Saturday morning finds many of them walking on eggshells. With the first tour slated to kick off at noon, and three total scheduled for the day, 78 people have already registered online, with untold walk-ups likely to appear as well. Even though Rebecca recently shocked almost no one by casually moving in with Jen, and the relationship does appear to have calmed down their tempestuous chef to some extent, she’s as tense this morning as anyone has yet seen her. Confidently declaring that this week’s theme will be brunch, all around the clock, and sticking steadfast to that concept, she’s nonetheless displayed uncharacteristic doubts concerning the individual dishes.
“I guess we’re going with the duck bacon hash, with a tomatillo relish on the side,” she sighs to Ben and Lois, and pretty much anyone else crossing her path out back while she smokes. Despite having already thought of and discarded this concept earlier in the week.
The Ados know better than to lock horns with her, however. Still feeling a bit out of their depth in this environment – and this is with their son and his girlfriend on hand, a couple other familiar faces in the form of Denise and Kay – they’ve mostly elected to just stay out of Jen’s way, offer whatever support she asks for or they’re certain is needed. For his part, Kidwell has come right out and said he knows they don’t have much of a workload throughout the week, so he really only expects them to be on top of every number in that kitchen, managing food costs, to make sure Jen has all the help she needs and that it’s spotless enough to keep the health department happy. As it so happens, limiting food costs is one of Ben’s fortes, and likely the only reason their ice cream stand lasted as long as it did. Lois meanwhile is a cleaning dervish, not just fast but also tireless, although terrific at multitasking, too, keeping endless functions separate in her head, and just rocking in a restaurant environment in general.
Despite Emily’s pep talk, to Grace and others, she’s just as nervous as anyone. And this is without having any completed pieces on display – with those that are still in progress, you can always tell yourself and others that they will come together eventually, an escape hatch unavailable to something that’s finished. But at least she can just hide, avoid interacting with the public. While the perpetually calm and confident Druckers remain freakishly nonplussed, plan on voluntarily chatting up visitors, she looks at Grace, and even the tour guide seemingly has a case of the nerves. She’s remained rooted behind her counter sipping endless diet sodas, while furiously studying notes about the history of this place, and various talking points about the art pieces on display.
Jeremy isn’t so much anxious as he is a bit agitated by Kidwell’s endless last minute projects. Meanwhile, the owner himself, his mood surely buoyed by all the dollar signs floating around, not to mention definitely a people person if not an outright attention whore, is perhaps the lone exception in seeming more enthusiastic than he has in all the weeks they’ve known him. Guffawing at his goofy dad jokes, clapping people on the back, giving thumbs up and in general just kind of clomping around the property with cringe inducing cheer, it’s enough to make the already edgy artists retreat to their corners all the more.
Or at least, some of them feel this way. Most agree that Tom and Kathy surely don’t think of themselves as edgy artists, that the two of them are way too professional to be anything but on top of their game today. Tom has set up shop in the front left classroom, with a few tasteful examples of his own work, but also some stapled together pages and spare painting supplies, should anyone care to sit in for a workshop. Meanwhile Kathy has stated she intends to sling pottery all day long up on the main house’s third floor, and will gladly speak a little bit to each tour group about whatever stages of the process she happens to be working on during those moments.
Though attired in a sharp looking suit, a tan corduroy sports jacket, his curly hair neatly gelled into place for a change and beard trimmed to respectably academic levels, Liam admits he has no clue what he’s supposed to do today, and plans on merely patrolling the school itself if not parking behind his desk. Kidwell has stated that in the coming weeks, he will be less hands-on, which will give Blodgett a meatier role here at Otherwise. Until then, he is mostly occupying himself with ordering supplies for everywhere outside of the kitchen, looking the part of a professor, and settling whatever rare disputes emerge.
Whether the artists are present or not largely depends upon what types of projects they have undertaken. Tony’s endlessly looping piece, projected along the far wall of the dim, third story room he has claimed, means he needs be nowhere in sight, and isn’t. Jeremy is the first to admit he doesn’t know the first thing about art, nor does he have any interest in learning such, and for that matter isn’t really all that into most of what his own girlfriend comes up with in that department, but even so…Tony’s work is kind of cool, at least what he’s seen of it.
