They See Me Rollin'

This week I nearly maxed out my credit card on a $3,000 clothing-related purchase.

Chrome-plated steel rolling racks. 50 of them. 

Ok, so it was a work purchase. They needed to get ordered this week but the museum credit card was in use, so I got the go-ahead to buy them with my own money and get reimbursed. 

The deal is that our new storage space has several niches where we can store clothing on rolling racks. Initially we were going to roll a long rack into each spot (there are 12 long racks clogging the aisles in the old space), but then realized that if we bought racks that were as long as the niches were deep, we could line up several of them and increase the storage capacity of those spots. Brilliant. 

Then we wrote a grant to pay for them. Double brilliant. 

But the real story here is that I AM IN LOVE WITH THESE ROLLING RACKS. I bought a small batch of them a couple of weeks ago just to make sure they were good quality and we were investing in the right thing. And somehow they just triggered this irrational enthusiasm in me. I assembled two the first day they arrived, and then that night I had a dream about them. When I woke up the next morning I couldn't wait to get to work to start assembling the rest of them. THEY ARE SO PRETTY AND SO EASY TO ROLL AROUND AND DID I SAY PRETTY AND ALSO THE WHEELS LOCK!!! 

Is this how men feel about sports cars?

Austen Translation

If you know me, you know that I love Jane Austen.* Even if you don't know me or Jane Austen, you probably know that her works are something of a pop culture cash cow. I have mixed feelings about this. Sometimes I take a purist "don't mess with Jane" attitude, but sometimes I willingly buy into it. I mean, I own a modern-day Pride and Prejudice movie made by Mormons which I have watched more times than I'd like to admit. There is a right way and a wrong way to mess with Jane, and I'm going to lecture you on it now.

Last Sunday, my roommate and I decided that we wanted to enjoy all the fun parts of the Super Bowl (snacks, spending time with friends, sitting around in oversized shirts, Beyonce) but skip the boring parts (football). So we bought some food, rented some Friends (the TV show, not the social concept), put on some Destiny's Child hits, and danced around in our favorite dumpy clothing (for me it was a gigantic shirt with raccoons on it). Our video store rents everything 2 for 1 so we had to get another show or movie. I advocated for Lost in Austen a miniseries in which a modern day fan of Jane Austen finds herself transported to the world of Pride and Prejudice. I thought it might be fun.

It turned out to be pretty unwatchable. The main character was unpleasant and obnoxious and as she wreaked havoc in the P&P world, I just got more and more disgusted.

Her period-inappropriate bangs were particularly grating

I resolved to give it a full hour, but only made it 40 minutes. I then tried to skip ahead and see if it got better, but instead ended up at a point where Jane was miserably married to Mr. Collins and Bingley was running off with Lydia. Ugh. Bleh.

Strangely, in the same week, I had a second opportunity to be entertained by the mangling of Miss Austen. Local theater company Jet City Improv is donating something to the museum collection, and the guy facilitating the donation told me about their latest "improvised play" called Austen Translation. It sounded intriguing, so on Friday I went.

Photo from the Jet City Improv website

There was a narrator and every actor had an assigned first name, but how they were related to each other, their social status, and who falls in love with whom was all made up that night.

It was awesome.

My night was the tale of Elinor Quackenbush, who was courted by new-in-town clergyman Frederick Fredericks and local braggart Walter Cavindish. Scenes were regularly stolen by her dim-witted twin sister Harriet, and elder sister Violet who was of "a sickly constitution and often near death." In the second act, Violet kept appearing with new arm-slings and eyepatches, and when Elinor said something particularly cruel to her she ran off stage sobbing "You know I'm allergic to my own tears!" It really looked like Elinor was falling for Mr. Thomas, but after a twin-based mistaken identity marriage proposal, Thomas and Harriet ended up together and Mr. Cavindish made a surprisingly charming declaration of love ("All my life I've known I was better than everyone else, but that changed when I met you"). It was ridiculous yet satisfying at the same time.

