The Fourth of July

Yesterday was July 4th, America's birthday. Consequentially we had a "fee free" day at Grey Towers. We kept the doors of the mansion open all day, and had staff stationed in each room to talk to visitors about what they were seeing. I was stationed in the sitting room. Overall the day was hectic. We had 388 visitors total, and I learned one very important thing: unless people start asking you questions about something, keep it simple.

The sitting room is basically the Pinchot's living room. There are a few things that everybody should know about the room. 1). It was origianlly two rooms, consisting of a breakfast room and formal dining room. Cornelia took out the diving wall in the early 1920s and after that the Pinchots never had an indoor dining room. 2). The paintings on the walls are on canvas that were attached to the wall, they are not murals. 3). The embelishments on the walls (there's a lot of them) are painted on the wall. They look 3-dimesional, but they aren't.

That's basically what I said to people most of the day. By the end of the day I was so sick of talking that I would only bring up those things is people asked me, or showed interest. Otherwise I just let people walk around unattended.

There were several things that happened throughout the day that really puzzled and amazed me. People were really interested in riding our very slow elevator, even though there are only three stories to the house. I was supposed to help people with the elevator because it has two stops that open to admoinistrative offices and if they pushed the wrong button they would be wandering around our offices. People would often come through the door of the mansion and make a bee-line for the elevator. They would get on and get the door shut before I even had a chance to warn them about the various stops. So I found a few groups of people wandering around in parts of the building that they shouldn't have been. There was one couple with a little boy in a stoller that rode the elevator up and down about five times. They kept walking around the various floors and then moving on, then going back to the same floor and looking around again. They visited the sitting room four times.

There were also people who told us the furninshings were in bad shape. There were people who gave me there business cards because they could do something to help Grey Towers, if we could pay them. There was one man who I asked to stop leafing through a 19th century book because we weren't allowed to handle them without gloves who asked me if I could lend him gloves so he could continue to look through it. I told him that I didn't have any gloves with me, but what I wanted to say was "I can't just let a random stranger walk into the house and start handling the antiques, gloves or no gloves."

So that was my fourth of July. People never cease to amaze me with their poor judgement, their sense of entitlement. By the end of the day I was tired, cranky, and sick of talking about the sitting room.