Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Freakin' Awesome
The New Yorker's librarians blog!

Annals of Home Maintenance
Get out the ladder - grab a step stool - and check out the top of your kitchen cabinets. No, this isn't about cleaning all that greasy dust: this is about workmanship. I couldn't figure out how such big pieces of grit got into my cabinets during recent plumbing repairs until I went up there today. (I'm sanding and repainting the repaired ceiling and walls myself. Slowly.) There's a gap where the end cap meets the "ceiling" of the cabinet, and the doors are not really . . . is plumb the word when the line is parallel to ground (or only perpendicular?)? It's just not sealed up there. Good grief.

Carytown
Something's up with the Byrd. In a C'town shop yesterday, clerks were gossiping about stuff taken out, perhaps not illegally, but (in the speaker's view) mean-spiritedly the last time it changed hands. Then I read this in Style and got fretful. Mostly my fears are along the lines of "they won't screw it up will they?" and "it won't cost $10 to see a movie, now, will it?"

3 comments:

Fringe Element Enthusiast said...

I think maybe they were breaking down stuff for the Patsy Cline musical they were running last weekend...

Lisa said...

No, he was saying something about "furniture" being removed by the family of the owner that died . . . some? many? years ago.

Daniel said...

FYI: A good bit of the furniture in the lobbies of the theatre isn't actually original. Much of it was on loan from a variety of people who were/are connected with the theatre, even though the theatre is still an operating private venture. Thus, it's entirely possible that the owners of some of those groovy old smoking-stands, chairs and sofas just decided that they wanted them back. (I'll refrain from naming names in a public forum.) For that matter, in the still-shuttered National on Broad street, there are a couple of my former parlor chairs.

The Style article is quite correct that there is NO other movie palace as completely intact as the Byrd. There are many that are a)intact but in not-very-good condition, b)intact and restored, and c)still there but altered. The Byrd has never been significantly altered and never restored because it didn't need to be. Its only alteration was the removal of the old stage dressing to provide for a wider screen in the '50s--there were no changes on "this side" of the proscenium arch, and even those changes were done by the original architect. Oh, and the fountain in the lobby was removed for a concession stand, but the gilded stag who used to live in the fountain still frolics around the theatre periodically.