Airman Marian

Sorry.  The anagram just jumped out at me.

I spent a near-perfect day at the Udvar-Hazy Air and Space Museum with Marian, who came down from New York for the cherry blossoms and Charity, whose presence makes everything nicer.

The thing that prevented it from being perfect: I was in drab.  I had a lingering cough/sneeze/need to sleep from a cold last week.  Charity was recovering from something else altogether.  I'm moving a bit more down the "it's OK for people to know both my male and female self" path, thanks to Star's SO who sometimes presents male and sometimes female, often with the same group of civilians.

Being in drab gave me a bit of a fly-on-the-wall perspective.  A few times, Marian was off by herself, or chatting with Charity.  A group of people would pass by and look up and I'd tag along behind them for a short distance to see if they said anything about my friend's presentation.  And the result, every time, was...

nothing.

Probably the same response they had to passing any other woman my age in the museum.

That's cool.  That's very cool.  I never expected trouble, but I thought I might hear something akin to when a group comes upon an unexpected situation: "did you see the man with three heads/the woman in a wedding gown/the girl on the unicycle/the baby being held upside-down/the group doing the conga/the flash mob/etc," but there was clearly nothing unusual to comment on.

I like that.  Things like that give my confidence a boost.  I mean, I would have loved to hear "did you see that tall beauty?" or something, but hearing nothing is excellent too.

Oscar Wilde said "the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about."  He was witty, but he was wrong.

One fun thing: Marian and I were on the top level near the stairs when a late-30s guy who was taking pictures turned to Marian and said "you really need a panorama camera in here" and showed her the playback of how his camera stitched together several images to make one contiguous image.  They chatted for a while about the museum until he decided he had to go down to take other photos.

Another fun thing: I walked up to Charity as she was talking to a woman and her young (5? 6?) daughter.  Charity and the girl were talking Star Wars (they had a space toy display case with, among other things, Star Wars figurines) and how there's an R2-D2 figure hidden somewhere in the "Close Encounters" spacecraft in the same hall and kind of how cool science is in general.  The girl mentioned that she didn't like to play with the girls and she liked the "boy toys."  Charity told her that she wasn't allowed to have "boy toys" when she was little and Marian, who had joined the little group, added that the girl was lucky she could play with anything she wanted."

I thought it was a nice convergence of science and gender and generations.

Oh... you can read the visit from Marian's point of view (and see a picture of her and Charity) on Marian's blog.

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