The Autism March of the Penguins

The Autism Walk was today.

We made an effort. We dressed warmly and headed to Unity Village. Snow was beginning to fall even as we arrived.



We met Darth Vader, made a circuit of the big tent of vendors (which, I'm sure unintentionally, is a serious sensory overload for autistic kiddos), checked out the frozen carnival attractions...



Mo got a balloon and set it free. That's what balloons are for, far as she's concerned.



And were back in the car minutes later.



It was too freakin' cold. I couldn't feel my fingers, and we're talking maybe a half hour. I bought some T-shirts, leftovers from last year. The current year shirts were available only in white, and they were $10-$15; the past year shirts were also available in yellow and only cost $3.

We bailed and went to the Nelson. By the time we left it, the snow was full force.



It's April, ya know? Snow? That sucking sound you hear is Al Gore shutting up for awhile.*





We did the older part of the Nelson this time. We've hit the Bloch addition pretty heavy the past couple times, so we were overdue. Some of it's closed off for construction, but there is some stuff on display that wasn't our last time through there.







I was interested to see what else the Nelson had been hiding. The Bloch addition has allowed them to show a ton of modern art that was in storage for years. Some of my faves from my childhood, Heineken, for instance. Or Central Savings.

A Picasso political cartoon (for want of a better term), 'The Dream and Lie of Franco' was among the surprises.



There were also some areas shut off for construction, so I'm keen to see what's cooking behind those doors.



I was also struck, not for the first time, by the Henry Moore working models and maquettes. A guy I used to work for referred to one of the Moore's as 'steel art turds on the lawn of the Nelson.' And believe it or not, this is a guy who turned out to be a bit of an art collector, and even weirder, an art collector who favors abstract expressionist paintings.



But he had a point about the haphazard appearance of some of these things. The sculptures tend to seem 'happy accidents.' But to see the nine inch tall version and the photo of the larger-than-life version as installed at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, for instance, is amazing. Almost like seeing a working sketch by Jackson Pollack that shows the paint splatters going exactly where they ended up on the canvas.





*Yeah, yeah, I know. 'Climate change means sometimes winters get harsher.' If it rains and stuff gets wet, it's not necessarily because we're burning fossil fuels. It might be this whole global warming scare is for real, but it's impossible to notice how the subject goes mute in the media at a time like this, to be brought back out during a heat wave or after a big-ass hurricane.