Mallory's Camera

A most fabulous visit to D.C.!

Alex is an epic hostess, so the two and two-half days felt like a mini-version of one of those fabulous house parties you read about in British novels: the adorable house that is just like a museum to Alex's quirky, interesting tastes, an enormous range of actual museums—we did the National Museum of African American History & Culture and Hillwood, the Marjorie Merriweather Post mansion where the Fabergé Eggs live—splendid weather; adorable felines; and non-stop conversation, perfectly timed so that the moment it began to pall was the morning I left to come back.

Alex also made it into The New York Times!



She had been to the Science Protest March just before I arrived.

Alex may be the only person in the world who's perfectly recognizable from the back of her head.

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She & her husband live in the same house her husband was born & brought up in, & every inch is filled with the most delightful kitsch. Kitsch is very much my own design aesthetic, so I scampered 'round the domicile, taking Art Photos™ at every opportunity:





Alex adopts people—by which I mean if she sees an opportunity to help them thrive, she helps them thrive! I see this in the way she opens her house to young people—presently, she has a very adorable young Russian woman, Arina, living with her—and to some extent, I see it in her friendship with me. It is a really lovely quality—and a rare quality.



So, the African American Museum...

It is a great museum, but I had some issues with the way the permanent exhibition is designed.

The permanent exhibition recreates the history of slavery—which is not necessarily the history you think you know. The exhibits are arranged chronologically, starting with the journey from Africa and the Middle Passage in dark, narrow halls in the lowest concourse of the building and culminating with the contemporary experience of African Americans in the somewhat brighter higher concourse—although given that, ironically enough, D.C.'s Black Lives Matter Plaza was being dismantled the very weekend I was in town, the contemporary experience may not be that much brighter.

There is no escape from the permanent exhibition, no easy way to drop in and out of the pieces you might specifically want to see. The design immerses you in the entire experience—and while I understand the intentionality of that design, it does make it difficult for people like me whose attention span gives out after about an hour and a half, no matter how worthy I may deem the overall experience.

It's an exhibition crafted for first-time visitors, in other words.

Repeat visitors are going to have a difficult time with it.

And even this first-time visitor developed a mild headache—it was so dark, so claustrophobic! And, of course, I understood that this headache was a measure of the exhibit's success—the suffering of the enslaved translating physically into my own discomfort.

Except—I was in a position to terminate my discomfort.

And wandered out somewhere around the beginning of Reconstruction.





Hillwood, in contrast, was all opulence & comfort as befits the spring-&-fall mansion of one of the obscenely rich.

We had a delightfully enthusiastic & mildly wacky tour guide:



Marjorie Merriweather Post became a connoisseur of 20th-century Tsarist art, something by accident—her third husband was FDR's ambassador to Russia. And the pieces were absolutely magnificent:





But I couldn't help thinking that in essence, they were not all that dissimilar to the lovely whimsies scattered around Alex's house.

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Alex said one other thing I want to remember.

Alex is a good cook. A comfortable cook. And we were talking about cooking, how challenging menu planning can be, & she said, "Well, of course, if you know your way around a kitchen, you don't see a loaf of bread, you see four sets of sandwiches, and one serving of French toast, and possibly bread pudding."

In other words, cooking isn't about recipes; it's about ingredients.

Words to live by.