of all places, why the mall?

roo flew out here from chicago for her birthday today to frolic in the warm sun, which i feel is a much better choice than staying home in the cold and snow, tagging along with someone else’s birthday party.

we started with brunch at kate’s kitchen, a spree at amoeba, and then decided spur of the moment to go to the charles schulz museum in santa rosa.

so, um, it’s a little, uh, disappointing. let me say that i was actually pretty excited to go and had wanted to go for quite some time, having read peanuts ever since i was a kid, and having been a really big charlie brown fan. to the point where if i were ever to get a tatoo, i keep thinking i might end up getting a young charlie brown looking exasperated.

so first off, all the docents there are pretty agressively helpful octogenarians. while waiting for roo to use the bathroom, one of them talked to me exensively about the morphing snoopy exhibit, which is cool, but pretty self-explanatory (and you know, i can read signs as well), and not really requiring of a five minute explanation.

and then she was trying to direct me to the introductory video, and how that worked. and how that it would loop. so if i got there in the middle, just wait for it to start over. because it will. because i guess that confuses some people.

and then the video itself was pretty dull, and i only lasted like 45 seconds there. the sad thing was that it was talking about what sparky liked to do, and it said that “when he got bored and needed inspiration, he would walk across the street, and spend time at the mall.” this, i find more depressing than anything else i’ve seen at the museum. i guess i should be happy that he didn’t end up at the tcby instead.

i guess the problem is that it’s pretty tiny. not that i was expecting the guggenheim or anything, but you figure with such a legacy and fifty years of strips, they’d just have more. there was a nice recreation of his studio upstairs, but i was quickly chased away by another agressively friendly docent. there were some funny strips about love downstairs, including a series which i don’t remember where peppermint patty and marcie are hounding charlie brown about which one of them he likes better. but really, there just isn’t that much to see. you figure with the fifty years of strips he did, if nothing else, just pack that hall with hundreds of strips, why not?

you could probably just stay home and read the art of charles schulz book instead and get more out of it.

Posted at March 13, 2004 11:38 PM