February | 2010 | Exile on Pain Street

Casa de Unbearable was ground zero for a water main break. The brown, muddy, Mississippi regurgitated up through a crack in the pavement. Thank bog it wasn’t raw sewage. Just the stuff we drink. The police arrived, traffic was blocked off and many panicked phone calls were made to New Jersey American Water.

The neighbors all came out of their houses to watch the approaching disaster. It flowed over our curb and, with frightening speed, flooded our front yard. Mrs. Wife threw the girls in the car and raced them over to her parent’s house and stayed there. I stayed behind, although there was nothing to do but wait.

The water slowly crept up our driveway. The race was on. Could the water company get to us and turn off the water before it started to flood inside our house? It was exciting. In the bad way.

It only took about :20 minutes for the water to work its way up and kiss our garage door. It was just two short paces away from our front door. Just beyond our front door is our carpeted family room.

My rare books cases are located a half-flight up. They’re not insured. I can’t afford the required appraisal. I was wondering how I was going to singlehandedly move a few hundred books to the third level. I imagined the pristine white pages all stained a brackish brown. I have a first edition of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas with an India ink illustration of Hunter S. Thompson drawn by Ralph Steadman on the first free endpaper. It’s beautiful. One drop of water would send the ink running down the page. My first edition of On The Road? Pulp.

On the cusp of Armageddon a miracle occurred. The water found its saturation point at the base of my house. It stopped flowing up my front yard and changed direction. It flowed down the street to find other books to destroy. Not one single drop of water entered our house.

The cool and hip thing to say is, “Oh, I NEVER listen to the critics! I go my own way!” But the fact of the matter (for me, anyway) is that I have very limited time and funds and on those rare occasions when I am at liberty to see a show or an exhibit, I do some homework beforehand so I don’t squander the opportunity, and that homework includes scouring the reviews. That’s why when the Tim Burton exhibit currently at MoMA got a weak review in the New York Times back in November, I demoted it to my B list of things to see.

Well, I had my “doh!” moment when I approached the exhibit. Critics can sometimes be humorless idiots and that is certainly the case here. The exhibit is a blast. Initially, I was puzzled over why MoMA would mount a retrospective of a movie director but Burton is an imaginative designer and makes good use of the floor space.

Photo credit: Marilyn K. Yee/The New York Times

As you can imagine, it has broad appeal and the crowds are pretty thick. (That’s probably one of the reasons why the Times critic—sniff-sniff—didn’t like it.) If you’re in the neighborhood, it’s worth a visit, although you should probably get a timed-ticked from the museum, especially if you’re going on a weekend.

Tim Burton/20th Century Fox

[Edit for comment: I didn’t take my girls to this show. 3-Year Old is too young for ANY museum and 8-Year Old would have been creeped out by it. As you can imagine, some of this stuff is actually quite frightening and 8-Year Old has a delicate sensibility. I think it would have given her some serious nightmares. At bedtime, the Edward Scissorhands costume would have marched out of her closet and the Catwoman costume from under her bed.]