I received a text from Anne today, it went like this, “Overheard: So I heard about Jan and Pete’s new tattoos!” The trouble with text communication is miscommunication, and trying to rendezvous with Anne and Joanie today was fraught with this. At one point, Anne was standing up on a hay bale, surveying the crowd, looking for me. A passing wag asked her what she was looking for, “My husband”, she replied. “Looking for a husband”, he asked? “I’m looking for my husband”, Anne said. “Now you are getting all picky”, said wag signing off. Trying to meet someone in a large crowd, like today’s Best of Missouri Festival, is always a problem. I never did manage to hook up with them, but in the end, we both managed to find our ways home.
The picture with this post shows the latest sculpture addition to downtown’s City Garden. It is called “Big Suit”, by Erwin Wurm, an Austrian artist who just happens to share my birth year. It is constructed of painted aluminum. Wurm called his work, “Big Suit”, but it looks like an empty suit to me. Detractors of President Obama have off-time referred to him as an empty suit, this encapsulates in a phrase, a sense of weakness. The sculpture is a big suit; no man alive could fill it. Still, the Prez of Us, sporting a pink suit would be mighty fine to see. It would be Smokin!