ART AND MORE BOATS

Today we went to the Farnsworth museum  in Rockland.  It's dedicated to the works of the three Wyeths and other Maine artists.  The town is another cute, quaint, town and bills itself as the lobster capital of the world.  I don't know, it seems to me that coastal Maine is lobsters, lobsters everywhere.  We had an extremely knowledgable guide in the museum who really knew how to keep the group engaged.  Most of the paintings are by Andrew Wyeth, but there are a couple of paintings each by N.C., his father, and Jamie, his son.

This one is by Jamie Wyeth.  

This is by Andrew Wyeth. 

This isn't by a Wyeth but has a great story.  The artist was so affronted by Prohibition that he and a friend and their families moved to France, where angels bring bottles of wine down from heaven.

We also visited the Old Snow Shipyard  Sail, Power, and Steam museum.  The owner is an old captain who limps stiff-leggedly around with a cane and has dozens of stories of old ships, their captains, their voyages -- and eventually they all have some interesting connection to him.  He also has a building full of old pictures, ship models, old engines that can run on steam, and a homemade foucault's pendulum. 

After dinner we went to a meeting of what I assume was the local storytellers club.  I was a bit reluctant to go, because I thought it would be the kind where people have memorized long stories, but this one had a five minute limit and everything was okay.  We heard a tale of a mans two grandkids, one of whom at 8 got to throw it up the opening ball at a Major League Baseball game, and the other got to go to Obama's birthday party.  That was the most prosaic.  Another was about it a couple who got involved Ina commune that turned into a cult,  one a man who at 36 decided to sail solo from England to America and lives to tell about it, and the most moving was a woman who was nearly killed by a street thug when she was 17 and 8 months pregnant.  It was a very interesting hour.