Futbol: The Beautiful Game

Henry, his friend Noah, Sophie and I walked over to LACMA to see the exhibit Futbol: The Beautiful Game. I don't have much interest in soccer, to tell you the truth, but the exhibit was thrilling. Here's how the museum described it:

The exhibition examines football—nicknamed "the beautiful game" by one sports commentator—and its significance in societies around the world. As a subject, football touches on issues of nationalism and identity, globalism and mass spectacle, as well as the common human experience shared by spectators from many cultures.

It's also intensely masculine, and the concept of machismo was explored as well -- no female athletes represented, here -- and I have to admit that a series of black and white photos of some Italian stars "looking vulnerable despite victory" were very easy on the eyes. I'm sorry that I don't have the artists' names -- there was one Andy Warhol print of Pele, but the more than thirty other artists weren't familiar to me.

This was my favorite piece:

And I loved this one, too:

You can read more about it here.

Mulan: An Epitaph and Addendum***

Yeah, I know. How perfect is this French postcard?

Mulan didn't make it home yesterday afternoon, but Brooklyn did, cracked-up, to be sure, but nestled securely in his box and held by Noah.

We threw Mulan out, Mom, Henry told me when I asked where she was. It was the end of the project, he added and turned on the radio. Geez, I said, just like that, she's gone? Yesterday, when I tried to take the picture of a beautiful young classmate of Henry's who was wearing her egg in a lovely box around her neck, he stopped me, embarrassed. Thinking of Mulan lying at the bottom of a school trash can made me wonder how some of the girls might have dealt with the end of the project. But the radio played one of the six songs it rotates through, and the three boys talked over one another like they generally do. They told me in their already-deep voices about an egg fight that broke out between two other boys. Evidently, when the project was declared finished, a few of the boys started throwing eggs back and forth, and since this is Los Angeles and the 21st century, another boy filmed it. Before long, one boy threw an egg a bit too hard at another boy who then put the egg-thrower in a choke-hold and then punches started flying. The guy with the camera phone kept filming.

It was a real fight, Mom, Henry said, laughing, and when I asked who broke it up and what the consequences were, he admitted that he didn't know and that he'd just watched the video.

Reader, go where you'd like with that.

So, guys, I said, when they'd calmed down relating the fight to me,  you each have to tell me what you learned with this egg baby project in two sentences or less. Henry?


Henry said, I learned that it's really hard and stressful to take care of a baby, even if it is for a week and it's an egg.


Noah said, Yeah, I'd basically say the same thing as Henry. And I learned that I'd do anything to get enough money to get out of debt.


I nodded my head and decided to no longer be smug and satisfied. You know, there's a lot of joy, too, in a baby -- way more joy than anxiety and stress, anyway. 


But only if you're ancient in years and experience, I added, and the boys rolled their eyes.


***The comments provoked my memory, and I completely forgot to tell ya'll that Oliver was sitting in the car during the discussion about Mulan's demise, and do you know what he said?


You know what, Mom? When I do the egg project, I'm going to have TWO eggs, TWINS!


 Like one of my old writing mentors said about memoir, "you really can't make this sh#$@ up"


Stay tuned. I'll probably have twin grandeggs in two years.