We went to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston yesterday for a special exhibition of 19th French masterpieces from The Metropolitan Museum of Art. It’s the only stop for this tour and the director of MOMA said that they’ve never before lent so many of their treasures to an exhibit. Some of the paintings left the building for the first time (and perhaps the last). Among the exhibit were multiple works by van Gogh, Matisse, Ingres, Renoir, Degas, Cézanne, Manet, Monet and Picasso, and four or five by my favorite, Camille Pissarro. I have his paintings as backgrounds on two of my computers, and I mention one by title (but not by artist) in my Borderlands story “One of Those Weeks.”
We had tickets for 3:30 admission and actually got into the halls by about 3:45. Since the exhibition only runs another week or so, it’s selling out fast. We spent over two and a half hours vying for space in front of the 100+ paintings. It was a crash course in pre-impressionism, impressionism and post-impressionism and all the variations thereof.
Didn’t get to see Amazing Race last night so I’m studiously avoiding any place that might have spoilers so I won’t find out who got eliminated before I can watch the episode tonight.
I had a revelation about the story in progress yesterday morning. It needs to be in first person, I realized, so I spent the morning recasting it from third person to first. I had too much distance between the reader and the viewpoint character. I also caught a major glimpse of where the story needs to go, though not all the details have gelled in my mind yet. It’s all about an element that’s already in the story, so it looks like I was foreshadowing, when in fact I was merely exploring. I have less than two weeks to get this one wrapped, edited, revised and ready to go out the door so I won’t be working on anything else in the interim.
Here’s a blast from the past. In her recent Storytellers Unplugged essay, Janet Berliner wrote about the first time she interviewed Ray Bradbury. This inspired me to dredge up the old memory of the one time I met one of my most influential authors. One of wife’s friends found out that Bradbury was coming to town to give a lecture, so my wife (fiancee at the time), knowing how much I liked Bradbury, got tickets while I was out of town. Then, after the lecture, I was tempted to give the signing line a miss rather than make everyone wait around for me, but she encouraged me to get in line—then she vanished. By the time I worked my way up to Bradbury, she had reappeared, bearing a disposable camera she’d gone to a nearby pharmacy to purchase. This was before the days when almost everyone has a cell phone camera—or even a cell phone.
We asked Mr. Bradbury if he would mind posing for a picture, a request he graciously accepted. For reasons known only to him, he latched onto my earlobe. Here is that photograph, which hangs in the entryway of our house. Note the dinosaur!
Photo © MA Vincent, 1995
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