Take this piece Tony’s debuted for the first weekly tour. The static image on the wall is the lobby of some anonymous looking bank, shot from the side, where customers would stand to wait their turn at the counter. Then, projected upon it, you see Tony enter the lobby from the left, opening the plate glass front doors and removing these gigantic aviator shades before he waltzes up to assume his place as the first person in line. Then the exact same sequence repeats itself, although choreographed to where this second Tony assumes his place in line behind the first. And on and on, until these figures are lined up all the way backward to the door. Nothing else changes, and these endless Tony replicas do nothing but stand there, which lends the entire piece a creepier quality than if they wore different outfits or spoke to one another or did anything else at all.
His fellow residents along this truncated hall offer still different levels of involvement with the intermittent crowds. Rebecca, who, long before moving in with Jen on the second floor, claimed this middle room on the south hall of the third, is sometimes lurking about the exhibit, making awkward, nerves induced jokes as she guzzles one retro chic cocktail after another. Therefore sometimes over in their quote unquote employee lounge, the front room on the west side of this third floor, mixing said cocktails, with each also insuring that the awkward jokes become just a little more so. But then disappearing from sight entirely during other long stretches, all apparently done on a whim.
As far as her work is concerned, here possibly the juxtaposed catchphrase – which Grace has, in fact, liberally sprinkled in speeches throughout these tours – has earned its keep. Or if not that, then at least there are certain angles and dimensions to her work to appreciate. For Rebecca has not only taken to wearing virtually nothing that was not originally found in The Collection, with the obvious exception of bras, panties, and socks, stocking her dresser in Jen’s room with these items exclusively save that lone undergarments drawer. But has already cycled through a number of outfits she no longer cares for, and these are what comprise her exhibit.
Hanging these clothing items from the ceiling, she has also affixed them with old school price tags, yellowing, thin, card stock type monstrosities like something from maybe the 1930s, upon which a dutiful shop owner might have written the price in fountain pen. Instead of this, however, on one side of the price tag, Rebecca has jotted a little note about what attracted her to this garment in the first place. And then on its flipside, a quick vignette about something that happened while wearing this piece, like the ghastly, green and orange, flower patterned blouse she had on that day that she found the dead squirrel. Upon which she has therefore written a pithy, heartfelt tribute to said creature.
Beyond Rebecca’s, there’s Marcus, in the last room, followed by the wide open space of that huge work shop, where Kathy and sometimes Kay continue to crank out pottery, where the lone Latino resident, Rafael, has been quietly cutting a bunch of boards in half all day, with some handheld electric saw. Wearing thick plastic goggles and intent upon nothing but his work, to Rebecca’s knowledge, nobody has bothered asking him what he’s doing, as even the insistent whine of that saw slicing through wood has become a background noise they don’t really notice after a while.
Oh, but Marcus. While in discussing this project with Jeremy, he admitted he doesn’t get the connection here, period, Rebecca believes that she does, and yet finds the premise dubious anyway. Owing to the nature of his art, an extended performance riff, Marcus is required to stand in one spot in his room all day, without even so much as a potty break. At least this is his stated intention, which he has thus far not violated.
Marcus is not only standing, but he has an old fashioned television resting on one shoulder, an equally antiquated boom box on another. If asked, he will recite something about this being a protest centered around how the government’s longstanding war on drugs is actually a cleverly disguised war on black people. Rebecca actually agrees with this premise, because this is the part she gets. What’s lost on her is the execution of his ideology, to wit, why there’s a 6 hour VHS tape of random black and white war footage playing on the television, and endlessly flipping cassette tape of classical music in the boombox, and what these two have to do with one another, not to mention his overarching premise. But she kind of doesn’t want to betray herself as some sort of dilettante neophyte by asking, at least not without a few more cocktails maybe, during a less intense moment when this is all over, perhaps in the employee lounge. And so apart from answering tour participants’ questions, or hitting the PLAY button on his TV/VCR combo when the tape reaches its end and automatically rewinds, Marcus just continues standing, adopting this same unwavering militant expression.
