Shouting against the wind

Have you ever met a mime artist? Is that even what you’re supposed to call them? Mime artist. It sounds odd. Mimeist? Mimeographer? Non-verbal actor?

I’ve never met a – let’s call them a mime artist – so I have no idea what they prefer to be called. Or what they do. Or the schooling they have to receive, the issues that face their careers, the triumphs, the tribulations. Sure, there’s probably a conference once a year, but does anybody talk at a mime conference?

I often think non-museum people view my career the same way. See, a friend of mine was house sitting recently. This house sat on eighty-six acres of beautiful farmland. But more importantly it had food, beer, and a hot tub. Naturally, a lot of my friends came to visit. One of them had been telling me about how his office has yearly “clean up days.” Now, he works for a government agency and the county historian stored some documents at his office. But after years of sitting there, seemingly unused, wasting space, his office was ready to get rid of them. They called the historian, but nobody came. So his office threw the documents away. Threw them out. Forever. Never to be seen again.

I was outraged. And when he told me which documents were on their way to a landfill, I was even more outraged. Once again, history was relegated to a dumpster. But as I launched into my usual speech about preserving history, how it affects current and future generations, ya-da ya-da, something interesting happened. All of my friends just laughed at me. I tried to show I was serious, that this was a tragedy, a catastrophe! Nothing. They laughed, and they changed topics. I was the only person within eighty-six acres who felt any emotion about this holocaust of history.

See, people outside the museum field just don’t understand what it’s like inside of it. The issues we face, the decisions we make, the training we receive, the triumphs, or the tribulations. There was a point in my museum training when I crossed a line, and things change when you cross it. There’s a language you start to understand, a behavior you start to follow. Museum people are in a small and selective bubble, and we can understand each other in a way no one else can.

That night, on the farm with my friends, I was on the inside shouting out against the wind. Maybe mimes feel the same way. But if so, could they even talk about it?