To Diorama For.

In honor of my new and soon to be popular Flickr group "Framing the Marvelous Museum Model", I am going to recall some of my favorite museum/tourist attraction set-ups on here over the next couple of days.

I have been racking my brain for examples of people doing metadocu projects on museum models, like taking pictures of animals in natural history museums, or gangsters in the Autry Museum, or spunky fifties waitresses from Route 66 museums, but I can't recall if I have heard of such work. I am sure there is something if only because I know I am hard at work documenting all of the historical fake wax people and animals and city and geographical models I can find. Documenting the display; a travelogists work is never done. Next up: the Cereal Box or Beer Display photo collection group. 

The greatest diorama/museum set up in all of my travels has to be at the "Old Exhibit Building" at The Hoover Dam.  It's the building near the 'angels':

The Hoover Dam itself is probably one of the most patriotic tourist attractions you can visit. It is even more American than Mount Rushmore because those carved faces aren't really doing a whole lot, other than reminding us that chicks can't be prez, and Teddy R's 'stach will always be in style. The Hoover D is one of the greatest engineering feats in the world, 660 feet of concrete at it's base, it supplies power to three states, and it might have been the only huge gov'ment construction contract to be built ahead of schedule.  (At the expense of a few lives, but I said it was American, didn't I?)

When you visit the Hoover Dam in the summer like I did, you can't believe than anyone could work in the kind of heat dealt out by the Nevada sun, let alone deal with heavy material like concrete and steel in such a death oven. It's the kind of hot that makes you nauseous and forget you have a stomach. Like the sun rays have wrapped a hankie of chloroform around your face and are kidnapping you into a heatStrokeComa. That is what happened to my sister on our way back to the parking lot after 'the tour", she was about to get pulled into the sunstroke abyss, nearly fainting and ralphing from the 110 degree heat, when we found refuge in a strange little building behind the Art Deco Angels.

We opened the door and found a nowhere age looking woman in a short blond cut holding up a guestbook. "Can we sit in your air conditioning for a minute?" "Of course, drinking fountain is right there. Would you mind signing our guest book?" We found out she was born and raised in Boulder City and that it was a downright big town in its own right, now, positively booming actually because not everyone could afford to live in Las Vegas and even if you could afford it who wants to live with the heathens and the rif-raff. and after the bypass gets built the traffic will be better... "You girls should stay for the show" "What kind of show?" "A show, well, a presentation about the Coloradao River Basin." If my sister had been fully recovered I'm sure we would have left because  presentation sounds dryer than the desert air, but we thought waiting for the show would buy us some more AC time...

"You can go in now"

We should have known by the light wood doors and the tan speckle floors and the green wall accents and the metal clock and the WPA letters and the silvery drinking fountain, that this would be a presentation that we would want to see.  Why didn't she just say DIORAMA?

When the doors opened to reveal the sweet Colorado River Basin diorama, it was like a little child angel had blown a cool kiss from Santa's workshop in the North over our heat woes. How precious it looked. A real live diorama with folding wood theater seats for undistracted viewing!

The presentation begins when the lights go off and a familiar deep voice explains all the towns and functions and statistics of the Colorado River Basin. "The Colorado River and its tributaries drain over such and such gallons of such and such..." As he says each name "Salton City" "Lake Mead" "Glen Canyon" the sections of the diorama light up and you think about how the river and the west and how you lived in Los Angeles and how lovely it all is and how lovely this presentation would be if you were back in old recreational desert holiday time in a shirtdress and pill box hat and had taken the side trip from the Sands with your rat packer wanna-be newlywed husband. DIORAMA power forever!