The Baboon Congress

Tut Tut

63 Comments

Welcome to the month of February!

I know many people actually enjoy winter, but to me, January seems endless. I am happy to have crossed the line into another month, and now we are that much closer to June.

Today we begin another wonderful collection of guest blogs submitted by Trail Baboon readers. Many, many thanks to all who stepped forward to write a post so I can take a step back and enjoy reading.

With a major winter storm bearing down on Chicago today, it seems right to go back to a warmer and more mysterious time.

Today’s guest blog is by Anna.

Summer 1977. A family trip to visit friends in Chicago. One memorable part of the trip: a two-hour wait during the hottest week of the summer outside of the movie theater so we could see “Star Wars” when it was first released. Totally awesome in all senses of the word, totally worth the two-hour wait. But the really big deal, the super cool thing, and the reason for the trip, was to see the King Tut exhibit at the Field Museum.

You remember King Tut – that guy that Steve Martin sings about (…born in Arizona, moved to Babylonia…has a condo made of stone-a…).

He also had some fabulous stuff buried with him when he died, just in case he needed several servants, some animals, and his organs in a jar in the after-life. A bunch of King Tut’s treasure made its way across the country (creating Tut Mania nationwide), and I got to see it – during the hottest week of the summer in Chicago (90+ degrees in the shade). I’m not harping on this because I remember the heat (though it was memorably hot), it’s because of how it affected my trip to see King Tut’s treasure.

I was a mere pup of 10 at the time, so I really don’t remember much of what I saw in the exhibit. I remember being stunned by the brilliant colors, trying to puzzle out how a wood or gold statue of something could come back to life in the great hereafter, and being fascinated by the hieroglyphs and style of the artifacts. I have vague memory of seeing part of the sarcophagus and the iconic gold mask. And being disappointed that I didn’t get to see the mummy.

Also: the power went out when we were about half way through the exhibit.

Remember the heat? That meant that all of Chicago was running their air conditioners pretty much non-stop. What happens when everyone demands a lot of power all at once? A blackout. Lucky for me, there was some emergency lighting, just enough to keep the place a little spooky and somewhat tomb-like.

Did I mention the big gold cobra? There was a big gold cobra.

In the case right across from where I was sitting while we waited to find out if the lights would come back on.

A big gold cobra with sinister eyes.

Staring.

Right.

At.

Me.

If Howard Carter (the Brit credited with discovering King Tut’s tomb) had been more like me, he would not have gotten past that cobra – he would have skedaddled out of the tomb and left everything in it. And perhaps been in need of fresh shorts.

That cobra was creepy; I was sure that it was the embodiment of the curse of King Tut’s tomb. And it just kept staring. Just about the time I was really getting wigged by a 3000-year-old statue, it was our turn to be led out of the exhibit by the security guards. No time to dilly-dally and look at the other stuff – and, unfortunately, no opportunity to go back through the exhibit later (though I will get a second chance at some of the treasure while it is here at the Science Museum). I did, however, get out and away from that cobra. Bye-bye snake – see ya in the afterlife!

What is the most memorable thing you have ever seen or experienced at a museum?

63 thoughts on “Tut Tut”

  1. Morning all. One of the perks of my job is that I’ve been lucky enough to travel to some fascinating places. One of those places is Paris. I was with clients and our destination management guide had an hour slotted for us to see the Louvre. An hour! I figured that we would see next to nothing, as I’ve always heard that you can spend days at the Louvre and still not see everything. Boy was I wrong. Francois, our guide was a little tiny Vietnamese woman but she barrelled her way through the crowds, knowing exactly where she was going. In an hour we saw the Mona Lisa, the Winged Victory, the Venus de Milo and of course, the now-famous pyramid (although my visit was well before Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code made is seriously famous). It was the most amazing hour I’ve ever spent in a museum… I think partly because I started out the hour with such low low expectations.

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  2. Anna – very nice piece today. Luckily I was an adult before I saw the cobra. I can’t imagine seeing it in the dark of a museum as a kid! I think you’ve turned out well despite your early trauma!

