Last week my daughter (Gray Dickerson, violin) played some Beethoven and Grieg with her friend (Charisse Smith, piano). They performed for the Foreign Service Women's Association as part of a holiday celebration that included sing-along Christmas carols and other music.

The location was interesting: the Diplomatic Reception Rooms on the top floor of the US Department of State. These rooms are ritzy (to put it diplomatically!) — they're dominated by Chippendale furniture, antique clocks, huge paintings, and Corinthian columns ... Hudson River School landscapes opposite pictures of famous dead dudes ... Bombay style cabinets of teak or mahogony, with rosewood inlays ... the Walter Thurston Gentlemen's Lounge on one side and the Martha Washington Ladies' Lounge on the other ... gilt plaster decorations and cut-glass chandeliers ... the John Quincy Adams State Drawing Room and the Benjamin Franklin State Dining Room ... and on and on.

Among the more striking artifacts on display:

• a desk from Thomas Jefferson's rented room in Philadelphia (on which he perhaps drafted part of the Declaration of Independence)
• a Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington, one of 75-100 that he cranked out (he got about $100 for each)
• silverware made by Paul Revere and his father (functional, not ornamental pieces)
• a painting based on the last life portrait of Thomas Jefferson (1821) showing him full-length, standing alert and a bit stiffly, gray-haired, by the columns of Monticello — holding a scroll in his left hand symbolic of his writings on liberty, religious freedom, and education (what thoughts were going through his head while posing there?)

Also striking about the reception rooms: they were entirely paid for by private, voluntary contributions — like the Roman Empire's architectural memorials (see GibbonChapter2).

Other notes of the day:

• the desire of one organizer to save every scrap of paper, including the flimsy signs that said "Reserved" on some chairs ... which reminded a friend to tell of her own uptightness, a trait which led her husband to nickname her "Lana" (spell it backwards!)
• the bizarre finger food: tiny canoe-shaped pastries bearing turkey-meat cargos ... blueberry mini-muffins with ham and jelly filling ... cylindrical biscuits with holes punched partway through, filled with thumb-tip globs of butter
• the piano (Harry S Truman's), and the metal detectors to scan visitors before they enter the building
• the good-natured way that a room full of archetypal "little old ladies" came together to sing songs of hope, love, joy, and peace

(for another perspective, see InfraStructure, written a year ago in the basement of an old Georgetown mansion)

TopicPersonalHistory - TopicArt - 2001-12-19

(correlates: GoForBaroque, PrivateCommunication, OppositeAttractions, ...)