So damned cold

So cold we actually bailed on skiing yesterday. We were going to go up north for an adult ski day, but it was 6 below as we got ready to head off and nobody was saying it was going to get warmer than 5 above (maybe it got to seven), so we bailed. Waste of a perfectly good day. Today it’s still super cold, 5.9. Supposed to warm up later on, but then we’re getting a couple inches of snow, and the girls are at a wizard camp up in Troy, so I need to be able to get them in the afternoon. So unless it warms up dramatically in the next two hours, no skiing today for me. It’s a shame, because this snow will leave things sweet. Oh, well.
Yesterday would have been a complete loss except that we finally got over to the show of Harry Benson photos of the Beatles at the Albany Institute of History and Art. I hadn’t even been there since their expansion/rehabilitation, and it’s very nice. They got rid of a lot of the jumbled feeling of a lot of art tucked into a bunch of tiny rooms, though they lost some of the treasures along the way. The mummies are much more prominently displayed, rather than slapped down in the basement. The old Dutch bedroom is gone, which is just as well — the area is lousy with old Dutch bedrooms, and I’ve been terrified of curtained beds since a long-ago visit to the Institute when we were informed that the Dutch slept sitting up in case they died in their sleep, so they’d be facing their maker. I’ve never heard that again, but let me tell you that can make an impression on a third-grader.
In any event, the Beatles photos were vastly more wonderful than I had hoped. Benson was with them in the early days, on the first American tour, during A Hard Day’s Night, and a little through the later years. These photographs were full of the energy of those four lads, including a magnificent series of a hotel room pillow fight. He also had some great shots of them composing, and the best shot of fans I’ve ever seen, taken from inside the limousine. There was also a nice little collection of local Beatles memorabilia, including a permission slip some father wrote out on Columbia Heating Company note paper to allow his daughter to get out of school to take the bus to NYC to see The Beatles. Very touching. There was a Beatles Disk-Go-Case for 45s, and I had to explain to Hannah what a 45 was (she’s seen them, but wouldn’t have known their name). Hard to believe all that was nearly 40 years ago. There were some pictures of the Wings Over America tour from 1976. At the time, it seemed like the Beatles had been broken up forever, yet it had only been six years.
Rebekah wants to go to Strawberry Fields the next time we’re in New York.