Austen Translation was more irreverent with Jane's work than Lost in Austen, yet somehow it was way better.  I think Lost in Austen went wrong because it messed with things that make Pride and Prejudice good in the first place. Watching the story unfold incorrectly because Elizabeth Bennett has been replaced by Annoying McStupidBangs wasn't fresh or exciting, it was just sad. But Austen Translation poked fun at Austen tropes while creating something new. It was goofy, awkward, romantic, funny, and exciting because no one knew exactly where it was going.

I'll leave you with one of the best "yep, this is improvised" moments from the show. The characters we had already met were going to church, where they were encountering people who weren't yet identified.

Un-introduced male character: I find these meetings so uncomfortable. I hope I can say as little as possible.
Second un-introduced male character: Are you going to start the sermon soon?

Apparently next month they are making up a Gilbert & Sullivan opera. YES.

*I should get points for resisting the urge to start this post with "It is the truth universally awknowledged..."

Advanced Vacuuming

This week I vacuumed one of MOHAI's most significant, and most fragile artifacts: The Petticoat Flag.

No, the image isn't flipped. I'll get to that in a sec.

The story of the petticoat flag is that it was made during the "Battle of Seattle" in 1856 -- a conflict between U.S. troops and Native people. During the fighting, settlers fled to a nearby blockhouse for shelter. A group of women decided to spend the time sewing this flag, using strips of red wool and white linen from their petticoats. The blue may have been a petticoat or a blanket, and the hang loops on the top are made of printed cotton. (About the orientation: It doesn't look nice on both sides so we can't just flip it over. It was originally meant to hang vertically which would have put the stars in the upper left corner).

Textiles weren't cheap or easy to come by in those days--certainly not for women in a small pioneer town. Add to that the fact that they were probably giving up clothes off their bodies for this task, and I find the story very touching. 

Stirring historical context aside, this thing is super old and in not great condition. The linen has yellowed, the blue fabric is thin and shredding to bits, and the red wool has survived multiple assaults by hungry bugs. That picture above is old, and just looking at it makes me shudder. Since then it underwent serious conservation work and that sucker is now stitched down flat on a padded board. None of this casual, wrinkled "I unfurled this with a swish of my wrists" look. That isn't even the scariest picture we have of it: 

Horrifying. I can hear the fibers weakening from here. 

Now we avoid touching it or moving it whenever possible. Instead of taking it out of its display at the old museum and packing it, the entire display was rolled onto the moving truck. Once inside the new museum, the old case was opened and the flag was carefully whisked into its new home. The new case is tightly sealed and has this special glass that is opaque until you trip a sensor and then a dim light makes the flag fleetingly visible. 

As I was gazing at it in its new home, I started noticing all this dusty crap on it. At first I panicked because I thought it was frass (aka bug poop), the telltale sign of insect activity. But I had checked it very carefully before it left the old place. How could it have exploded in bugs during one moving-van ride? My next theory was that it was dust from the old plexiglass cover that slid onto the flag as the cover was removed. That made more sense considering some of the "stuff" appeared to be glitter, and we all know that no bug is magical enough to poop glitter. 

Problem was, the only artifact vacuum we had on site didn't have the knob where you could control the amount of suction. And seriously, if any artifact in the collection needed to be vacuumed on low, it was this one. So basically "vacuum the petticoat flag" was on my to-do list for about two months before I finally found an opportunity to have someone schlep the variable speed vacuum to and from the new museum for me. But this week I did it and it was actually a little less terrifying than I expected. I also gave the white edge of the padded board a good clean, so if it does turn out to be bug activity, the frass will be visible immediately. 

Although if that happens, you'll probably see me fleeing to the nearest blockhouse.

Grand Opening. Cleaning Lady. Realness.

I thought I was done posting about Grand Opening, but then one of my coworkers sent me this:

This is me and exhibits pal Meka about to go clean 7,000 fingerprints (and some mouth prints) off of all the exhibits cases after Grand Opening. Don't let our cheerful maid fabulousness fool you: those are smiles of exhaustion. 

The New Normal

Now that I'm done with my posts about Grand Opening and New Orleans (GONO for short), I guess I have to catch you all up on all that has happened since then.

