I spent my morning stationed in the ITVR gallery, for those
of you who are not museum insiders, ITVR stands for Internet, T.V., and Radio –
the focus of the gallery. I kept busy making laps of the gallery, resetting
kiosks as I went. In these passes I read different tidbits on the evolution of
each news medium. I learned that initial problems with the color white in TV
broadcasts caused female performers to don green makeup and black lipstick. The
position offered more space to roam than some of the other galleries, something
that I came to appreciate in the four hours I spent there.
In the afternoon I was stationed on the sixth floor, home to
today’s front pages, the Pennsylvania Avenue terrace, and the Every Four Years
Exhibit. Visitor traffic seemed to pick up in the afternoon, and I tried my
hand at monitoring the waves on school groups rolling through the floor. The
key to working on the sixth floor is stopping kids from running and from
spitting off of the balcony. The second act happens with surprising frequency,
the perpetrators are distinctive with their guilty smiles and darting glances.
An odd side effect of this position is the uneasy feeling of being trapped in
middle school, something I’ll be happy to leave behind.
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