VISITING THE MFA ... OR MY FRIKKIN' ADVENTURE

Today we took the entire grade on a field trip to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to get some glimpses of ancient civilizations, particularly the Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians.  We only set off the alarms twice.  Well, I mean I only set off the alarms twice.

Here's the deal.  I should've gone into the music room first because we ended up missing it, even though I've been in there about a hundred times before.  They have a musical instrument there called a Serpent, that's kind of cool to look at.  They have all kinds of interesting stuff in there, but we ran out of time to go back to that end of the museum.

We did get to see the Samurai exhibit.  I knew there were Samurai swords there, and I kept trying to get back to the room where they were, but they keep rotating the flipping exhibits.  When we finally followed the directions, we discovered room after room had been dedicated to the Samurai stuff, including two life-sized displays of horse-mounted warriors.  Spectacular!  Worth every squeezed-in second.

But the place was too crowded, too mobbed.  We couldn't spend any time anywhere because we had to keep moving lest we be eaten up by the throngs of voracious art appreciators or rival school groups.  We rushed through the exhibits like it was a NASCAR event. 

Unfortunately, my group missed an entire room on Rome because of the crowds, but I was told later that there was an enormous statue with a giant phallus holding up a tray of fruit (impressive feat by any standards).  While I'm terribly sorry that I missed that one, I'm not at all sorry the students in my group and my son's group (he chaperoned, the brave soul) missed the display.  We saw enough T&A without the statue of the amazing "waiter" serving food by defying sexual gravity.

Of course, we raced to see my favorite painting at the MFA, Watson and the Shark by Copley.  This was after we saw the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings of Renoir and Cezanne and Gauguin et al.  The children didn't have a clue as to the importance of what they were seeing.  My mother was an art history major; I knew exactly what I was seeing.  But I am a storyteller, so Watson and the Shark has always been my go-to painting at the MFA when bringing students.  There is a huge political story behind the painting, as well as the real story of a teenaged cabin boy who loses one of his legs to a shark in Havana Harbor, but the children, sadly enough, have not been schooled in American history up to this point (with the exception of the yearly commercial break of Thanksgiving when we mention the Pilgrims, yet again), and the tale of Copley's artistic politics would be wasted oxygen.

As we move through that section of the building, some of my students try hiding in a corner by a window.  Why the museum has these little hidden corners is beyond stupid.  I see the boys cramming themselves into the area near the window like clowns in a car.  So I do what any responsible chaperone would do, I bend forward to look around the corner and see what they're doing.

Only one problem:  There is a painting in front of me.  My head smacks the frame of the painting, lifting the artwork ever so slightly from the wall.  I realize to my horror and to the amazement of my students, that I am now balancing thousands of dollars worth of history on my head. 

Amidst gasps and hushed whispers, I take a moment to decide what the hell I am going to do.  Surely I have set off the laser alarms as not only have I crossed the tiny floor-marked line of sensors, I have actually physically engaged with the art itself.  Oh, what to do, what to do?

Once I hear the kids whisper, "Let's get out of here!" I realize they're going to abandon me.  I pull my head straight back and stare at the painting, which wobbles precariously to and fro as if it is going to fall completely off the wall.  For about seven seconds, that damn masterpiece is swaying and dancing and banging against the display wall.  We all seriously believe that it's going to come down. 

Suddenly we see a security guard racing for us.  I look at the kids, my eyes as wide and amazed as theirs, and I yell, "RUN FOR IT!"

Never in all of my years of teaching have I had a group of children so ardently prepared to follow my directions.  My group of eleven and the group of ten traveling with my youngest son, who so graciously allowed himself to be volunteered as a chaperone, all high-tail it out into another area of the museum, closing the door quickly behind all twenty-three of us and making a beeline toward the nearest exit.  What the hell -- It's almost time to regroup at the buses, anyway.

Instead of an exit, we find an outdoor garden with chairs.  We go out to it and sit, catching our collective breath and wondering how on earth we would've explained this debacle, had the picture fallen or had we been caught, to the administration.

When we finally feel relieved enough that we have outsmarted security, we re-enter the building and start for the exit, but we find ourselves lost in the lower rotunda.  After a series of directions, we almost make it to the correct place but get disoriented in the Blue and White Exhibit.  I lean over to ask a different security guard a question and step directly on a laser alarm system. 

The guard pushes me out of the way, which shocks the students who see the female brute put her hands on me, and I swear I see a couple of them blanch white like they're going to faint.  Surely we are going to be arrested before we make it back to our bus in the lot, and I just know in my heart that these loyal little cherubs will completely and without compunction throw me under the security bus before they board their yellow one outside.  "SHE did it, SHE did it, and she MADE us do it, too" they will chant while pointing at me from afar like witnesses at the Salem Witch Trials.

Luckily, and by the grace of the Egyptian gods we've come to see, our group manages to find its way outside and into the safety of our transportation home.  After all the berating and the finger-wagging and the warnings, it is I who sets off the record number of alarms for the day.  Ha ha ha, isn't it just the best joke in the office when the story, that I did not tell them, mind you, makes its way around from the vice principal to the secretaries.  It'll make its way to the principal when she returns from the Washington, DC trip tonight with the eighth graders.

Truly, though, it was a great day.  We sang Christmas music (in June) on the bus because the social studies teacher hates holiday carols, our entire bus did a ten second dance routine before disembarking back at the school, the kids in my group missed the giant alabaster penis, we got to see Watson lose a leg, and I balanced priceless artwork on my head.  And the one kid who nearly puked?  Not in my group nor on my bus.  Hallelujah!

All in all, it was another successful and eventful field trip … even though I'll probably never be allowed to chaperone one again.