Right now at MOHAI, the most common phrase in conversations and all-staff emails is "the new normal," as in "we are still figuring out the new normal," and "I hope this isn't part of the new normal," and "me eating cake for lunch is the new normal." Basically, grand opening was such a massive success that we are drowning in public interest. Attendance is crazy, phones are ringing off the hook, and emails are pouring in. People want to book school groups, plan tours, rent event spaces, buy memberships, and donate artifacts, and our staff is struggling to keep up.  We know that opening created a peak in interest which will die down eventually, but we have no way of knowing when and by how much. Is this a passing phase, or is it the new normal?

Because of this wave of excitement, MOHAI made a second appearance on everyone's favorite local daytime talk show, New Day Northwest. For me it meant getting to the museum by 6:30 am to oversee the process of de-installing and packing the artifacts, unpacking at the studio and arranging the artifacts on a table, and then standing like a bouncer and slapping away hands that wanted to touch. Someone tried to set down three cups of water for "just a sec" next to the c. 1900 Nordstrom baby booties and I think my forceful "NO!" freaked her out a little. While I have a fondness for the booties, as far as everyone else was concerned the big deal artifact we brought this time was the basketball championship trophy won by the Sonics in 1979.

Yes, first put on your gloves

Now you may touch

Ok, I'll admit, it is pretty cool. My supervisors wanted only MOHAI people to handle and move it, so I got to carry it out to the table for the taping. I couldn't help but think to myself "There are lots of NBA players who have never held one of these, yet here I am, holding this...and all it took was a degree in fashion." 

The New Day Northwest clips were a pain to imbed last time, so if you want to see the whole thing, here is the link: http://www.king5.com/new-day-northwest/MOHAI-186973551.html

Trophy-holding aside, the new normal for me is mostly going to involve another major move project. The entire costume and textile collection has to be moved out of its old storage facility and into a new one. It is exciting, because I can't wait to start going through all the cool stuff we have, but totally overwhelming because there is just so much stuff. Some of it is organized, but there are lots of weird things stuck into strange places and vestiges of projects long past. The whole place is like a monument to the old normal. I found a box of random items with a note that said "these were on the front table when I started so I moved them here" and then some initials and a date from 1996. I also found a dress balled up in a clear garbage bag with a post-it note on the outside that read "Bugs! also stains." 

Among some mannequin props I found an entire shelf of things that looked like this:

If you can't tell what you are looking at (and why would you?) it is two different shapes of wood forms with custom pads that fit over. The one on the left has a round pad that has a drawstring on the top and bottom, and the one on the right has a pad (behind it) that looks like a tea cozy. 

On the way back from New Orleans I lost my phone and then got talked into making the leap to smartphoneville. I still wasn't sure it was the right choice until I encountered these things. I was able to take a photo, email it to the former manager of the costume collection, and receive a response about what the heck I was looking at, all on one device. The answer? The one on the left is hips and on the right is shoulders, and they were stuck on wood poles to create makeshift mannequins. Ingenious yet depressing! 

Yes, it is a brave new future at MOHAI, and I decided that mine is not going to include padded pole mannequins. 

Clara's Busy Fortnight- Part III: New Orleans Museums

On my last day in New Orleans, I skipped the conference and visited three museums. Here is the rundown:

I’ve never been to the Deep South before, so I figured I should go for the full experience. So first up, I went to Confederate Memorial Hall. 

No photos were allowed inside

It was pretty sad, but not in the way I was expecting. I pictured something that had a whiff of modernity to it but that still had a clear Confederate apologist slant.  But it turned out to be one of those waaay old-style museums that maybe hadn’t been updated since its inception in the 1890s. (The handout I received at the front door still boasted about the highest attendance day in the museum's history: May 1893). The displays featured piles of random stuff arranged in glass-and-wood cases with labels printed on slips of paper. In several cases the glass was so warped with age that it was hard to read the labels. Because of the long-term display, the condition of most of the artifacts was pretty bad. It was particularly grim to see the state of the textiles: the wool had moth holes, the silk was shattering to bits, and hats were sagging and tearing on insufficient supports. 

In the gift shop, things went from "oh, what a sad little museum" to "I don't think they are selling these confederate flags ironically." Most bizarre was the fact that you could buy a bootleg copy of the controversial Disney movie Song of the South, which has never been released on home video in the US because it is really really racist. The text on the DVD case promised that it was good, family entertainment. 

