Masqueraders with Tambourines

Just in the interest of idle chitchat, I mentioned to a friend the other day that someone always seems to be running a lawnmower in our urban block. And here again it is yet again: the quiet of the city bus garage and kids on the corner shouting, drown out by incessant motors. Today, it’s two men cutting the open space in the alley that’s marked as church parking. Over the weekend, it was one guy cutting the grassy place in the alley directly outside his back fence. I guess that makes only two sessions across perhaps four days – but now I am counting!

I finished Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City. I like how he pulls together many threads of history, material culture, architecture, and art. It’s the sort of thing my William and Mary thesis advisor said I couldn’t do. I also do enjoy plus ca change moments. Frederick Law Olmstead noted that 1893 World’s Fair visitors like the extra, fun bits more than the inspirational beauties of the White City: “‘There is [among visitors] too much an appearance of an impatient and tired doing of sight-seeing duty. A stint to be got through before it is time to go home.’ ” As a remedy, he suggested lemon sellers and “ ‘skipping and dancing masqueraders with tambourines.’” Many years ago, when I worked the Valentine Museum, our shorthand for this was “get culture” as in, “we need large, concise labels in this exhibition for those people who feel like they need to stop somewhere to Get Culture between the beach and Kings Dominion.”

As for Larson’s assertion that Walt Disney’s Magic Kingdom “may well be a descendant” of the Fair, fed by his father’s recollections of helping to build it: Duh. Olmstead and Daniel Burnaham (architect, Director of Works for the Fair) could have trained the “Disney Institute” seminar I attended at an American Camping Association conference a couple of years ago. Their attention to details like making sure the cleaning crew didn’t just sweep sandwich wrappers into the shrubs, or ensuring that the Fair police would politely answer questions and give directions every time, even if they answered the same ones all day long was just the sort of thing the 21st century Disney “cast members” highlighted as important to their philosophy. Instead of rolling their eyes when the fifth person asks “What time’s the 5 o’clock parade?” Disney cast members know how to say things like, “it’ll come by this corner at about 5:10, but you’ll get an even better view right there by that souvenir shop.” It’s difficult to get 18 and 20 year olds working at a summer camp to be all that.