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    1. I think seeing Star Wars and a trip to Marriott’s Great America (an amusement park near Chicago that has been renamed at least twice since 1977) helped ease the trauma of that cobra. 🙂

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      1. Great story Anna. As a very young person, I rode with my parents through Chicago on the way from Michigan to Wisconsin. I had a tramatic experience there myself. Our route took us over a long old wooden bridge which I was sure would fall apart. This was before the Interstate highways came into being.

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  3. Rise and Shine Baboons:

    “I don’t know that I can pick just one superlative moment or exhibit,” she whined.

    Really, I cannot choose. There have been so many. I loved the to-scale cement model of the Mississippi River in Memphis, Tennessee at the Museum of the Mississippi, everything at the Smithsonian in DC, the submarine at the Children’s Museum in Chicago, dinosaur bones in Utah. Elvis’ home in Memphis, now a museum, was spectacularly awful. If I was held at gunpoint and forced to choose– Michaelangelo’s David in Florence. Followed closely, in the same museum, by M’s unfinished sculptures leaving people emerging from their marble. Then there is Old Town in Savannah, Georgia, a living, breathing salute to our beginnings in the USA….

    And this week–I’ll be at the Louvre in Paris! Tomorrow we take off for 9 days in Paris and London. My participation after Wednesday morning will be spotty and will depend on our internet access.

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    1. Have a wonderful time, Jacque. Maybe you can arrange to see the Louvre with Sherrilee’s no-nonsense guide, Francois!
      And while Jacque enjoys one of the world’s great museums, remember that we have many fine ones close to home. In fact, my friend Chuck Strinz has a long term project underway to create an online clearinghouse for information about The Museums of Minnesota.

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      2. So sorry…. the marvelous Francois is now in the south of France.. no longer in the business. She and her husband sold their company years ago and retired!

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      3. This looks like a cool site, Dale. Will definitely have to explore further. (And is the Chuck of MOM also the Chuck on the PSAs for Radio Heartland…Chuck in Duluth, Chuck at the Saints Games?)

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      4. Yes, Anna, that’s the very same Chuck of the Radio Heartland bits. He was kind enough to do those on a whim, free of charge, and now he’s the most consistent and recognizable voice on the station.

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    2. Anna: I love the Steve Martin clip. He is so fabulously silly which is what I love about his schticks. That and the great intelligence the silliness conceals. Thanks.

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      1. Apologies one and all if I have infected you all with a “King Tut” earworm…I have had this in my head for a week now. (And yes, I think you have to be pretty smart to be this silly…)

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      2. No apologies necessary here. Was dancing around getting breakfast ready singing it and thinking it should have been on the “music to walk to” list (provided you are ok walking like that and your pre-teen is not looking).

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      5. THanks to all for the suggestions. I will take them along. I am excited. I’ve also heard about the round Monet Museum which sounds so interesting. My husband will need to find some other things to do while I look at art. Wine tasting perhaps….

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    3. Oooh… Dale, this is a fabulous link. I’ve been to lots of MN Museums, but love the idea that there are still lots more out there to be explored! Thanks.

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    4. Jacque…. another nice little museum in Paris is the Cluny… they have lots of work from the middle ages, including the beautiful unicorn tapestries.

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    5. Jaque, I have visited Paris and hope to visit that great city again if I can. I really liked the Rodin museum and I supose you will visit the Notre Dame Cathedral which was another high light of my visit.. Have a good trip.

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  4. Thanks Anna! I love Steve Martin and like you am looking forward to seeing the Tut exhibit soon.

    I suspect I will be thinking of things all day, I love museums and there are so many kinds-probably my most memorable experiences have been at the National Gallery in DC. The great thing about living there was that it was all available for the price of a Metro ticket and maybe 20 minutes on the train.

