For reasons still mysterious to me, my department, a community health education center in a hospital, has ventured into the arts. This weekend we hosted an event called “Celebrate Women”. I can only describe it as a big group hug, as affirming as all get-out. It was more formally called a “women’s retreat” – it ended this afternoon.
Among the things we did was exhibit a portion of the photo exhibit 70Up: New York Women in Their Prime We had twelve large (about 4’x3’ and 30-40 pounds each) framed photos to display in a very large livingroom type environment – it was in a common space of a fairly upscale retirement community.
The soap star on the TV, Frances Reid, is one of the pictures we used. We put it and several others up on these kind of iffy-strength-seeming aluminum telescoping easels, but they all held together. At least for as ;omg as what might be the shortest art exhibit ever – about 22 hours from its final positioning to breaking it down. The lesbian playwright is another woman who’s photo we used, but unfortunately I can’t find her photo online. We put it on the floor leaning against the leg of a grand piano. A few we were actually able to hang on the wall by taking down the paintings normally there. I was there explicitly to set up a playback system for a soundtrack accompanying the photos, but as the only guy in a department of 12, I end up doing a LOT of heavy lifting. Including toting most of themto one room, and later to another across the building, when my boss determined the first room wasn’t good enough.
We brought in an author named Judith Duerk to run a workshop. When I heard she wasted us to provide a drum to each of 40 registrants (which we declined to do as too expensive, btw), I decided to pass on her session. I was sitting outside her workshop room when two other staffers came scurrying out and ran to a reception counter.
“We need all the tussue boxes you’ve got. Everybody’s crying” They got together 3 or 4 boxes and raced back inside.
The very last event of the day was, of all things, a belly dancing lesson to loosen people up. As the department tech guy, I needed to be there to run the teacher’s music, and I was the only man in a room of 50.
Near the end of the little class, the teacher has everybody wriggling around, sees me standing still stock still in the little alcove with the CD player. “Boyo Jim, she calls, why aren’t you dancing?”
“I am dancing. I’m just not very flexible”, I answered.
All in all a pretty interesting weekend.