The Severed Cortex

Link: http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/illinoisnews/story/392EB402367572EA8625744D000B9224?OpenDocument

Look at how long ago we did this.

This was probably not one of Robert's favorite things to do. Ten year old kids have the attention span of a rabid ferret on double espresso (stolen from Dennis Miller), so looking at art work is definitely not going to be on the top of Robert's fun list. But, it's not all about having fun. Part of this experience is to expose him to things he wouldn't necessarily be exposed to. Yes, I used the phrase ten year old and the word expose in the same paragraph. Don't go there.

We headed to lovely Belleville from Alton in the mid-afternoon, just as it started to get hot. There's really not much to do at an art fair but walk around and look at art. Strangely enough, that's exactly what we did. There were the usual suspects there ... jewelry, textiles, wood bowls ... some of which were better than the usual run of the mill stuff. (As if I could do any of this ... all the artists were a bazillion times better than I could do). We saw one guy that made these wooden bowls and on top he would carve a frog or lizard or gila monster; very Southwestern stuff. It looked like a real lizard was sitting on top of it and the detail he put into it was amazing. But those weren't the coolest things. We also saw some giant animal caricatures. At least that's what I'd call them. There was a giant giraffe that was at least 12 feet tall and a huge frog. They were painted in vivid colors and were made out of ... well ... I'm not sure exactly what they were made out of. Fiberglass maybe? Some sort of ceramic maybe? Who knows. They were very cool and very expensive. I think they were asking $8500 for the giraffe. You'd think at some point the artist would get tired of lugging the damn giant things around. But even those weren't the coolest thing. The coolest thing were these kick ass dinosaur/monster looking sculptures. Some guy made them out of who knows what, but the details on them were incredible. He even had some that looked like baby ones hatching out of eggs. They were very cool for both 10 year old and 42 year olds alike.

After walking the entire circuit, Nancy decided there was nothing there she couldn't do without. We got back in the car and proceeded to drink our body weight in water. It was then decided that Red Robin would be a good place to get some food. It was. Despite our rocky start many months ago when it opened, I do have to admit they have good burgers.