November 29 Block

Rick was one of the keynote speakers at a conference in Milwaukee today.  There was a dinner last night, so the conference put him up in a really nice downtown hotel.  I decided to go along just for fun.  It wasn't a hotel room, it was a suite, a really, really nice suite.  While Rick went out to dinner with the other speakers, I stayed in, ordered room service, and watched Dr. Zhivago with no commercials.  An upgrade for us would be the Holiday Inn, so a boutique hotel suite was pretty decadent.

While Rick was at the conference today, I went to the Milwaukee Art Museum to see the Impressionism: Masterworks on Paper.  It was a lovely exhibit of pastels, drawings, and watercolors by the Impressionists from Cassatt to Monet to Van Gogh.

The most amazing thing about the museum though was the couple of hundred school children who were there.  There were big round tables set up in the permanent collection galleries with chairs filled with kids maybe 10 years old.  They were all writing and talking with the docents who were helping.  It was phenomenal:  Renaissance art, icons, 15th century silver crucifixes, and 4th graders everywhere!  After once having my younger daughter followed around by a security guard in a Madison museum just because she was a kid, this was a completely different experience.  Hats off to the MAM for making the museum experience so accessible for kids!