with for a new slogan: "Baltimore: It's Infectious!"). They also had a motivational speaker. I have to admit I got a little excited, and then felt kind of embarrassed that I got taken in by the whole melodramatic presentation, kind of like the way I felt after watching "Driving Miss Daisy."
In the presentation about promoting Baltimore as a desitnation they made a point that really caught my attention. When they talked to ordinary non-Baltimoreans in focus groups, people said that they really had little interest in seeing the neighborhoods outside of downtown, that the quirkiness and vibrance of Baltimore's neighborhoods did little to make it stand out as a destination. Those were honest comments, not really surprising. However, the presenter followed by suggesting that this meant that promoting this part of Baltimore had little relevance to advertising Baltimore to the outside world, and that the focus should be on promoting downtown and the Inner Harbor. Now it can be easy to be cynical about the Inner Harbor alone. But my mental brakes screeched for another reason. Regardless of the difficulty of getting people there, shouldn't promoting visitorship in Baltimore's neighborhoods still be a primary or at least parallel concern for the promoters of the city? If only the pockets of the Hyatts, Marriots, Cheesecake Factories, Sunglass Huts and Aquariums are lined, how does that help the families who actually live here? How does promotion of Baltimore benefit the citizens of Baltimore if visitors aren't drawn to the small businesses the citizens themselves own? Isn't it going to be that much harder for local leaders to justify calls to improve the liveablity of their neighborhoods with infrastructure improvements if they're not part of an overarching plan for drawing outside people in? I don't think that the neighborhoods are not still part of city or even BACVA plans, but I think I heard the beginning of a dangerous new level being reached in the continuing fetishization of a certain inlet off the Patapsco River. In the meantime, I'm just starting to wrap my head around this and where I fit in the ant hill.

Swiss Army Curator

Recently it hit me how long I've been at the museum, and that it may be time to be saying adios. I've threatened this before, but now I'm finding myself eyeballing museum job descriptions for things completely out of my realm of expertise like "historic area wagon master." In fact I'm probably getting out of the museum business period.
I used to find it exciting , and a boon for my attention deficient brain, to be in a small place where I did a little of everything. I would swagger out to meet someone from a back room where I was building an exhibit all by myself. "Yes, I'm the curator. Can I help you?" brushing sawdust off my pants like Indiana Jones with a circular saw. However, the institution's been short more than a few bucks in the budget for over a year now, and we're down a lot of people. I'm not above screwing in lightbulbs and cleaning trash up, and I've had some good conversation ammunition with stories like singlehandedly catching a bird inside the historic house. Still, my job duty diversification is starting to get a little ridiculous. Recently, hanging out in the employee lounge with some tour guides, we made a list of the job roles I fill for a sign on my door: "Director of Collections and Programs, Historian, Librarian, Tour Guide, Exhibit Designer and Builder, Graphic Designer, Building Maintenance Manager, Preservation Coordinator, Chief of Security, Head Table and Chair Choreographer, Mouse and Bug Liaison, Lead Smell and Sound Inspector, Graffiti Removal Technician, Flag Trivia Consultant, Gardener, Goon."
Finally, this morning I was handed the pre-treated hardwood floorboards that just about broke this camel's back. I was told we were receiving two carefully wrapped, 5 by 5 foot pallets of donated flooring for our 2nd floor gallery, to be gently placed by forklift in our back room. Instead, the truck arrived at 8:30 a.m. with about 40, 8 foot long boxes filled with wood that had to be individually carried into the museum.
Delivery guy: You're the only guy here to move these in?
Me: Yes, right now I'm the lone male working here who hasn't had hernia surgery in the last 6 months.
Delivery guy: Don't you have any volunteers?
Me: Not that I can call right now. I thought these were supposed to be pallets you could move in with a forklift.
Delivery guy: Nope. Y'know, you're wearing a suit. You're going to carry stuff in that?
Me: I have an interview this afternoon.
Delivery guy: I don't blame you.

Museum Brunch

I work at a historic site, but I'm usually busy enough that I don't get to all the other museums around town. So the Visitor's Association people invented Dollar Days for local goobs like me who pull off the road to see where Stonewall Jackson's arm was buried (yes, separate from the rest of his body) but don't get around to the sites in their own town. Sunday morning I decided to go on a bit of a marathon and see 4 sites for a buck each before it was time to cheer on the Shriners on their souped-up go-carts in the Hampden parade. It's wonderful to pay only a little to go to a museum, because then I don't feel like I need to take in every exhibit to get my money's worth, like eating some of every dish at the Chinese Buffet. I usually walk out stumbling and blurry-eyed, not even remembering what I saw or did when I've paid full price. Instead, this Sunday I spent about a 45 minutes at every place and I actually some pretty great facts for the mental card-file at the places I hit.

At the Fell's Point Maritime Museum I learned that Edward Fell died a year after purchasing the area that's Fell's Point, and his widow Ann Fell made most of the development decisions that grew it into a town that rivaled Baltimore. After the American Revolution, Fell's Point became the leading shipbuilding area in the country. Since I work at a women's history site, I'm going to make sure we give Ann some props in our education programs when we talk about Baltimore women of the past.

I was really happily surprised by the Baltimore Public Works Museum that's housed in the most beautiful building you didn't know was a sewage pumping station. I used to test for (literally) shitty water with the Jones Falls Watershed Association, so this quote from the Baltimore Sun in the early 20th century made me laugh: "Baltimore's sewage enterprise is already world-famous. Experts have thousands of miles to see it." Then I read that the mother of Abe Wolman, the Baltimorean who invented the water purifying system still used today, used to put cheese cloth over their faucet to keep rocks and dirt from coming out with the water, and I didn't feel as bad about Baltimore's current water system.

I climbed on the Taney for the first time and learned that the ship helped set up the fueling stations on islands in the Pacific for the first Pan Am trans-Pacific flights. It made wish I could take an ocean crossing trip in a sea plane back then, when stewardesses gave out meals with real china and silver ware. (......and ear-plugs and barf cups).

I was running out of time, but I still made it to the Constellation where I learned that it was re-commissioned in World War II. While docked in Norfolk, it was used by the commander of the Atlantic fleet at the beginning of the war as his flag ship for 6 and a half months where he made battle plans. This seemed really strange to me, and then it hit me: if you worked for the Navy your whole life at the time of metal boats, would you even have to think twice about a chance to command a giant sail boat as your personal office space? I bet all the parties were at his place.

I'm going to be really embarrassed if it takes me another year to visit 4 local sites, but I'm enough of a museum geek that I wouldn't mind spending the day playing catch-up like this again.