    For now, I will say the thing I still am in awe of is an exhibit of landscape kimonos by Itchiku Kubota. You can read about it here, http://creativityjourney.blogspot.com/2009/04/kimono-as-art-landscapes-of-itchiku.html

    An article can’t even come close to the feeling of standing in the middle of a u-shaped display in a dark room of kimonos each hung next to the other in such a way that as you look from one to another, you not only travel through a landscape, but you also travel through part of a year of seasons. There were benches in the middle of the exhibit and at that less hurried point in my life, I could just sit and drink it all in.

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      2. Thanks, MIG -I am now! I did go through some serious stuff though. Like you said, I should have been more careful to define my boundaries – for myself as well as for others. It’s not entirely over yet but there is light at the end of this tunnel and I am optimistic that all will turn out for the best.

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  5. Thanks, Anna – for the really vivid description of your experience! and thanks Dale for the link – agree it’s a wonderful resource!

    think the best experiences for me were in outdoor “museums” – Frogner Park in Oslo – with all the Gustav Vigeland sculptures
    and the NOMA sculpture garden in New Orleans
    http://www.noma.org/sgarden/index.html

    fun topic! a gracious good morning to You All.

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    1. Frogner Park is amazing. I loved all the sculpture – but loved even more watching kids climbing all over it and picnic-ing around it with parents and grandparents. It was so celebratory, and fit so well with the Vigeland sculptures and what they depicted.

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      1. Two trips to Oslo and I still haven’t seen Frogner Park…tisk, tisk. but I loved the Folk and the Viking Ship Museums.

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      2. If you have been to the Folk Museum, you have, no doubt, been inside the Stave church that is there. Family lore has it that many of my ancestors were baptized (and probably married) in that church before it was moved to the museum site. Lovely lovely building.

        And heck, since you haven’t seen Frogner Park, you have an excuse to go back. 🙂

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  6. i love the museum remembrance anna, nice way to start the day. my mom was in line for the tut exhibit all thise years ago waiting and sweating and somehow it occurred to her that a membership would make it possible to get in without the wait part. she said she was very impressed with herself. she went up to the front of the line. went over to the window where they do memberships. paid the 30 dollars and walked in like she owned the place. best 30 dollars she ever spent. she loved the exhibit. i saw it later at the science museum but i understand chicago was fantastic. the dark had to be a drag but imagine all those 1/2 and hour behind you in the line who didn’t get in because of the power failure…
    i love museums, chicago art museum is the regular show stopper for me. i could spend years in there. the impressionist wing and modern art collections are amazing, the smithsonian was a fun experience, i have only been once. i was wandering around alone and there was a tour going on i decided to latch onto, it seemed like the woman doing the talking was pretty good so i hung with it, it turned out to be the tour for all the high roller donors and we got to go behind the scenes and do al sorts of amazing stuff. she came up to me afterwards and said that i sure was lucky, no one noticed or cared but that was supposed to be their big perk for giving bazillions of dollars to the smithsonian, good tour… michaelangelo in florence was amazing jackie and i did like the unfinished statues better than david but my daughter was studying art and architecture at the time and took me to the big museum there with the medicci collection and that was amazing she was a great guide, the last supper was in a church not a museum in milan and that was amazing to see it underway to a facelift. we are luck here to have the mia the walker the science museum the history museum all so close and accessable. the special exhibits they bring through are amamzing. i have loved the impressionist exhibits i have seen, the jackson pollack, picasso, dekooning, calder, the ansel adams, the permanant collections, the titanic the great great stuff the museum folks make it possible for us to experiecne and carry with us. dont forget the world largest ball of twine. that too is an experience to remember. off to the salt mines today i am selling roof rakes to new york and connecticut where they are not used to the winters we think are the way life is supposed to be . another foot for them later this week meand more business next week for me. cha ching. see you all later.

