Kahlo Youth

I felt bad about not having been to the Kimmel Center, where the Philadelphia Orchestra lives, in all the years it's been open. But anyway, now I've been, and one of the interesting things about it was the gift shop. It's full of gimcracks and gewgaws for the cognitive elite—a phrase they're welcome to use for marketing purposes, free and clear—and some of them made me laugh. They had these little dolls of the famously accomplished, like Shakespeare and Abraham Lincoln and so forth. There's a whole subculture of parents who relentlessly indoctrinate their kids with the sense that you should always be striving intellectually, and while I'm not exactly opposed to intellectual effort, at least on other people's parts, I think it could be inculcated in a slightly less driven, obsessive way. If parents sit around reading, or listening to quality music, because they really enjoy such things, that's really going to accomplish more for their kids than a truckload of Abraham Lincoln dolls. A doll should evoke some sort of protective instinct in a young child, and it should evoke it by being cute, which is unfortunately not one of Abraham Lincoln's many qualities. (Shakespeare was cuter, but he does have that Van Dyke and moustache thing going on.)

Which brings us to the Frida Kahlo doll. There was a Frida Kahlo vogue that started in the '70s, and crescendoed in the States when a biopic came out in 2002. In the photographs, you see a striking, intense-looking person. In the self-portraits, though, holey moley, you see the inner person, and it's pretty scary. There's a scene in War and Peace (speaking of enrichment) in which Prince Andrey is walking around at the battle of Borodino and an explosive shell lands at his feet. "The smoking shell spun like a top," says the relevant passage. That's what I see when I look at Frida Kahlo. Just being in the same room with her would be pretty dangerous, I'm guessing. She had a tumultuous relationship with her husband Diego Rivera, and for some reason I'm not surprised at all. (Diego didn't mind her relationships with women, but he didn't like it when she slept with other men. One of the men was Leon Trotsky. Personally I don't see what quality Leon Trotsky had that Frida might have found so compelling. You don't think of the founders of Bolshevism as devils with the ladies but I certainly wasn't there and can't say for sure.)

Anyway, lots of people see her as a hero, admire her, identify with her, and that's perfectly fine. I'm just saying that a doll based on these self-portraits has a certain kind of emotional intensity that's capable of making your kid have screaming nightmares for months. If that fits into your ideas about enrichment then maybe you should change your ideas.

Another thing that made me laugh was a sign about the opera glasses, which they sell for $49.99. "All sales of opera glasses are final," the sign said. For a part of a second I wondered why. Bathing suits, OK, sales of them are final for reasons that occur to us fairly quickly. Then it came to me—a fabulously rich and fabulously cheap concertgoer who made a habit of coming in a few minutes early, buying the opera glasses, and returning them for a refund after the concert. "I changed my mind," the concertgoer sniffs. "They really don't meet my needs."

After about three times, they change the policy. And the clerk is able to inform the concertgoer that if you take the opera glasses, that's it. You have to live with them. I can see the dropped jaw now—no more free opera glasses. It would be worth it to be that clerk, it would be worth it to be a person of modest means your whole life (hey, it's my fate anyway) just to be able to say that.