Yesterday, on Friday the Thirteenth, we went to the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth. My parents, both in their eighties, took us there in a week-long celebration of Dorin’s graduation from high school. It was a worthy thing. Unlike most kids, my three are not bored to apoplexy by art museums. In fact, for most of the exhibitions, they traveled at my heels. It seems I know enough about art to fascinate them. All three of them are amateur artists themselves.
The Amon Carter Museum is centered on old Mr. Carter’s collection of the paintings of Frederick Remington and Charles Russell.
Remington was an adventurer and story-teller. He was also a sculptor with a gift for creating action-filled scenes in bronze. The Bronco Buster, the statue pictured here, is on prominent display in the foyer of the museum. It is one of Remington’s first, and one of his best known (in large part due to the Amon Carter Collection). The painting that follows was used as an illustration for one of his western stories. Remington wrote western novels, articles about the west, and factual essays about Native Americans. He had actually lived with Indians for a while and did a lot to lend credibility to everything he wrote about them. He didn’t save them from the depredations of the white man, but then, who could have done that? His nighttime scene is ultra-realistic and you can learn a lot about Indians just by studying the picture.
Russell came after Remington by a few years, but he was a contemporary and an admirer of Remington’s work. Russell is also an artist of intricate detail and accuracy, having also studied Indians from inside their villages and camps. The Silk Robe painting shown below and exhibited at the Carter reveals detailed knowledge of curing a buffalo hide that only could have come from watching the process in real life. He also did bronze sculpture and watercolor paintings along with his fantastic oil paintings. In fact, in his day, Russell was considered a sculptor who also paints. I don’t know how you can look at his cowboy art and still believe that. He is a truly masterful painter.
You’ll have to forgive me for taking a break from the usual humor blog, but I have an overwhelming love for art and painting, and this museum visit put an Indian arrow right through my silly old heart.
Catch a Falling Star 
Free to Be Naked
I managed to finally return to Bluebonnet Nudist Park on Saturday. It was a Memorial Day weekend crowd, so I got to meet a lot of naked people. Of course, I only saw one kid the whole time I was there, and he looked to be high-school-aged. So, don’t let the first picture in this post fool you. Most nudists at the park were closer to my age than the girls in the picture.
But it was freeing of spirit to actually gather around a swimming pool and have an all-you-can-eat hot-dog lunch with 50-plus other naked people. I can’t explain why that strange alchemy can work. But it does.
Having been around nudists at different times for the majority of my life, I can honestly say I have observed nudists to be happier people than the rest of us. Of course, that is a generalization, and not true of every individual nudist. But they are comfortable in their own skin and connected to the natural world the way most of us are not. I found that most of these people knew they were nudists since childhood. Like me, if their families did not already embrace being nudists, they sneaked off to the woods when they could to get naked in nature.
Am I alone in thinking that this is not a mental aberration, but rather, a natural instinct that was trained out of us (or in my case, almost trained out of us,) in childhood?
I don’t have any pictures from the nudist park to post, so I use the usual collection of innocent-seeming illustrations and pictures to add a sense of beauty and youthfulness to the idea of going to a nudist park for recreation. You know its not really the way the pictures show it. I am not the exhibitionist-sort of nudist whose whole desire is to be seen by the world naked. I, for the most part, am a solitary nudist. Not too proud of my lumpy, wrinkled, and sore-covered carcass so that I am obsessed with others seeing me, but also not ashamed of my corporeal self to the point of not allowing myself to be seen nude by other like-minded nude people. Most of my nudism occurs when I am alone in private places where only peeping Toms and computer-camera hackers can see me. I am, however, proud that I have now been to Bluebonnet twice and have a membership in AANR (American Association for Nude Recreation.)
While I was there, a journalist who writes books on American culture used in sociology research at the college level, was there taking pictures and interviewing folks. He spoke to us, confessing that it was the first time speaking to a group of naked people, and also his first time speaking to a group while naked. He explained that he was recording and documenting interesting and important social organizations in an area only 100 miles wide, but stretching from the Mexican border to the Canadian border through the middle of the US. He felt that there were important things to learn about American life from the Bluebonnet Nudist Park just as there were to learn from the Dallas Police Department which he had scheduled for the upcoming week (and he specified he would be wearing clothes for that next part.) Even though I was there for his research, I did not get asked to sign any consent forms for photographs or interviews, so I will not be in that book of his in any way.
I am definitely more confident now in identifying myself as a nudist. I never embraced the idea of actually being one while I was a school teacher in Texas. Texans are suspicious of even letting a Democrat be a public school teacher, let alone someone who purposely goes to a public place with no pants on. I know I have lost Twitter followers and Facebook friends who found out I was actually a nudist. And I feel like I may have lost some of my WordPress followers over it as well. They can’t take seriously someone who walks around with no clothes on.
But my answer to that is… Who in the heck takes Mickey seriously anyway? Get real!
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