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  7. When i was 16 I spent a month studying Spanish in Saltillo Mexico. We took a week long side trip to Mexico City.The ulta-modern National Museum of Anthropology was one of the first museums I was ever at, and the pre-Columbian artifacts were fascinating and kind of scary, as I recall. I also loved the Louvre, and the museums in Florence, and was lucky to see a traveling exhibit of the works of Miro while I was in Florence. Closer to home. my aunt and uncle took me to the strange little home of an even stranger woman who lived near Battle Lake and who had an enormous collection of pencils, magazines chronicling the lives of the Dionne quintuplets, and other oddities. I don’t know where she found room to live. I don’t know what happened to the collection when she died.

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      1. So it seems. Everything was neatly displayed on old glass shelving she picked up from small mercantiles that had closed down. The pencils were in neat rows in a wooden cases attached to the wall.

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  8. Good morning to all,

    There are many exhibits that I have seen in modern art museums that I thought were very remarkable. I don’t remember the names of most of the artist that I struck me this way. One that I like that I have seen in a few locations is Sol LeWitt.

    Sol LeWitt is currently being exhibited at the Walker. I find the LeWitt wall drawings especially amazing. To me the most unusual ones are the very detailed and repetitive line drawing that fill a whole wall and are drawn there following LeWitt’s instructions. It is hard for me to imagine how the people selected to do these drawings can carry out the very precise and detailed work need to do one of them.

    One of interesting things about the LeWitt wall drawing is that most of the time they only exist as instructions. As I understand it, the LeWitt drawings on the walls at the Walker will be painted over when the exhibit comes down.

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  9. I also remember going the the Art Institute in Chicago when my son was 18 months old and he was in a stroller and would cry if I stopped to look at the exhibits so I had to keep moving and circled the rooms several times looking at the paintings. He was so happy when we left the museum and he danced to the music of some street musicians outside the museum.

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    1. My first visit to an art museum was the Chicago Art Institute. I was stunned by the original Van Gogh’s…the prints never had colors like that. Between the Van Gogh sunflowers and a painting of (Matisse?) bathers (that I was so sure were alive I had to touch a leg to see if it was warm…first lesson learned when visiting a museum: DO NOT TOUCH!) Still have warm feelings for the Chicago Art Institute. Thanks, Anna for sparking the memory.

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  11. Great lead-in, Anna. As I reflect on the question, I must conclude with some embarrassment that I must not be a museum person. I’ve enjoyed every one I visited, and yet I have few intense experiences that live in memory.

    To my surprise, the museum I remember most fondly is the Bell Museum of Natural History on the University of MN campus. When I was a graduate student–which I was for WAY too many years–I could become depressed by the artifice of scholarly bickering. And then I’d know it was time to get to the Bell where I could lurk in the dark halls and melt into the dioramas of different ecotomes and try to spot all the various critters in them. For a boy who grew up spending most of his time outdoors, the Bell Museum was a portal for contacting the magic of the natural world, right in the heart of that unnatural world of the University.

    As a young dad, I loved taking my daughter to the Bell. She went crazy playing with exhibits in the Touch and Feel Room. And I remember a moment from when she was about 14 months old, just acquiring speech. We were admiring a realistic North Shore scene in which a black bear has just scooped a brook trout from a stream. As Molly studied that diorama, her eyes locked on the tiny fish. She had a bath toy then, a blue plastic whale that would swim in the tub with her. Suddenly Molly recognized the little brook trout’s resemblance to her toy, and the Bell shattered with her triumphant scream of, “WHALE! WHALE! WHALE!” In her little mind, two totally disparate worlds had suddenly coalesced to form a unity that excited her beyond her ability to express it.

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  12. Morning–

    Great story Anna, Thanks!

    I traveled with my folks to visit my oldest sister in DC when I was about 10 or 12… (back when they still invited the kids up to the airplane cockpit). We went to the Smithsonian and I think the power went out there too. I don’t remember a lot about it, I remember just Dad and I walking around and the place was pretty much empty, which doesn’t make any sense… and perhaps I threw up somewhere… or I could just be making all this up…. better check with my folks.

