My great friend, Dorothy is a widow. I am divorced. As I alluded to in my previous post, Valentine’s Day isn’t a fun holiday for the…um…unattached. (And I’m sure that’s not exactly a news flash to those of you who fall into the same category!)
Well, not ones to sit around feeling sorry for ourselves, we decided to meet up with a group doing the Downtown Arts Walk.
The endeavor was doomed from the start. Dorothy doesn’t drive freeways so I was at the helm of her Lexus (a nice change from my lowly PT Cruiser!). She told me she wanted us to take her care because it would be good for it since it never gets driven on anything except surface streets. To blow crud out the engine, so to speak.
We had planned to meet up with everyone at the Edison Hotel where they were offering 35 cent martinis from 5:00-7:00 in honor of the day. Whoo-hoo!
We had planned to leave at 4:30 but that was nixed because my boss had missed his plane and I was helping him get an alternative. So we set off closer to 5:30. First mistake: we decided to take the 405 South to the 10. Bad idea! No accidents (which was good), just too many cars, not enough freeway. When we finally reached the 10 East, it didn’t really improve. But we spent the time chatting so it wasn’t too awful.
Then I noticed the time. It was 6:15. The martinis were officially off. *sigh* But we could still catch the group for the walk. We passed one of those helpful/mocking signs: “Time to Downtown, 40 minutes.” Wait…no we couldn’t.
But, hey, we had all the information we could just do it on our own. Again, wrong choice. We cruised onto the 110 doing a majestic 7 miles an hour. (So much for blowing crud out of the engine!) We got off at 4th just like Google Maps told us to and promptly found ourselves in an empty downtown. We passed streets with familiar names but couldn’t remember which direction they ran. The Google map had been to get to the
But, wait! A sign for MOCA! Whoo-hoo! We’ll just go there and catch the Dash bus (which was running in a loop). If we don’t find the group, no problem. We can still see the galleries.
Problem 1: Although we saw intermittent MOCA signs, we couldn’t seem to find the museum itself. The signs were of the “MOCA Nearby – Guess Where!” variety rather than actually giving anything so crass as an exact location. But we figured we MUST be near and cruised into a handy parking lot. There was a lone worker strolling by and we asked where to park for MOCA parking. He confirmed that we were in the right place – we just needed to “Go down there and turn left and follow the arrows……It’s easy!”
Clutching our parking stub, we tried to follow his vague directions. I love it when the implication is that you’ll be able to follow directions easily (“Just follow the arrows”), not allowing for the fact that there are places where the arrows go both ways.
Don’t you love it when the implication is that you’ll be able to follow directions easily, not allowing for things like having to make turning decisions with no signage to guide you?
Amazingly, after a good deal of driving around in the deserted underground parking lot, we managed to find a bank of elevators that promised to take us up to MOCA. We parked (remembering to make a note of where the car was), went up to Plaza Level…and promptly found that MOCA and any signs referring to it were nowhere to be seen.
It was dark, cold and really windy. There were so few people that things had that post-Apocalyptic look – which should have told us something! Spotting a Koo Koo Roo across the street, we headed there for more directions. The lady behind the counter looked at us like we were mad. “It’s right across the street.” Where we’d just come from.
Sighing, we stepped back outside and pushed our way, against the wind this time, back to where we’d started. Turning left we walked half a block and there it was. The man at the ticket booth gave us the good news first: the tickets were free. Whoo-hoo! Then came the bad news: the museum was open for only 23 more minutes. (I swear he said “23 minutes.” Not “less than half an hour” or even “25 minutes”…”23 minutes!”)
Wonderful. We’d just agreed to pay $11 to park for 23 minutes of museum time. Using my trusty calculator, I find that breaks down to just under $.48 per minute.
We sighed (yet again), accepted our free tickets (“Be sure to put the MOCA sticker on your shirt!”) and headed for the entrance. At least there were a few people inside.
Once we entered, we were once again reminded of the importance in putting the stickers on our shirts. Why? To keep people from sneaking in to the FREE museum? As a theft deterent? (“Well, I was going to walk off with that Mondrian, but, see, I was wearing this sticker…”) Or just because they can tell us to do something dumb and we’ll do it?
But at least we were IN!
End Part 1
1 comment:
Thank you -- why not post more??
Post a Comment