Girl for Sale

Girl Museum's newest exhibition is live over at www.girlforsale.org.  About the trafficking of girls, Girl for Sale is a collaborative exhibition between Girl Museum Inc. and the American Poetry Museum about girl trafficking that interrogates and responds to the issues through poetry, art, and education.

This is a major exhibition for Girl Museum on an incredibly important topic, so please visit and participate.

Girl Museum

Hi everyone,

I just started an internship with Girl Museum, a brand new online museum dedicated to the celebration and exploration of girlhood worldwide.  Our website is www.girlmuseum.org, and we also have a Facebook site.  Please come visit us on the web, and check back regularly, because we're currently working on several exhibitions that will go live over the next couple of months.  Also, if you are on Facebook, please consider becoming a fan (or whatever) of Girl Museum.  And please tell all your friends!

Additionally, March is Women's Month, and we've got a great exhibition planned: the Heroine Quilt.  Each day in March will feature a girlhood heroine, and then in April it will be "stitched" together and become an ongoing exhibition with audience submissions.  For any gals who wish to participate (and I'd like to hope you all would!) please consider submitting a short paragraph on a heroine of your girlhood, why she was important to you, and any impact she may still have on your life.  Also, please submit a photo of your heroine (especially if your heroine isn't someone famous).

Thanks everyone, and I hope you'll support this new endeavor.  It's the only museum out there dedicated to exploring what it means to be a girl, and I'm really excited to be a part of it from the beginning.

Thanks,

Katie

Katie Weidmann

Intern, Girl Museum

katie@girlmuseum.org

www.girlmuseum.org

Zoofari

I got to pet a hippo on Sunday!!!  Adam's parents gave a donation to the Oregon zoo in my name, and made me a ZooParent to one of the hippos in the zoo.  The biggest part of the ZooParent perks is a pass into an annual event called Zoofari, which allowed me to go behind the scenes in a few different areas of the zoo.  Five areas were open, but Grandma and I only made it to two.  Which was ok, because the first one we went to was the rhino and hippo area.  I got to meet Petey, the black rhino, and I got to pet him (I chose not to feed him a carrot--he was very drooly).  He was endearing, and came right on over when he was called by the zookeeper.

After we left Petey, we went over to meet the hippos, who also came (slowly) when they were called.  Their names are Bubbles and Poppy, and like good hippos, they put their chins up on the bars of the gate, so that we silly humans could pet their chins.  I was both surprised and impressed that we were allowed to touch and feed them.  Hippos are very dangerous, but these guys were well enough trained (and the keeper wouldn't let us pet her girls when they started acting up).  I was surprised at how soft and supple their skin was.  I expected it to be rather bristly.  I declined to feed them though, because one small piece of apple or carrot kinda gets lost in their giant mouths.

So yes, Sunday was a happy day, as I got to pet a hippo and a rhino, and meet a giraffe behind the scenes too (couldn't pet him, though :( ).  And lest Adam feel overshadowed by his parents, he gave me Father Ted on DVD and the complete collection of Star Wars Kinder Hippos, and I've looked at them every day for the three months I've had them.  And I've watched Father Ted as well, toasting Jephcott in spirit.

My way of adding to the political "libel"

I got this as a forward from Laurel, who was on my MA course in Leicester with me. No, people don't randomly email me museum related news...I just get it from my coursemates, which is logical.  I didn't like Sarah Palin anyway, but this really sealed it for me.  And the best part?  It's not actually libel (or slander) if it's true.  I would include the link that came with it, but it seems to have died, so here's the article.

REPUBLICAN VP A MUSEUM FOE
Much of the copious news coverage swirling around Sarah Palin, Republican John McCain's surprise pick for vice president, has focused on the relative inexperience of the freshman governor of Alaska and former mayor of Wasilla, a suburb of less than 10,000 people outside Anchorage. However, the 44-year-old Palin had proven experience with one thing during her brief tenure in government: slashing museum funding. As mayor of Wasilla, Palin quickly moved to cut the budget of the Dorothy G. Page Museum, a city-run institution that teaches Alaskan history and includes exhibits about the Gold Rush and the Iditarod.

According to a 1997 report in the Anchorage Daily News, Palin summarily fired museum director John Cooper (along with many other city officials. Palin, known for injecting her religious beliefs into government, also reportedly pressured town librarian Mary Ellen Baker to ban books, and then tried to fire the woman when she refused). Palin cut $32,000 from the Page Museum's $200,000 budget, provoking the three 15-year employees of the museum, Ann Meyers, Opal Toomey and Esther West, to resign en masse. "They'd rather quit than continue working for a city that doesn't want to preserve its history," the Daily News reported. Wasilla was running a $4 million budget surplus at the time.