Next, I went on a pre-scheduled AHA tour of the Historic New Orleans Collection -- a history museum in the heart of the French Quarter.

I found this image on the internet. I'm not sure I actually saw this room, but the whole place basically looked like this.

It was a lovely museum but it was very...dry. The artifacts in the core New Orleans history exhibition were nearly all maps, documents, and paintings. Everything was very beautiful and had this old-world elegance to it, but it was probably exactly the kind of thing that people picture when they make statements like "history is boring." 

For a while I tried to be a good historian and get invigorated by signatures on documents related to the Louisiana purchase, but at some point I realized that if I left right away I would still have time for one more museum. 

My final pick was The Presbytere, one of several museums associated with the Louisiana State Museum. Their main exhibit was about Hurricane Katrina, and it was really really good. I cried. I'm tearing up a little just thinking about it now. It used video clips, oral histories, photographs, and interesting (not beautiful) artifacts to tell a story that was pretty emotionally devastating. 

Fats Domino's piano, displayed exactly as it was found in his home after Katrina

During my visit to New Orleans I heard locals talk about Katrina and how in some ways they felt abandoned by the rest of the country--not just in terms of aid, but in how other Americans felt and talked about it. Hurricane Katrina didn't resonate with people in the same way that something like September 11th did. The general response (and I was certainly guilty of this too) was a feeling of "That's terrible, but this doesn't affect me personally because I'm not from there." Whereas New York has a symbolic pull for a lot of Americans, a city like New Orleans is treated as distant and foreign.  The Katrina exhibition was amazing because it gave me an emotional connection to a place I'm not from and an event I didn't live through. All history museums should strive to create experiences like that. 

Clara's Busy Fortnight- Part II: AHA Conference

On January 2^nd it was on to the next adventure. I flew to New Orleans to present my paper about the Hemline Index at the American Historical Association conference.

I was staying in a hotel by myself, and a pretty nice one at that. This was exciting for a lot of reasons, but chief among them was the ridiculous number of pillows that I had all to myself.

There was also an extra in the closet

After the long week at MOHAI, it was very tempting to just make a pillow nest and watch reality shows on TLC. But I was good, and convinced myself to leave the room and actually attend the conference. 

Even though it promotes itself as an organization for all historians, the AHA is really geared toward people who have PhDs and tenured professorships and those who are trying to get those things.  (When I emailed a question to the IT people the response came back “Dear Dr. Berg…”). It was a big honor to be asked to present and I wanted to do a good job, but if I bungled the whole thing it wouldn't be that big of a deal. Unlike most people there, I wasn’t trying to find employment, beef up my credentials for tenure, or catch the eye of a publisher.

Luckily, my talk did go well, and was delivered to a rapturously attentive crowd of eight. After it was over, I could relax and just go hear other people talk. The sessions I picked included papers on the portrayal of women in 1950s Hallmark Hall of Fame movies, a detailed rundown of every Civil War monument built in Kentucky, and what it is like to be a white guy who teaches Latin American history to Latino students. Fascinating stuff. 

One thing I was particularly interested to find out was how stereotypically historian-looking the AHA crowd would be. There were certainly people there who didn't look like fusty old academics (young people! women! people of color!) but there was a solid contingent of people who skewed the general profile toward the gray haired and tweedy. Three proofs of this fact: 1) At any larger session there always seemed to be an inordinate amount of old-man coughing. Not the "I have a cold" kind, but the "I've reached a point in my life where I just open my mouth and cough every 2 minutes" kind. 2) After I gave my talk I opened my conference booklet and saw a picture of AHA president William Cronon--and realized he looked exactly like the guy sitting in the front row of my talk! So exciting! I later found out that it was, in fact, a different older white male with white hair and glasses. 3) On the first night, early AHA arrivals mixed in the lobby with football fans there for something called the "Sugar Bowl." There was no mistaking who was there for which event.

When I got back, I opened my email and saw that I had been sent this NY Times article:
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/04/historians-look-back-and-inward-at-annual-meeting/

So it doesn't talk about me or my specific talk, but THE ARTICLE MENTIONED MY PANEL. Which means one of those eight people in the room was a reporter from the New York Times. So yeah, I think the whole thing counts as a win.