Leland,

So sad to not live closer.   It would be fun to brush the dust off that 
museum stuff with you.   I now specialize in designing museum exhibits, and 
as a former museum curator, that grant writing language is all too familiar. 
Your Ready Kilowatt item really catches my attention since I just finished 
designing a new museum of electricity for the Saskatchewan Power Commission. 
Ready really is a potatoe head.   Who was he intended to convince?   In the 
1960's, Saskatchewan Power created a sweet miss with a tidy little apron, 
Penny Power, to travel around the province trying to convince and teach 
people how to use electricity in their homes during the rural 
electrification campaign.   Pretty Penny Power would pop in to community 
events and Women's Institute meetings with her floor lamp and iron and 
electric mixer, and at the big fairs, with her washer-dryer combination and 
electric stove to try to get the happy farm wives to convince their husbands 
they needed to get hook-ups to the farms.   She was targeting the ladies, 
knowing full well there would be hell to pay if she targeted their men.

At the moment, I'm in the midst of a commission to write a best practices 
article for a museum association web site, the topic: Exhibit Planning. 
The basic tack I now recommend is to see exhibits as performance art instead 
of designed objects.   It is a lot more fun that way and provides a lot of 
room for community relevance and involvement.   It also takes a lot of 
pressure off the exhibit maker because the entire work is seen as a process 
and is therefore never finished, a great strategy if one is on a payroll or 
a volunteer.   An easy accountability becomes the number of people coming 
with things to add to the exhibit.   The exhibit then belongs to everyone. 
To bad for "designers" but then the same could be said for a lot of 
architecture too.   Most buildings look better and attract a lot more 
interest during construction than when "finished".

A shovel exhibit would be a hoot.   Wish we could play with it together.

A classic shovel event here was the groundbreaking for a new community 
college in mid October of 1981.   The local member of the legislature was 
Patsy Jordan, a "Big Lady", big in every way, and for the groundbreaking 
ceremony she was at the controls of a big backhoe with a long line-up of 
male dignitaries on both sides.  The very large photo without a caption on 
the front page of the daily newspaper had them all grinning from ear to ear 
beside the hole and big pile of fresh dirt, with Patsy's smile showing teeth 
visible to the camera from 30 away.   The paper's typesetter made his 
comment on the day by placing a bold black 1" headline immediately below the 
photo stating, "Sadat buried in Egyptian desert!"   I always wanted to 
combine archive and artefact in an exhibit around that one.

cp over the hill and far away in bc


> ][< man,
> I was going through storage rooms at the New Haven Historical Society
> yesterday, trying to figure out how we can get a grip on how much it will
> cost to get the collections on line (a grant) and find some threads for
> scripting some new exhibits and what do you know?  We have a wonderful
> collection of shovels, all kinds of shovels, including shovels used for
> ground breaking ceremonies.  My favorite is one with a painting of Ready
> Killowat on the blade, or shall we say Ready (light the fire) ][<illowatt.
> The sparky little fellow reminds me of you (sorry Mr Potato Head) Why did
> thanatos remind me of shovels?
> Signed,
> Digging my own grave
>
> Leland R. S. Torrence
> Leland Torrence Enterprises and the Guild
> 17 Vernon Court, Woodbridge, CT  06525
> Office:  203-397-8505
> Fax:  203-389-7516
> Pager:  860-340-2174
> Mobile:  203-981-4004
> E-mail:  [log in to unmask]
> www.LelandTorrenceEnterprises.com
>

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