Screaming Heads and Bloody Girls….

…actually I switched the adjectives around to make the title more of an attention grabber.

Yesterday we had our first gallery visit for art. Guess where we went? You got it… the National Gallery. It is such a huge museum though, that it wasn’t a repeat visit. For maybe the first time in my life I made it for three hours WITHOUT getting sleepy!! I LOVE art, don’t get me wrong, but there is just something about warm, quiet museums filled with pretty colors and really old objects that make me drowsy after about the first hour. But, our teacher made it so interesting that I didn’t even realize that the time disappeared. Of course my favorite paintings were the impressionists... Monet, Seurat, etc.

THEN…. At the end of the class, our teacher took us next door to the National Portrait Gallery to view a certain piece that the gallery had just purchased. It was a self portrait of Mark Quinn, a modern artist. He makes a self portrait every 5 years. The reason it takes him so long is because he makes a mold of his head, and then he fills the caste with EIGHT AND A HALF PINTS OF HIS OWN BLOOOOOOOD( roughly the amount circulating through the human body at one time). He then freezes it, and puts it in a specialized unit to keep it frozen at all times. It is meant to show the fragility of life, because if the external unit that the sculpture is dependent upon were to ever fail , the sculpture would melt and disappear, symbolizing human dependence on so many external factors. I felt very fragile as I left the exhibit, like I had lost all my blood.

I had a voice lesson after class, and lets all thank the Lord that there were no more incidents. I took a cab from my teacher’s house to the train station, but unfortunately the cabbie misheard me and took me to Catford Station rather than Catford BRIDGE station, meaning that I got on a train that I had no idea how to get home on. But I used my brilliant internal compass and found my way home via an alternative route. Mom, you can be proud of your daughter’s 180 in directional skills.

Today in Beatles we watched “A Hard Day’s Night” and saw lots of screaming girls fawning over the Beatles. Were all you old fogies really all gooey ooey like that? I mean… I guess MAYBE I was a little obsessed with N’Sync, but I can’t imagine picking the grass that they walked on and holding it close to my heart for the next 20 years.

Fun Beatle Facts for Marie:
-The song A Hard Day’s Night was written after Ringo looked out the window after a long day of rehearsal and goes “It has been a hard day…” and then realized that it was no longer day and added on the word “night.” John raced home to beat Paul to writing the song and it was recorded the next day.

-The Beatles were the first to hold the #1 spot for album and single in both the UK and US and would be the only until Simon and Garfunkel in the 1970s.
Tonight my friend Brooke made us dinner (yummy quesadillas) and then Linda and I went down to the blockbuster to rent a movie to keep us awake until the men’s ice-skating is on TV at ONE in the morning…. The guy hated his life, and when he went into the back to enter in all Linda’s details for her newly issued Blockbuster card, we hear him say, “I’m so sick of this job!” We smiled at him and got him to smile back.

Tomorrow… Windsor Castle hopefully? I will post pics!