Vierailulla 1700-luvulla

Amerikkalaisen Slate-lehden toimittaja Emily Yoffe on muutaman vuoden ajan kokeillut asioita, joita ihan kaikki eivät tee. Tuoreimman jutun aiheena on työskentely museossa, jossa henkilökunta "tulkitsee" menneisyyden henkilöitä. Yoffesta tehtiin maatilamuseon naapurin rouva.

En muista törmänneeni suomalaisissa museoissa varsinaiseen tulkitsemiseen eli siihen, että pukeutumisen lisäksi käytös ja vastaukset pyritään esittämään menneisyydestä. Yoffen jutun mukaan tämä yleistyi Yhdysvalloissa 1970-luvulla ja nykyään tämän tapaisia museoympäristöjä on yli sata.

Mitä toimittaja sai irti kokemuksestaan? Korsetti ei ollut epämukava vaan sen tuoma ryhdikkyys tuntui historian kapaloilta:

As a historical interpreter at the farm, the foundation of my transformation into an 18th-century woman was the foundation garment called "stays—the fabric and bone device that tied around the upper body. This was not the wasp-waisted, heaving-bosom look of a Scarlett O'Hara corset. Instead the torso in stays becomes almost cylindrical, one's front flattened, one's back held straight. Good posture was a matter of propriety, and both Colonial boys and girls were put in stays. Males were released around age 7, but females spent their lives in them. I expected stays to be a sartorial prison. Instead, I enjoyed them. They made my movements deliberate, my posture impeccable. I felt as if the past was swaddling me.

Vaatetus toi myös siveän olon:

For one of the farm's special events, a Colonial wedding, I acted as a kind of hostess, engaging our 21st-century guests in small talk, encouraging them to dance, and handing out cake. With my conelike bodice, billowing hips, ruffled cap, and no makeup (cosmetics are banned on the farm), I felt it would have been easy to live up to my virtuous name [Chastity Crump].

Ruuanlaitto jätti (yllättävän) vaivattoman vaikutuksen:

At home, I am a despiser of the domestic arts. But I loved the meal preparation at the farm. One morning, Cannon got the fire blazing in the hearth, and I assisted with making slapjacks (pancakes made from dried, hand-pounded corn) using fresh turkey eggs, pease porridge (a split pea soup, and, yes, "pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold" ran incessantly through my head as I stirred), and a salad from the dark greens in the garden. There was not a single modern convenience, yet it all didn't take much longer than a meal Rachael Ray would put together. All the women on the farm came down for the midday meal and we sat outside at a long wooden table, shooing the chickens away. I'm not sure why every simple meal I had there tasted so good. Maybe because it was all raised a few feet from where we ate. Maybe it was the witchy satisfaction of women together stirring their cauldrons.

Konkreettinen työ tuntui hyvältä:

After lunch one day Hughes put me to work making tobacco sticks. These are the humblest of objects—long sticks stripped of their bark and planed straight. They are placed across the rafters of the tobacco house where "hands" of tobacco—10 leaves tied together in bundles—are draped over them to dry. I sat on a "shaving horse," a wooden workbench in which I secured the stick so that it pointed toward me. I then took the drawknife—a blade with handles at each end—and drew it across the stick. ... Yet I kept pulling the knife along the stick and it began to smooth and straighten. I fell into a rhythm and my movements started to become fluid. Making tobacco sticks required an action very similar to that used for the latissimus machine at the gym, a piece of equipment I hated. But as I sat on the shaving horse and pulled, my mind began to quiet. I finished my first stick, and as I stroked its silky finish I felt an inordinate sense of accomplishment. I put in another, and I found the scrape-scrape-scrape of the knife lobotomized the usual chattering in my head. A pair of middle-aged women approaching took me out of my reverie; I surreptitiously looked at the watch I had tucked into my pocket. Forty-five minutes had gone by; it had felt like 10. ... Once humans spent most of their days doing useful things with their hands, and I realized that we were designed to get a deep satisfaction from this. As Hughes put it, "You have the feeling people were supposed to do this kind of work, rather than data entry, which is amazingly horrible."

Alla elävänä kuvana museoelämää CIA:n pääkonttorin vierestä: