2 April 2011 Cultural events ending in rain on an April Friday night.

1 April 2011 Watching the crowd go by

It is 1920 and we are in an art gallery on the edge of downtown Johnson City. Gloria’s metal smithing class is hosting an opening. The featured objets d’art are things she and her classmates have created as class projects and personal works for degree demands.

Gloria has one item in the exhibition. It’s small, well crafted, and I’m quite proud for her accomplishment. She deserves some praise for conceiving and sculpting something quite symbolic of her daily environment, and markedly minimalistic.

The gallery is the ground floor of an old downtown building that runs the length of one city block. The various artists who normally display and sell from it are here in hopes that the crowd brought in by students will migrate to their works and open their wallets. The gallery is concrete floored, has ca. 15 foot ceilings and absolutely no noise suppression.

The actual occasion is “First Friday,” a downtown merchant scheme to attract people to downtown by having stores stay open and some musical group play. Tonight, the added feature is a “Zombie Tag” event designed to attract young adults of legal age to consume ethanol. They expect, according to the organizers, ca 1500 people who have nothing better to do on Friday night than to get drunk and to pretend to be zombies.

The overwhelming sensation is noise. Everyone who is talking at exaggerated volume to allow them to hear each other over the background. I’d guess the background to be at 75-80 dB. It’s tiring to try to hear over this.

The population density swells and ebbs as people wander in and then wander off to other attractions. I just watched a couple come in with a large, Lab-sized dog that they promptly turned loose to wander, dragging its leash. A group of three middle school-aged boys keep running in and out. At one point, I noted them trying to look through the keyhole of the single bathroom door while it was occupied. I pointed them out to Gloria when she stopped by my staked out position. She promptly discovered that none of them were here with parents and told them to leave.

There is food in the gallery for the artists and potential buyers. There’s also a functioning coffee bar serving the usual over-priced milk flavored with coffee.

Groups of zombie tag losers keep wandering in to buy drinks and discover the food. Then they, too, wander off; leaving the art unpurchased and the noise level undiminished.

The college-aged girls are mostly dressed in the same cloths they would wear to class. They seem to be more interested in the art and the artists (at least the male artists) than the young male students they are paired with for the evening. High school-aged girls traveling in pods enter and leave, never looking at the works of art, never removing their hands from the keyboards of their cell phones. Families enter dragging tired kids, dressed too lightly for the weather, and promptly turn them loose. The male children run around the building, between the plinths and pedestals topped with breakable items. No one, no one corrals either the boys or their parents.

At 2043, the zombie tag players have only 17 minutes left to reach their goal or to be caught and declared a loser. The high schoolers have mostly left, the college students are generating enough EM radiation to boil a gallon of water as the generation that won’t decide to make a head call without a text message consensus waits for the gallery to close and force them into the decision they seem unable to make, where to gather and “hang” next.

It will be a long, cold walk back to campus for the un-motored. It appears that there will be sore feet tomorrow morning. The lack of support and protection in women’s footwear is criminal in nature. Yet, they buy them, not seeing their obvious surgical future in the feet of their parents’ generation.

We leave at 2100 and share the uneventful drive home by talking about the opening. Gloria noticed the dog, but since she is much more tolerant of other people’s pets and children than I, she felt the dog’s presence was all right. She was very pleased at the number of positive comments her sculpture drew. It really is a nice piece and I hope it sells. It reminds me of what is probably my absolute favorite museum item, a three-panel screen Japanese woodcut of a single pine branch. I’ve sat and become lost in that screen for hours. Gloria’s sculpture, though not of that caliber, shows understanding of the school and promise for future works.

We’re opting out of tonight’s Contra dance in Jonesborough. It was a busy week and the fatigue is catching up.

I’m unsure now when my Volcanology exam will be, Monday or Wednesday, as Dr. Gregg opened that choice up to the class and called for a vote. I voted for Monday. There’s never any point in delaying an exam for me. If I don’t know it now, I’m not likely to know it Wednesday.

So it’s back to the power-point slide shows and books. The weather is not conducive to studying. We had a pop-up thunderstorm about midnight that dumped a load of water so rapidly that it kept us awake, waiting for hail. But the total volume was so low it didn’t trip the rain gauge at all. Monday PM and Tues AM are predicted to be severe storm days. Looking at the maps, I believe it.