Like Denise, Emily has found it more interesting to wander the grounds at random all day, soaking up the aura at that moment from wherever they find themselves. Occasionally joined by Kay, or just as often meandering alone, not to mention occasionally intersecting her boyfriend, just as Denise, with Clay arriving to screw off and hang around the fringes himself midday, does the same with hers.
Emily finds herself hanging out in the front right classroom with Liam, their only company otherwise a quartet of middle aged housewives oohing and ahhing over the pottery exhibits. As Kathy is not here, Blodgett has been kept a roving eye on the merchandise. In his dapper suit and tie, his sports coat, well groomed and with hands clasped behind his back, Emily actually thinks Liam looks every bit the part of museum tour guide himself, at the very least as much as he does schoolmaster. He’s telling her a substantial bit about his backstory, and meanwhile she’s also half listening to Tom Drucker offer his workshop pupils some instruction across the hall.
“Only flat sides have flat shades of tone,” he is explaining, his voice a soothing, near monotone, Emily thinks, in fact not all that far removed from the Bob Ross she vaguely remembers from PBS specials of old, if just a smidgen more nasal, “curved surfaces, as you will see here, have gradation…okay…and…there we are...”
“So you were saying?” Emily throws back to Liam, as much to pull her mind into this conversation as much as anything else, “Oxford, was it?”
“Okay, right,” Blodgett nods. The two of them are standing side by side, just to the right of the classroom’s only door, passively observing the minimal action. “Well then. For all intents, yay, you may as well declare I drank myself out of not one but two separate posts. Within this industry.”
“…and so as you can see, it’s much more preferable to plot the position of the horizon before any other compositional lines…”
“Really?” she says, turning to Blodgett, genuinely intrigued now by what had been idle conversation to this point. “How is that?”
Blodgett sighs and thrusts his hands in his pockets, rocks on his heels while explaining. “Right, well okay, so I was terminated from my post at Oxford for what you might charitably term, uh, let’s call it alcohol inspired indifference. So yes and then after spinning my wheels for many an idle month, or make that year, hmm, I managed to catch on at this slightly less prestigious college over there in your splendid eastern Carolinas. But let’s just say…familiar patterns often repeat themselves, if you will….”
“…and so if we pause to really examine our piece, a couple of things will stand out to us. One is that the range of tones diminishes the further away an object is…”
“But are you…better…now?” Emily asks, giggles, “and they’re definitely not my splendid eastern Carolinas, by the way. I’m from south of here.”
Liam shrugs and allows, “as you say, then. But yes, you know, a big parcel of altering one’s behavior is inner twined with altering one’s environment. You might suppose that having all sorts of free time on one’s hand, and keeping a much more solitary lifestyle, might lead to greater temptation. But it’s actually proven quite the opposite.”
“Oh wow,” she offers, shaking her head, unsure what else to say, “that’s pretty wild.”
“Not really,” he tells her. “It’s all actually sadly, predictably common. As well as – and I’m not precisely certain how to phrase this – but a well-documented disillusionment begins to set in, and eat away at you after a spell. If you’ve half a brain at all, that is.”
“What do you mean?”
“What do I mean?” he throws back at Emily, and craning his neck to face her directly for a change, “well, most eventually begin to realize there’s a great deal of bullshit within these halls of academia, shall we say. If you’ve half a brain, as I mentioned. If you’ve half a brain, you realize you could memorize a few key talking points and basically sleepwalk through any of this. That’s why I might have the credentials, but refuse to answer to Doctor. Would rather get in one’s face demanding that he or she does not address me as Doctor, in fact. But, you know…,” he sighs, “I must admit, I do rather expect that I will like it here.”
“Well, yeah, uh…hopefully this can help with…whatever, getting you back on track.”
“Yeah,” Blodgett chuckles, though it’s debatable whether this is pure cynicism, or standard droll British humor as he adds, “here’s to hoping…”
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