Art Show Confidential

There are some people who believe that parents do not have some inalienable right to bring their kids everywhere; that although  you think your kid is cute and wonderful, the rest of the world is at best indifferent and at worst downright hostile to him; that sometimes you need to leave the kid at home with the babysitter, and folks, I am here to tell you that I am one of those people.

Case in point: Saturday, we were lucky enough to secure VIP access to L.A.'s hottest photography show, Gregory Colbert's Ashes and Snow. It's a truly impressive experience, housed as it is inside the Nomadic Museum (pictured above), a makeshift gallery the size of an aircraft hanger - a temporary Guggenheim on the Santa Monica beach constructed entirely of recycled material. The images themselves are awe-inspiring - well, at least to adults, a couple of thousand of which were there to view them. The lines wrapped around the building twice, a couple of hours' wait just to buy a ticket, and then another couple of hours' wait to actually get inside. But we had connections, and were whisked past the teeming throngs while getting a quick tour of the facility (see the walls? Old shipping containers. The curtains? Thousands upon thousands of teabags, stained and sewn together). Yes, we were excited to step away from our usual Philistine existence and experience some Art.

One problem. Lucas. For some reason, we thought that a hip art show would be the perfect place for a manically energetic two-year-old boy. Yes, we took our Stupid Pills that morning, and were rewarded handsomely; five minutes' worth of sepia-toned portraits of elephants and skinny people in white robes were about all the kid could take, and then the squirming and wailing began. A sort of mortified horror crept over me; they were a surly lot, these people that had been standing in line since 6:00 that morning, and there was some bad juju in the air. I could feel the glares, boring into my back like psychic daggers, and after about two minutes of the aforementioned squirming and wailing I hustled the kid out of there.

Luckily, we had the Santa Monica Pier, with its rides and sidewalk entertainers and most important, a Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf that sells chocolate milk. So Lucas hung out and watched the cavalcade of freaks, tourists, and seagulls, a show more to his tastes. And I tried in vain to scalp the Boris Godunov ticket we bought for him.