Walkin' in Memphis

Wednesday, Jul. 28, 2004
8:25 AM

�or not.

Settle in, this is going to be a long one, all about the saga of our trip this weekend. First, some background: There is currently an exhibit put on by the WONDERS organization in Memphis, called �Masters of Florence: Glory and Genius at the Court of the Medici�. You don�t have to be a Theo to realize this is right up my alley. It�s an exhibit of 240 items � artwork and artifacts � from the 15th � 18th centuries. We waffled about going to see it for a while (because we didn�t want to fork out the bucks to fly � we�re saving for our trip to the actual Florence in the fall � and because Memphis is a long freaking way to drive from here). Then Kevin noticed a listing of special tours with the curator on the website, and that was that. He signed us up and we were set. It�ll be an adventure, we agreed, neither of us ever having been to Memphis at an age where we could remember it.

Fast forward to last Friday. I had had the oil changed and the registration renewed on my car, though there was something else I did not think to check which will come into the story later. We packed up and headed out of town. The first leg of our trip actually had us stopping in Charlottesville. My father-in-law was having surgery on his kidney so we headed to UVA to see how he was doing. Thankfully he came through with flying colors and the prognosis was as good as could be expected. We had dinner with mom and sister-in-law and then drove the 30 miles to my parents� where we spent the night.

Insert proud daughter note here: My dad�s second book is soon to be in publication, though only in the UK at first. It will be pre-order-able from Amazon.com and should be available in the states in August. Of course I have an advance copy, and it looks great. There are at least three pictures by Kevin from our first trip to Italy, a detail of one of which graces the back cover. All you woodcarving geeks out there should go buy a copy (or two or three or fifty).

We got up too early on Saturday morning, had breakfast with my folks and then hit the road. It was a gorgeous day and the drive started out really nicely. Of course, Memphis is something like twelve hours from Central Virginia, so we knew that the drive was going to get wearisome at some point. That point abruptly came shortly after we crossed the Tennessee state line, where we sat in amazingly bad traffic for about an hour and a half. Turns out there was a pretty horrific accident, so it was quite sucky for all involved. At least we did have a good book on tape (The Birth of Venus, by Sarah Dunant � I highly recommend it!) to keep our minds occupied.

We got to Memphis without further incident and navigated our way downtown to the Rendezvous, reputed to be one of the best barbeque restaurants in the city. It�s a huge place and obviously very popular because there were tons and tons of people waiting for a table. Things moved pretty quickly because it took less time than anticipated for us to get seated. We got ribs, because, well, you have to, pretty much. I mean, there are other things on the menu, but come on � even for a non-rib gal like me, you�ve got to have ribs at least once in Memphis. Unfortunately, we were underwhelmed. Don�t get me wrong, the food didn�t suck (although the service did) but we both felt we had had better at Red Hot & Blue at home. Oh well. We were fed, and it wasn�t very expensive � just not all it was cracked up to be.

We made our weary way to our hotel near the airport, discovering that Memphis is not that big a city (at least by DC standards) and is pretty easy to navigate around. Everything is well labeled and we were armed with many maps. Yay us. We crashed hard that night.

Now the real saga begins. We got up Sunday morning, hungry and thus in need of breakfast. Silly us, we wanted more than the pitiful glazed donuts and bad coffee in the hotel lobby so we went looking for something more substantial. There were no restaurants serving breakfast anywhere near our hotel, which was in spitting distance of the airport. So we headed back toward downtown, finally finding an IHOP on Union Ave. Much rejoicing (and rumbling of tummies). Unfortunately, breakfast was not an optimal experience. My choice of food was for some reason not available but I was handed a plate with a stack of plain pancakes with no option to pick something else that I actually wanted. I like pancakes as much as the next guy, but I would have preferred to choose my own substitute breakfast rather than just have it handed to me because it�s the fastest thing to get on the table. An integral part of Kevin�s breakfast was missing as well, so neither of us got what we wanted. At least we didn�t have to pay for any of it � they picked up the check to make up for the screw-ups.

Our plan for the day was to go back to the hotel, shower and get cleaned up, then go to downtown and walk around Beale Street and possibly find another, hopefully better, place to eat lunch. Then we would go to the Pyramid, where the exhibit is, check out the gift shop, maybe try to see the exhibit on our own before the tour, and then meet up with the group at 6:15 for the tour at 6:30. Ha! The Fates, they laughed at us. We got in the car, turned the key in the ignition, and� nothing. My car battery, which was approaching five years old, had died an unceremonious death while we were drowning our sorrows in butter pecan syrup. A couple of passing Good Samaritans gave us a jumpstart, and we were on our way back to the hotel, hoping that maybe we�d just left the map light on the night before and that a good twenty minutes of driving would charge the battery back up. I was trying not to think about the possibility of worse problems, like an alternator gone bad. Got back to the hotel, turned the car off, held our breath and tried to turn it on again. No dice.

