I'll keep this brief:
My six year-old has some kind of thing for art glass in general and Dale Chihuly in particular.
My aunt and uncle have a Dale Chihuly chandelier in one of their homes.
My aunt was tickled that my daughter likes Dale Chihuly as much as she does.
She was also tickled that my two year-old calls Dale Chihuly "Chihooty".
The chandelier came with spare parts.
That is how we ended up with an acorn squash-sized Chihooty hanging in our living room.
The child is pleased.
Whoa. There is much awesomeness to be found in my figurative backyard, within a short car trip one way or another. I have historically been super lazy about getting off my keister and seeing all of the films and museums and nature trails and concerts and whatnot that I hear about and think "I should go do that...as soon as I really feel like it." And I just never really feel like it. But with the kids! They have pester power. If you don't go out and FREAKING DO SOME THINGS they engage a secret special pitch in their voices that only children have, out of the range of normal hearing, that goes HUHNNNRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!! and vibrates your brains until they turn into jelly. It's true. Look it up.
We hit the Tacoma Art Museum on Wednesday and I was incredibly surprised to see the big kid have a strong positive experience with a Dale Chihuly exhibit that's showing up there (I'd taken her up to see a traveling Norman Rockwell exhibit, which she ended up having almost no interest in). She was standing in a corner, absolutely still, gazing with enormous saucer eyes at a shelf full of Chihuly's glass cylinders and the old old Pacific Northwest Native woven baskets that informed his cylinders. I was a little worried so I asked if she was alright, and she said, and I quote, "I'm alright. I'm just feeling so much right now. Oh, Mama, I'm enchanted." WTF! She begged me to take her back the next day, but settled for a her-and-me date at the Museum of Glass on Friday instead.
The museum, located in Tacoma, Washington, just across the freeway by pedestrian bridge from the Tacoma Art Museum and the Washington State History Museum (I somehow feel I am going to know this particular block in Tacoma rather better than I do now), is itself a work of art, as you can see from the photographs of crossing the pedestrian bridge and entering the building. The kid was already immersed in the experience by the time we slapped on our visitor stickers.
The museum is showing several fantastic exhibits in their moderate gallery space, including a sequence of installations called Glimmering Gone that you should not miss if you live in this area or are visiting in the next year (it closes in March of 2012). These felt incredibly powerful to me, and the sadness of their meaning quite immediate, so much so that I had to work a bit to make sure I didn't start crying in front of the second and third graders having a guided museum tour in the same room.
Along with the works of visiting artists who have completed residencies at the museum, the museum has devoted an incredibly generous amount of gallery space to the works of Kids Design Glass, a program that takes selected children's drawings and turns them into (unexpectedly large!) three dimensional glass sculpture. The hot shop team selects one drawing a month, out of presumably quite a pile, and the child who made the drawing gets to come up and see her design worked in glass, then gets to take the sculpture home (the artists also make one to keep at the museum). Big kid was all lit up about it, and after her turn through the galleries she sat down in the museum's open studio and drew her own critter for the hot shop team to consider.
We also spent a few minutes in the hot shop, located inside that metal cone that looks like a volcano (the last photograph is the view straight up from the front row seats). Neat-o. More than anything I was mesmerized by people who were completely at their ease working with molten glass, poking sticks in and out of ovens that reach temperatures in the quadruple digits. They made some cheeseburger goblets, which, you know...okay.
The kid loved her day at the museum. It was great. Take your kids.
It's been a wild month for us in terms of seeing and doing. It feels exhilerating and exhausting and good good good. Within the span of four weeks the big kid, and to a lesser extent the little kid, saw, or will see: symphony, zoo, opera, fine art museum, glass museum, outdoor musical theatre, symphony (again), and, oh my good gravy is the big kid excited about this, soundsuits.
But really, who isn't excited about soundsuits? No one, that's who.
Gotta keep a lid on the souveniers, though. My kid's bedroom is beginning its evolution into the place where she will, at 14, be wearing Artist black, hair pulled back in a carefully mussed chignon, lying on her bed writing Leonard Cohen lyrics on the insides of her elbows and dreaming about what Paris smells like on a wet day in October.