Flutterings

Y'all. I was skimming one of the local Jacksonville weeklies over breakfast, and happened to glimpse the listing for the Adams family exhibit, which looks like is just down the street from MOCA, which is where I'd planned to spend the early part of this afternoon.

So that got me excited, since the American Revolution is basically one of my earliest obsessions ... and then I peeked at the page for the Charleston, where I'll be heading next, and the current exhibit there is on Sherlock Holmes, Dorothy L. Sayers, and James Bond. EEEEEEEEE!!!

(It's all icing on the cake: this whole mad trip got going when I found out Juan Carlos Ferrero (and Roddick [NYT link], and Murray, and Falla and Isner) would be playing in Miami this past weekend, which prompted me to contact a friend in tennis fandom to meet up there... which ended up being so very cool, because she is a press photographer, so she got to chat with Juanquito in Spanish and I hung out on the patio at Novocento during the players' party; while my friend worked, I got to eavesdrop on the neighboring tables [the OHs I tapped into my phone included "Ok, how many of your friends are there that don't do drugs?" and "I asked Amelia Earhart to play dodgeball with me in my sleep"] and witness Juanqui doing laps around the restaurant with his buddies. The rest of the trip was plotted in terms of visiting other friends in other cities and making a stop at Mepkin Abbey, the latter to scratch a longstanding Revolutionary-War-related itch (I was obsessed with John Laurens after Kevin Conroy [now better known as the voice of Batman] played him in the Barry-Bostwick-as-George-Washington miniseries; the abbey is on the site of the former Laurens plantation).

(I didn't find much time to prepare for this trip before it was underway, beyond choosing hotels and making [futile] inquiries about stand-up paddleboarding lessons -- it looks like it's just the wrong time of year for that, even in warmer zones [the US National Whitewater Center gets major props for writing me back, and promptly, which none of the other prospective vendors seemed to deem important, so guess who I'll go to next summer?]. So I'm delighted at how fun things to visit keep making themselves known just in time. The hotel in Miami had a coupon rack that included $2 off admission to the World Erotic Art Museum, which contained (among other things) dozens of depictions of Leda and the Swan, gorgeous glass sculptures (as well as creations in metal, clay, stone, enamel, etc.), medallions by Dali, etc. There was a video loop of the founder of the museum, who basically has the demeanor of a middle-aged art historian and apparently started the collection when her son asked her to buy some erotic art for his flat and then complained that her original selections weren't hot enough. My friend quipped that we were looking at one of the grandest "Oh? I'll show you" gestures in Jewish mama history.)

(Also: up to Chapter 61 in my listening to the Moby Dick Big Read. BBC Sherlock fans might be especially interested in Chapter 58, which is narrated by Benedict Cumberbatch.)