    We saw a Norman Rockwell exhibit in Arizona a few years ago. I have always loved his illustrations so to be able to see the originals and learn the stories behind them was very fun.
    Took the kids to the now defunct Airplane Museum in Owatonna several years ago.
    The funnel shaped thing representing a Black Hole and you roll a quarter around in it was a big hit with my kids…
    And the Spam Museum of course is a quick easy trip…

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  13. My wife and I did London, Paris, and Rome in 2005. We did a Smithsonian tour of Egypt two years ago. Lots of great things to see and do out there. To choose one is impossible.

    Did you know that most of the columns in Rome are actually brick/mortar with carved marble shells around them?

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  14. I love the museums you find by accident. Years ago on a trip through Iowa, we had a breakdown and ended up in Mason City for the night. Since the car was in the shop, we walked around the neighborhood and found the Bil Baird museum with a huge room full of his marionettes, including several from The Sound of Music. I think it’s actually called the MacNider Art museum, but it was such a treasure to find that day.

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  15. Great story, Anna! Well done! I loved the Steve Martin clip and your description of staring into the eyes of the snake – wonderful!

    I hope to travel someday. I’ve always wanted to explore every corner of Ireland, Scotland, Italy and France. I’ve never had the opportunity or the money. The older I get, the more of a dream it becomes.

    I have visited some museums in Minnesota, including the Bell Museum, the Walker, the MIA and the Science Museum. They all fascinated me. I’ve also seen numerous smaller museums that have their own fascinating treasures. I’m not a science person, but the Science Museum must be one of the coolest places anywhere.

    I’ve also visited the Russell Museum in Great Falls, MT and the National Gallery in D.C. That was quite an amazing experience, but I might have been a little too young to really appreciate it.

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  16. Greaat story Anna. thanks for sharing so vividly.

    When my son was 12 he won a trip around the world. He also broke his leg so we circumnavigated in a wheelchair. The Louvre is not very accessible and the French are not very accommodating but every time we would get to a staircase or dead end we couldn’t traverse a plainclothes guard would open a secret door or sliding panel and only we could continue. We also didn’t have to pay in any of the French museums. We called it the pity discount.

    My son was fascinated by the giant , gory pictures-Napoleon on his horse and big battle screnes. The 12 year old boy tour of the Louvre was a different view than I’d ever had before.

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    1. The s&h is currently 12 and very into Napoleon right now-I can imagine how great (if extremely challenging) that trip must have been.

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  17. OT but funny. I recieved email notice over lunch that there were 7 soup spoons available in my flatware pattern and I phoned right away to order some and was told that someone else had already beat me to them. I guess there are 3000 people registered to get notification when there are pieces available in my pattern. Sigh. So near and yet so far!

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    4. I keep thinking that this is like some weird game of virtual Spoons – you know the card game where you pass cards around in a circle and steal spoons from the middle of the table and it gets quite raucous as the game progresses…like that, only different.

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  18. Thanks all for the kind words – and fun to read about the museums you have been to (and related experiences like Jim and the bridge).

    Can’t wait to read more from the other guests this week!

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  19. Fun question and story, Anna. My earliest and favorite memory is of the Denver Natural History Museum when I was maybe 10… SO much to look at, and my dad loved history so it was fun to do it with him. More recently, the new downtown Denver Art Museum was pretty cool, too — organized differently — an entire room of “Portraits” that included all styles and periods; and each floor had a seating area with books on that topic. Tons of Native American stuff…

    Closer to hime, there is this incredible sculpture garden across the river from Hastings near Beldenville, WI… my “book” group went a couple of summers ago.
    http://www.concretemosaicsculpture.com/

    OT: this post-surgery stuff is a little like having a newborn. I’m learning to ask for help.

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  20. We had a great day at a geological museum called the Grand Canyon. Amazing views with clouds and fog and the like rolling through, down, up across, etc. Wow. What a day at a museum.

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  21. The train today had a singer on it named Clyde who referred to his wife named Sandy. He sang “I’m My Own Grandpa.”

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      1. She was a trooper today. She must have walked close to 2 miles up and down the rim. I on the other hand have fallen twice. But you will not get any details.

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