Kansas City Museum

The KC Museum of Industry & Technology was why I was in the old zip code. The grand old houses in the neighborhood affected Em pretty much the way they affected her parents umpteen years ago, when we decided to play urban pioneer despite neither of us really grasping what it meant to be urban or to pioneer.

I was better adapted to life there than the artist formerly known as Frau Lobster, but there were some pretty big down sides to the situation.



Example? When we were moving out, my Dad was helping me load stuff out of the basement and two of the boarders my next door neighbor had taken in were sitting on the front porch drinking, playing checkers and arguing in loud voices about which one of them had 'fucked' more 'bitches.' They were a couple of Ramos' better tenants: they hadn't left huge car parts in the yard for months on end or caused the police to come out in the wee hours. They didn't turn tricks, they just talked about them at high volume.



Ramos was from Cuba, had been one of the Mariel Boatlift crowd. He'd been in prison there, though he claimed that was all 'political.' He was a likable guy, and it's not hard to get in trouble in Castro's Cuba, so I gave him the benefit o the doubt. His tenants, though: I think he may have been jailed in Cuba for having no judgment at all.

So anyway, this museum, I remember it being pretty cool. And I've never taken the girls there, so...




Em was not down with this.



But it's closed for renovations. They think for at least a couple more years as they juggle the needs of a house built over a hundred years ago with the need for windows that keep the wind out and a bunch of other things. They have a visitor's center open, and there's foam stickers you can play with in there, so all was not lost. I extricated the girls before Mo used up the entire basket of foam stickies.