My friend Frances Lide journeyed on the RMS Queen Elizabeth in 1957. She gave me a dress she wore when dining with the captain of the ship. I wore it once, but it fell into disrepair. Clare has it now. She also gave me two menus from that voyage.
I think it would be fun to recreate the “Suggested Menu” someday. Maybe on the anniversaries of the luncheon and dinner.
Click the images below to enlarge them.
I’ve just come across a souvenir booklet for the Circus World Museum that my parents must have bought for me on our trip there in the summer of 1972. I’m not sure why I felt I needed a booklet about the museum because I don’t remember really liking it much. In fact the only thing I remember about it was a clown talking to my dad out of character. I wrote about it on my Snapshots of my Life blog.
Baraboo is even more memorable to me. It was there I began my dislike for clowns. The museum put on a circus show several times daily and we got in late and didn’t have a seat so we stood by the opening to the tent. The clown act ended and one of the clowns came over, stood by my dad and said, “Hell of a way to make a living”. That in itself is not a reason to dislike clowns, but it ruined the magic for me. Clowns were supposed to be happy or tragic, but not dislike their occupation.
Me 2005
I grew up in a town not far from Chicago. Chicago has several museums and in grade school our classrooms visited them often. My favorite museum was the Museum of Science and Industry. Its exhibits were memorable including the coal mine where an elevator took you “below the earth” (actually you started up high and it only seemed you were far underground) where a train awaited you and took you on a tour of the mine and the, now gone, room of fetuses in glass jars and cross sections of a human body that were preserved between two pieces of plexiglass.
My favorite exhibit, however, was Colleen Moore’s Fairy Castle. I could stand for hours looking into that exquisite dollhouse at the tiny rooms filled with miniature furniture. I imagined myself suddenly becoming tiny enough to wander through the fairy castle, napping on Sleeping Beauty’s bed in the princess’ bedroom, bathing in the princess’ silver tub, eating at King Arthur’s table in the dining room.
I loved it so much that I bought myself a souvenir booklet describing the dollhouse so I could see inside the dollhouse from the comfort of my own home. I still have that booklet and I still look through it now and then. And still, fifty-something years later, I like to pretend I’m small enough to live in the castle, but now I visit the magic garden and library too.
Clutch Cargo Lips 