On Friday I went over to Philly to hang with my friend who moved away last year. She has a two year post-doc and still a year to go before she can return to Philly, which is the plan. It was good to catch up. It seems like she’s been gone so long, but at the same time not that long at all. I’m hoping the next year will zip by.

We hit the Franklin Institute and saw the “Star Wars” exhibit there. It’s a show that’s traveling around the country. It features props and costumes from the movies as well as a lot of hands on science stuff like building robots and making them work. We just went to look at the “Star Wars” stuff! It was pretty cool, they had the land speeder and Chewbacca’s costume (which is gigantic). All the light sabers and various guns were there. They look very cheap and plastic up close, so it somewhat spoils the fun, even though you know they are props.

After that we hit the Philly Art museum where there is currently and exhibit on the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. I didn’t know much about her. I knew they made a movie of her life a few years ago and I knew she had a unibrow. That was about it. It was a very interesting exhibit, yet dark and morbid too. She apparently did not have a happy life at all, fraught with health problems as well as marital problems. I plan to rent the movie.

This was I think my favorite painting in the show. I had a few, but the story behind this one was just such an over the top one. It’s called “The Suicide of Dorothy Hale.” Dorothy Hale was basically a Ziegfeld Follies girl/wanna-be actress who threw herself off the 16th story of a building in New York in the 1930s. Frida was commissioned by a friend of Dorothy’s to make a painting of Dorothy, which was to be given to her mother. This is what she painted! I mean is that insane or what? The story made me fascinated with the painting.