Hoogies

Nina's cousin Michael got married, and we took the bus out to Philadelphia to visit. We caught the Bolt bus on Friday out on 12th Ave. by the Javits Center, the gray concrete baking in the late afternoon soon. The sun set during the journey, and it was dark when we pulled into 30th St. Weird: Downtown Philadelpia is a ghost town, to its discredit. Market St. is all office towers, nobody inside except maybe a security guard at the front desk playing smartphone.

We'd booked a room in the wedding block at the Sonesta, a modern-looking hotel that was apparently beginning to re-open after a renovation. Some of the floors and amenities were still off-limits, and the elevators all had plaster-dusted cardboard on the floor, but the outdoor swimming pool was open! We could see it out our windows, many floors below. At Nina's urging ("Do all the things"), we ventured down to check it out in the pre-noon hours the following morning. The pool was on top of an intermediate floor of the hotel so that we could look out over sunlit roofs of downtown Philadelphia on one side, the black obelisk of the rest of the hotel towering over us on the other. Nina waded up and down the shallow end of the pool. I mostly just put my feet in. It was very quiet, and we were almost the only people we could see; occasionally we would catch a glimpse of a painter or contractor doing something in a room on one of the sealed-off floors. Sparrows hopped around. The bride and groom are both public transit enthusiasts, and the "goody bag" they'd left for us at the front desk included sufficient SEPTA tokens to get us around for the weekend (along with an admonition to donate them to a less fortunate Philadelphian if we couldn't use them). The wedding was at the Old First Reformed Unitarian Church on 4th and Race. Nina and her brother and I took the Market-Frankford line from the City Hall stop near the hotel to 5th St. It was a Quaker service, meaning that the official proceedings were short, but there were a whole lot of benedictions from the witnesses. Friendly nerds, most all of them.

I spent the whole weekend straining my ears to catch a fragment of Jon Wurster's Philly Boy Roy accent but came up dry until Sunday morning, when I was walking through an alley back to the hotel after an unsuccessful breakfast forage. An old woman and her adult son were walking ahead of me, and I overheard that distinct, peculiar way of speaking: "Did you talk to him last week?" "No, I'm going to call him on Tewsday."

We stopped off at the Mütter Museum on our way to the bus station. I'd heard a lot about the place. My mom and my sister had visited on a road trip many years ago and came back thoroughly titillated. Nina is the prowd owner of their 1993 wall calendar, which lives in a pile of prestige items (hardcover book of battlefield photography; Clash On Broadway boxed set) on our coffee table's lower shelf. So I was expecting an intimidating physical presence, but the Museum is about the size and external demeanor of a Brooklyn Public Library branch -- not the huge central one with the gold-leaf Masonic symbology around the entrance, but one of the Park Slope branches, say, tidy brick with a lawn that no one's bothered to sweep free of dead leaves. Inside, the collection is mostly localized to a single large, split-level room, which is filled with glass-paned wooden display cabinets jammed with specimens -- mostly skeletal -- of human morphological non-conformism, some with an explanation or some description of provenance, others with a simple typewritten slip of paper, yellowed with age, giving only the date of the donation. The presentation is very neutral and mid-century scientific. The cabinets are packed shoulder to shoulder with one another, and each one runs floor to ceiling. In another room on the first floor there's an exhibit on battlefield medicine in the Civil War. There's a booth you can step into to see what you would look like as an amputee. A large stairwell takes you down to the lower tier of the main collection, where there's more stuff, grouped anatomically: Eyes, noses, spines, genitals.

A cabinet at one end of the first floor displayed the personal effects and photos of the late Dr. Mütter himself, who was handsome -- nothing of the "Innsmouth look" you might have reasonably expected -- and died young, in his forties. In a back room of the ground floor there was a similar display noting the recent passing of the Museum's director, Gretchen Worden. She was 56 years old. It made me feel sad, and brought the most disturbing aspect of the collection into focus. The specimens of people who seemed like they'd been dealt a rough hand by birth or by accident, and for whom contemporary medicine could / would do nothing: The skeleton of the dwarf prostitute who'd gotten pregnant with a fetus too big to deliver; the model (it better be a model) of the enormous colon possessed by the Human Windbag, a circus performer who pretty much filled up with shit and died. It reminded me of the hero's final question from The Sirens Of Titan: Why are we created only to suffer and die?

This turned into more of a downer than I wanted it to. Good things are in the offing. Nina got us tickets to see Ana Tijoux in July. Watch this and tell me she can't spit.

We ferried out to the St. Andrew's vicarage in Saltaire to visit Billy and Sarah and Baby Charlie last weekend. It was a bright, hot day, and the gang gathered at the house (Kim, Chris, Jessie, others) was itching to run out to the beach. I'd neglected to pack swim trunks, either by accident or subconscious motive. I felt self-conscious about my bald head and mugwump-like physique, and I wished I could have stayed in a protective and concealing tent like Baby Charlie, who was sporting a bright yellow bathing costume like one of the original X-Men's. But Billy graciously lent me a pair of his own trunks, and Nina and Chris coaxed me into the cold blue water, and it was actually a lot of fun. We bobbed in the deep parts, and splashed around until the afternoon change in the tides drew the waves up higher and stronger than we could handle. In the evening we rode the vicarage house bikes out to Surf's Out for some food. While we waited for Billy and Sarah to show up with the stroller, we elbowed our way into the crowd listening to the band playing in the restaurant's outdoor space. They were Rich Mahogany, five or six swollen middle-aged dudes, red-faced and sharing a glans-like appearance. To their credit, the crowd was dense with ladies, and from the ambient chatter it sounded like many of them had traveled to the island just for this show. (The Cravin' Band had opened the evening; double-header!) We walked away from the noise, out to the pier, where we found a tiny boutique selling beach towels and doo-dads. They were selling "throwing snaps," too, and we bought a couple of boxes to arm Chris for an evening's entertainment.

On the ferry ride back, we were packed cheek-to-jowl with drunk, middle-aged Rich Mahogany fans -- some of whom had been fighting in the restaurant bathroom -- leaning this way and that as the boat pitched in the darkness. It was a Boschian vision of hell, but not a very bad one.