8/4/09
The highlight of the day fro My Kid and The Mother-In-Law was lunch at the Rainforest Cafe in Southcenter Mall which has been inexplicably renamed “Westfield”. As an aspiring downtown Seattle creative person I never went to that mall. Then when we got pregnant and had a baby we started to go there frequently because of the nearby Babies R Us.
The Rainforest Cafe, impressed my kid to the point that it is now her second favorite restaurant after Dave and Busters (beating out Bubba Gump Shrimp). The drinks were too sweet and the food too heavy. But hey there were anamatronic monkeys, elephants and snakes, with live sharks in the saltwater fish tanks. And the dessert brownie volcano was topped with a lit sparkler! Other than that the mall was a bad mall according to My Kid did not get anything. She couldn’t even any clip-on earrings at Claires, her favorite mall store. I looked at handbags, but I did not buy one. She was upset that they were all over $100 and therefore not anything she could expect to get so she stopped enjoying the mall. The only person who got anything at all was The Husband who purchased a much needed pair of casual sneakers to wear during the rest of the vacation. And it must be remembered, My Kid did get the giant special frog-head glass with a toy in the bottom compartment at the Rainforest Cafe so it wasn’t like she was leaving completely empty handed. But, her emotional state may have been entirely unrelated to the mall experience. In the car her child’s piped up from the back seat asking if this was Tuesday:
“Today is Eliza’s birthday and today is the day I’ll never see Mutessi ever again.”
She was thinking about neighborhood friends back in Brooklyn, one lives on our block, the other is moving to Uganda.
Because My Kid’s dark mood plans were changed and I hoped out of the car alone at the Northwest Film Forum while The Husband took My Kid and The Mother-In-Law to Uwagimaya to look for novelty erasers and snacks. Then back to her apartment to make small repairs while I watched the evening of short films about water commissioned by the Seattle Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs with Seattle Public Utilities;
“The projects reflect SPU’s management of the complete cycle of hydrology for Seattle’s water resources from drinking water through drainage, and Restore Our Waters, the city’s initiative to protect and restore Seattle’s urban waterways.”
Everything in the Northwest is green. Even one of our old theatre friends now works promoting sustainable agriculture.
There were 5 films. SJ Chiro (our Annex Friend) created a fairy tale based on a story by Brett Fetzer (another Annex Friend) narrated by Susanna Burney (another Annex Friend) Cynthia Whalen (another Annex Friend) was in it. Other people we knew from our time at Annex worked on the film and some were at the screening and it was good to see them and go to Eleseyan afterwards for some yummy Seattle microbrew.
But, I was filled with mommy guilt throughout entire film event. My Kid would have enjoyed the short films, especially the stop action animation piece in which the role of water was played by clear glass marbles and the two live-action stories featuring children near her own age. I wish she had been there to see some kids on screen from outside the Disney Studio stable and I was blaming myself for not monitoring everyones protein, rest and happiness levels in the hours ahead of 7:00pm in order to alter the balance of my child so that we could have gone as a family to see the films and friends. Besides, there were some friends’ kids in the audience she might have played with.
Two of the films featured novelty photography and modern dancers in the rain which reminded me why I was hesitant to major the arts while at the University of Montana.
SJ Chiro’s films and Kendall Cornell’s latest work Clown Axioms both rely on fairy tale imagery and that is exciting to me.