Teentrum @ The Nelson

I'm a terrible father. The way I mistreat these kids, it's a marvel the state hasn't already intervened.







For instance, today I took them to the Nelson, sprung the vie bucks to park in the covered parking so we wouldn't have to walk far in the cold, and exposed them for the umpteenth time to William de Kooning, Rodin, Rothko, Warhol, Thomas Hart Benton, Max Ernst, etc.









The way Em reacted to this was understandable: since abuse like this should not be tolerated, she sulked, complained of being hungry and not wanting to be there ever 45 seconds, refused to smile for pictures and was generally a moody teenager in rebellion.





I know, this is what I get for being an insufferable teenager when I was her age. And to her credit, when I decided the fitting punishment would be an hour and a half of media blackout, she folded. Her favorite place to be in the known universe is on the end of the couch with the computer, her cell phone and her mp3 player, and banishment from this little paradise is about the most effective tool I have in my Daddy arsenal. Sometimes when she cops an attitude, merely the suggestion that her little oasis might dry up will get her to snap out of it.





Mo, on the other hand, didn't really want to go either but had fun with it once we were there. She'd have preferred Kaleidoscope, but we didn't get out of the house early enough to make a session there. She happily clicked off 76 bizarrely composed, blurry photos on her camera and took ever opportunity to sit down the museum offers. She'd have taken many more pictures, I don't doubt, but the batteries in her camera were shagged out from Moon Marble where she took almost 500 in under an hour, and I didn't have any fresh AAAs on me.





Oh, and I found something that might rival the Hawaiian shirt for great looking men's clothing. This thing is, basically, a royal toga. I could totally see myself going around with just this wrapped around me.











They have the Buddha more or less walled in. They're doing some construction upstairs from him and don't trust the knucklehead contractors to be careful enough carrying stuff past him. If memory serves, he's 900 years old or so, and I guess he's a bit tricky to move.