Screaming Kids

120 ten and eleven year olds, in groups of thirty, Pegi downstairs, me upstairs, answering questions. They loved the Wrack Show. Kept asking me what things were, I told them things weren't anything but what they appeared to be. Everyone sat in the chair. One of the prolate spheroids, hanging from a small rope off to the side, has heart-checked severely, all the sticks are checking, but in the case of the wooden football, it now slips from its rope at the slightest touch. I'm good with that, things fall apart. The first time it happened today there was a deathly silence, everyone circled the guilty party. I walked over and picked it up, slid the rope back into the heart-check (knot at the bottom) and slipped in a shim that I just happened to have in my pocket. I had foreseen the entire sequence, I knew the spheroid was loose. A theater career prepares you perfectly for life in a museum. A theater education and even a few years working the trade, prepares you very well indeed for any other pursuit. Theater is a vertically integrated discipline, you do a little of everything, you build, you wire, use a lot of pipes, fly things, revolve things, sit quietly, learn who and what you can depend on. Not bad training. We took down the show in the tiny Mehser Gallery, nice pencil drawings, well matted and backed, a high school show, and we have a problem that we often have. Have been trying to solve for years: how do you hang a show of unframed ephemeral paper? We've tried every sticky thing in the book, and we get catalogs. Diana found my janitor supply catalog, embedded in academic literary print-outs stacked by the guest bed. A tell, or a plant. A plant, as it happens, I put it there for Glenn to find. Very cool that Diana found it. That's the problem with specific plants, you can never be sure the intended person will come along, an innocent stranger might pick up a poem meant for someone else. It's a mind field. There was a double-stick product, with foam between the sticky surfaces, D was large on, worked somewhere else but not here. D cut between the work and the wall with a sharp blade, and left, to format the newsletter. What I have are 45 stickers, and I need to get them off. They don't come off. I spend hours, develop a system, it's a six step program. Half the guilt. And it's straight-forward. Who chooses? I'm lost completely in a world where I want to differentiate between this and that.