So we put in a call to AAA, who eventually sent out a local gentleman with a battered Dodge pickup truck, some jumper cables and a mouthful of gold teeth. He gave us another jumpstart, told us where to find a Wal-Mart so we could buy a new battery, and went on his merry way. We headed off in search of said Wal-Mart and began to revise our plans for the day. I stayed in the car with the engine running while Kevin went in to inquire about the possibility of having the Wally World tire and lube center change the battery for us, only to discover that while it was possible, it would take three hours for them to get to us. At this time it was 2:30, and while we could have made it on time for our tour (the entire reason for the blasted trip in the first place), there wasn�t a lot of wiggle room and neither of us really wanted to spend three hours waiting around in a Wal-Mart anyway. Nowhere else that might have been able to do the job was open on Sunday. So we bought the new battery plus some basic tools (which I should probably keep in my car anyway) with the thought of changing it ourselves. Then we decided to go to the Pyramid, get some lunch, relax a little and worry about the battery later.

So, the exhibit. I won�t bore you with the intervening time between arriving at the Pyramid and starting the tour � basically we ate cheese pizza and looked at the exhibit catalog. The tour was fantastic! The curator is a guy who works with the WONDERS organization, so I get the impression that he is an all-around art history geek. He was a good speaker, amusing in places and pretty knowledgeable about the subject. I suppose I am tooting my own horn when I say that I probably could have given about 90% of the lecture myself � I learned a few new things but most of what I got out of the tour was stories about the exhibit itself, such as the fact that one painting by Botticelli was only allowed to be included because the WONDERS people had agreed to have it cleaned and restored. The artifacts themselves were amazing. The most impressive, I thought, was a fragment of the bloody shirt worn by Giuliano de� Medici when he was assassinated in 1478. The curator said that the provenance of the piece goes all the way back to the day Giuliano died � it has been kept track of during the entire intervening 525 years. Pretty freakin� cool. I was also told that it was cotton-linen. Huh.

The furniture was really cool too, as well as the few other items of clothing. There was a pair of leather slippers reputed to have been worn by Michelangelo. The funny thing was, they were tiny, at least for a man. They would have probably fit me. The piece de resistance, for me at least, was the Eleonora di Toledo gown that was on display. It is similar to the one in Janet Arnold's book, but not the same one. Seeing an entire existing dress in person was staggering. There is yards and yards of trim on it, all handmade of course, and I noted all kinds of details in my sketchbook. I wish the catalog had more detail shots of it, but obviously the cool kids of the exhibit were the paintings and frescoes. After the tour was over I pestered the poor curator with all kinds of technical questions about the gown; his answer to all of them was �I don�t know.� It seems the gown arrived at the museum already mounted on the dress form, so he didn�t have a whole lot to do with it. He finally staved off the rest of my queries by giving me his email address and telling me that he would forward my questions to the people in Italy and try to get some answers that way. Now I am trying to figure out a way to recreate that dress without bankrupting myself or going blind or insane. I�m actually more concerned about affording it � magnifying glasses are easily gotten and most people probably think I�m crazy already anyway. Heh heh.

After we left the exhibit, we got another jumpstart from a security guard and headed back to our hotel. We decided to worry about the battery in the morning � we were exhausted and most of our day had been shot by dealing with it. But, we had made the tour and that was the most important thing. If we�d missed it, what would have been the point of coming to Memphis in the first place? We slept the sleep of the dead, and once again, morning came way too early.

One more jumpstart, this time from the hotel clerk. I seem to recall from somewhere that too many jumpstarts are bad for batteries, but seeing as how this one was dead as a doornail anyway, it didn�t seem to matter. We had tried to change it ourselves but didn�t have a socket wrench to move an impeding metal bar out of the way. So back to Wal-Mart we went. At 7:30 on a Monday morning, there was virtually no wait at the tire center, so we handed over the battery we�d bought the day before and went shopping to while away the time. We bought snacks and breakfast food, and decided to pick up another book on CD or two for the trip home. The pickins were slim, however, and we opted for two mysteries from the bestseller list, rather than some cheesy romantic thing about somebody�s letters to somebody else. Those were literally our only three options. Yay for cheap Wal-Mart prices. The battery swap was done in fairly reasonable time, and we were finally on our way home, with the car starting like a champ on the first try. OK, so we were about 1.5 hours later in starting out than we�d hoped, but at least we weren�t stranded for an extra day.

The drive home was fortunately uneventful. The books on CD were very helpful. For the record, we both enjoyed Kill the Messenger by Tami Hoag but were not too keen on R is for Ricochet by Sue Grafton. The latter had a surfeit of descriptive detail which drives Kevin nuts and too much nattering about money laundering for my taste. Give me a good bloody murder any time (fictitious, of course). We pulled into our garage just at the end of the last CD, a few minutes before 1:00 am. Both of us were dragging ass yessterday morning, lending more weight to my hypothesis that we are getting too old for this shit.

We did have one moment of hilarity during the trip, provided by the Memphis Yellow Pages, or maybe it was a tourist brochure. There was an ad for an eating establishment, which I believe was called Windjammers, and which advertised �KARAOKE AND DARTS�, which I guess provides the patrons with some form of painful commentary on their fellows� performances. "Blue Moon, you saw me standing al- ow! My arm!" We also saw an ad for a hat store called Mister Hats.

Overall, we were not especially taken with Memphis. If we�d gotten to do a little more sight-seeing, perhaps we would have had a different view of the city and culture. As it is, my main impressions are of poor road quality and surly service industry employees. I�m glad we went to see the exhibit, since most of the items were things I had not even seen in books. But I was just as glad to put Tennessee behind me.