September 16th and 17th - Philadelphia and Pottstown, PA

After the West Collection, I drove into Philadelphia to visit with Grey, my friend from high school with whom I was staying the night.  I was reading at Robin’s Books later in the evening, and spent the afternoon with Grey and her son Shuford.

Grey read the Museum Legs table of contents aloud, and every time she said a chapter title, Shuford would repeat it back like a cheer: “The Insulated Judiciary.”  Met by, “THE INSULATED JUDICIARY – YaaaaYYY!!!!!” 

There were three people at my first reading -- Grey, the bookstore owner, and a woman named Myna.  I was reading at Robin’s, the oldest independent bookstore in Philadelphia.  Unbeknownst to me, though, it had closed the year before.  It reopened as a non-profit performing arts space – on the second floor.  We were trying to go there and accidentally walked past. 

At some point, I had gotten a bit of advice from other writers who had been on book tour.  One friend, Michael, said, “It’s going to happen. You are going to have a reading where no one shows up.  Or one person, or two.  It’s just part of it.”  This piece of advice reminded me of receiving pointers from my sister’s quite athletic friend before running the New York Marathon.  I had said to her that I was making peace with the fact that I would, at some point, get passed by a guy in a bear suit.  Without missing a beat, she replied, “I got passed by a lobster.” 

The first reading was definitely a lobster moment.

Full credit to Grey for being attendee 001. Myna had an encyclopedic knowledge of local union relations with art-school teachers and said a photography opening scheduled at the same time had kept people from coming. Robin was really interesting and engaged, though I couldn’t help but feel bad. Parenthetically, Robin’s has a lively program of political and historical commentators coming to speak. And a high quality half-price books section.

The next morning, we harkened back to “art in the everyday environment” – as in the West Collection – when we took Grey’s son to the school run by Robin’s wife.  I liked the art enough both to get out my camera and to ask for permission to take photographs in a room full of four year olds (none of whom are photographed).  The mural is in the entry hall, 

the wings and hands in the crafts room. 

The stroller rack:

September 17 – The Hill, Pottstown, Pennsylvania

From Philadelphia, I drove out to Pottstown, Pennsylvania, to guest lecture in a high school art history class, thanks to an introduction from my sister’s friend Dana.  The Hill, a cloistered residential school, is one of those really special places that anyone who has attended loves and whose good will is palpable to anyone else upon arrival – even to strung-out people who almost forgot they had an appointment with Mrs. Nelson, the lovely art teacher.

Mrs. Nelson is one of those people who lavish attention on others.  She has such a kindly and enthusiastic temperament that when she told me she had taught there for 25 or 30 years, I thought she must have started when she was 12. Her husband teachers there too.  I had lunch with them and a group of students in an old, wooden, Harry-Potter-style dining hall where the whole school eats together. 

The walls are covered in NC Wyeth paintings.  These are extremely valuable, but rather than over-thinking their value and replacing them with copies (and occasional administrative thought), they let the students live with the originals and just don't advertise them (my apologies for doing that here).

I sat wit the Nelsons at one end of a long table full of students. Over lunch, they had school-wide announcements followed by a standard blessing that they say everyday. You could tell the grace was well rehearsed because exactly on the "Amen," the students got up with a Jeopardy-buzzer quickness to be first in line to serve their tables. Lunch was mystery Mexican wraps – as Ellen’s husband said, “I think pork.” At the end of the meal, they cleaned plates so quickly I felt solidly out of practice at eating in a high school.

Ellen and I walked over to the art building, full of interesting things like this mosaic of a unicorn tapestry. 

I chatted with her class about museum history and what some different career tracks were in museums.  The students were so good-natured, I was mostly reminding them that they can do whatever they want to do. You could sense how smart and nice everyone was, just good kids everywhere.

Afterward, Ellen and I toured an art exhibition she had helped to organize, with beautiful colors and surfaces of paintings. 

Then we visited the library (more original art, probably highly valuable, still lived with). As Ellen walked me to my car she gave me a wrapped present that was a Hill mug.  I gave it pride of place in the ‘crazy person’ pile of things in the car (better to look crazy and disorganized than like you have valuables), and I drove south to Charlottesville.