12.20.2009

Rare Bird


We took the train north to Salem a couple of weekends ago for another visit to the Peabody Essex museum.  The morning was grey and chilly; the afternoon, rainy; and by the time we left the museum at 5:00pm, it was snowing.  Inside the soaring PEM atrium, though, it was bright and warm. We saw Unzipped, a documentary about the making of Isaac Mizrahi's fall 1994 collection, and a panel discussion featuring Iris Apfel that coincided with the Rare Bird of Fashion exhibit.  Iris and Robin Givhan, fashion editor for the Washington Post, had a lot of interesting things to say about the politics of women's clothes (especially for politicians like Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton). 


The gift shop was full of crazy accessories inspired by the exhibit: necklaces as big as salad plates, huge bracelets, lots of feathers.  I got this fascinator and wore it until we had to go back out into the nasty weather.

After the museum closed, we had an hour and a half to kill before the train home.  We walked over to a little cafe, lured by signs promising Aztec hot chocolate and a chocolate fountain.  I was initially skeptical about the idea of a shared pool of chocolate, but the proprietor assured us that it was sanitary.  (Also, it was free and we were starving, so that tipped the balance in favor of the fountain.)  We ate a bunch of chocolate-covered things, drank hot chocolate, and then ran over to the train station, where we huddled on the open-air platform waiting for the train back to Boston.  It was a fun winter outing--though, someday, I would like to visit Salem when it's not freezing cold.