"Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love." -Claude Monet
The good news was that the four-hour internship period had been reduced to attending a memorial service for some important person in the Lederer Art Gallery. The bad news was that I had to forgo white conservation gloves and artwork in favor of attending a memorial service for some important person in the Lederer Art Gallery.
Day three. I am sitting in between a hyperactive alum who is VERY energetically discussing her life post-Geneseo with a professor and an elderly man who informed me toothily that he had no qualms about sitting next to a "good-looking girl." He was probably in his mid-eighties, had one front tooth that was much larger than the other one, and held his program against his mouth whenever he talked to me. He was nice.
I spend the next ten minutes informing and re-informing my venerable companion as to my major and home county and looking around the room to discover I am the youngest person in the room by about thirty years at least. The exceptions to this are aforementioned excitable alum, a dance professor, and Jean, who is hovering in the doorway and wisely deciding not to take a seat next to any of the inquisitive and forgetful old folk.
As the ceremony goes on, I am struck more and more how memorial services are a lot more poignant when one knows the person it is being given for. I have absolutely no doubt, after listening to four speeches and various artistic performances, that Bertha Lederer was a really astounding human being. However. There are only so many ways to listen to "Hey, so she was really pretty super awesome" when all you know about the woman is that the art gallery your bum is resting in was named after her.
I think I prefer the four hours with conservation gloves.
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