FRIDAY: Rolled up to Philly through some thick, snarly traffic (it took me 5 hours to get there) to get to my girl Mimi's house. Had lazy, loving girl talk. Ate ice cream and spinach dip.
SATURDAY: Visited
Eastern State Penitentiary, where Mimi volunteers (she does makeup and costuming for their haunted house, which I am seriously TRYING TO GO UP FOR this year. Y'all in?). I'm not sure if I can do the experience justice in words. I couldn't help being in the prison without thinking about the amount of pain that had been experienced within those walls, as well as the pain some of the people who'd been there had caused outside. There was something very affecting about the architecture (paging Foucault):
Opened in 1829 as part of a controversial movement to change the behavior of inmates through "confinement in solitude with labor," Eastern State Penitentiary quickly became one of the most expensive and most copied buildings in the young United States. It is estimated that more than 300 prisons worldwide are based on the Penitentiary's wagon-wheel, or "radial" floor plan. - from the ESP website.
Plus, there's that whole thing about human detritus - in a few of the cells, whole walls had crumbled away, and in some, there were inmates' shoes still left there. (The prison closed in 1971.) In one cell, an inmate had drawn a crying eye right above the door, and in another, there was something scrawled on the wall - I couldn't make out any words other than the last few: "... and she will tell the truth."
In a (dresser?) drawer that's on display now in one of the exhibit areas, one inmate had written a ballpoint-pen confession to killing his wife. The confession read like an obituary.
Mimi and I hit the road to the Poconos after that - that's where she's from, and we were headed up for her niece's 6th birthday party. After spotting some teenypunx (including a teenyskinhead) at the Allentown rest stop, we missed our exit. We were going up a minor incline when the transmission went kaput. Mimi went to put her foot to the gas, and instead of accelerating, the RPMs went nuts and the car just ... coasted. We rolled into a turnoff and considered our options; eventually, we called the Turnpike Hotline and AAA came to the rescue. Matt, the guy that towed our car, was our best friend for the next couple of hours.
We hung out with Mimi's family when we got there, and Sara, age 3, told us the following jokes:
Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?
A: TO POOP.
Knock knock.
Who's there?
Banana.
Banana who?
Bananya glad I didn't say orange?
Knock knock.
Who's there?
Watermelon.
Watermelon who?
WATERMELON ON YOUR HEAD!
Sara also did her "fancy dance" for us and informed us that she laughed so hard at her classmate's misfortune (the little dude peed himself on a field trip to the beach) that her "brain popped out of [her] head." She is a little gem, that one.
Julia, newly minted age 6, is just as awesome.
SUNDAY: Julia's birthday was really heartening. Not only did the entire family show up, but the kids are at that age where nobody is too cool and nobody is too cool - they're all just
kids, and they can all hang. It doesn't last long. On a trip to the supermarket, we spotted a doughnut shaped like a hamburger (!), which I snagged for $0.85 to bring home so that everyone could marvel at it. It melted in the car. Mimi's dad - Julia's granddad - coasted around the front yard on his granddaughter's Barbie Razor scooter (dude can tear it up). Julia chased him in her Barbie Jeep. Mimi's friends drove up from Philly to take us back, and then I drove home by myself. The drive from Philly to DC, by the way, is the exact correct length to think things over and have some good time to yourself without getting bored or antsy.
