It might happen!

Today for the first time in 3 days I had enough energy to take a shower and go for a short walk. Out walking, I saw this figurine in the (rather dirty) window of a tattoo shop, and it reminded me a little of the lighting designer and dancer,  Loie Fuller, who is one of the three people who dreamed a quirky museum into being. On Monday, if I’m well enough and nothing else changes, I’ll make a little trip to that museum with the Grands, Seth, & Cristina. I’ve been dreaming of doing this since about 2017, but one damn thing after another delayed it, including the pandemic. 

Here’s the story: three eccentric people sat around in cafés in Paris around 1920 and dreamed this up. Sam Hill was an early ecologist, engineer, and visionary (possibly with bipolar disorder) who owned some property in the middle of nowhere, Oregon, on which he built a mansion to share with his wife, Mary Hill. She left him and took the kids, and he had a grand (but empty) house next to the Columbia River, nestled among windy hills in the high desert. Loie Fuller, the dancer, convinced Sam to turn his empty house into a museum. She had her archive, and she was friends with the sculptor Rodin and several painters. She was also bosom buddies with Marie, the Queen of Romania, who said she could donate a throne she wasn’t using, her coronation dress, and some odd pieces of furniture. I can imagine the three of them drinking endless cups of coffee, drawing on napkins, and whipping up enthusiasm for this non-existent museum. Sam said yes, Loie said yes, the Queen said yes. Somebody said if you build it, the people will come. 

They had a glorious Dedication of the space in 1926, but all three of them were dead by the time all the details were worked out and the museum opened to the public in 1940. Fortunately a fourth rather nutty but wonderful person, heiress to a sugar fortune, took over after they died and devoted her life to making it happen. She consolidated Sam’s collection of Native American art and gained access to the foot-high wire models used by Christian Dior, Lucien LeLong, and that crowd when World War 2 ended and they didn’t have enough fabric to build clothes, so they made mockups for miniature wire women. Then the first curator of the museum was a chess enthusiast, so he collected 300 chess sets, and boom! Maryhill Museum! 

Sam hated war, so he built a couple of Peace monuments, one being a fake Stonehenge located just a mile from the museum. I’ve been to the museum and the monument several times since I moved to Oregon in 2008, but I’ve never gone with the family, and I think we might actually pull it off this time. I hope I’m not jinxing it by writing about it two days ahead of time. If it actually does happen, I won't have to explain about it. Fingers crossed.

There's a vibrant, lengthy article about Loie Fuller here, if you'd like to know more about her. She probably hated figurines like the one in the tattoo shop window, but hey ho. She didn't know about Blipfoto and the desire to find a photo a day, somehow related to what's going on in your life.