fauxklore

I had the usual routine meetings and such in May, e.g. both book clubs and my Litvak genealogy mentoring session, which also included a talk by Nina on how to work with a translator. I did also make a used bookstore run, in which I got rid of 17 books and came home with 13 new to me books.

Better Said Than Done had a Mother’s Day show on the 10th in Ellicott City (essentially, Baltimore). The traffic getting there was dreadful, mostly due to construction. Let’s just say it took me almost an hour just to get past Tyson’s Corner, which should be about 10 - 15 minutes. Fortunately, everyone did make it there and the show went well, with a wide mix of stories. I told a story about my mother’s bargain hunting / hoarding tendencies, which includes the time she bought 12 cases of bottled borscht (24 bottles per case) at our public television station’s auction.

I also had three trips out of town in May. The first one was the first weekend in May, when I went to Kansas City for the Flyertalk BBQ Do. Basically, frequent flyers got together to eat barbecue and talk about points and miles (and, in some cases, drink, but that’s not my thing). Most of us stayed at the Westin Crown Center Hotel, which I think I had been at on my first trip to Kansas City back in the mid-1980’s, when I took Amtrak’s Southwest Chief from Los Angeles to the Grand Canyon to Santa Fe to Kansas City.

Friday night’s get-together was at Jack Stack. The Freight House location was a short walk from the hotel. Beer goes well with barbecue so I got a Boulevard Space Camper IPA, which was tasty. Unfortunately, the service was terrible and it took ages before I actually got my beer. The food service was also very slow. I got the Stack sandwich, which was okay, though the honey-chipotle barbecue sauce was not particularly exciting and the cole slaw was more creamy than the vinegary type I prefer. Overall, I wasn’t particularly impressed.

I thought the food and service at Wolf Pack BBQ, where we went for lunch on Saturday, were better. I got a combo plate which had turkey breast, beans, and potato salad. The latter was just okay, but the turkey and beans were very tasty.

After lunch, I got a ride to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum and the American Jazz Museum which are in the same building. The baseball museum was excellent and included some things I had been completely unaware of, such as the role of women (including as team owners) and how a reporter from a communist newspaper helped the push for integration.

Satchel Paige has always been one of my favorites.

Overall, this was worth about an hour and a half. The American Jazz Museum was not as good and I only spent about 45 minutes there. While it has some cool exhibits, e.g. listening stations which let you hear performances by musicians like Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker, I wish the museum had had things like chronological info about the development of different subgenres and more info on less familiar performers. There was a pretty good temporary exhibit about Louis Prima.

Also, the sidewalk outside the building had medallions for the Jazz Hall of Fame with performers such as Harry Belafonte, Al Jarred, and Ella Fitzgerald.

On Sunday I walked over to the World War I Museum, which is definitely worth half a day.

The major part of the museum consists of year by year chronological exhibits about the events of the war. Those are mixed in with displays of weapons and protective equipment and so on, such as this gas mask.

One display I found particularly moving had to do with trench warfare and included this powerful poem.

There were also a few interesting special exhibits. One had to do with military chaplains.

This panorama is on one of the upper levels of the building.

And the downstairs level had a display of letters sent to a soldier by his artist father.

I finished off the day by walking over to the Crown Center and checking out a temporary display (which was closing that day) on Snoopy and the Red Baron.