Would You Like To Sit Inside A Womb?

Portland has a meager art scene. Of course, I don't know what a non-meager art scene would consist of since I'm about as artistic as a shoe, but anyway...we have something called "First Thursday" in one section of the city...maybe other cities have something similar, I don't know. All the local galleries and some random spaces altered to become galleries open their doors til the wee hours of the night providing wine and crunchy snacks in the hopes that someone will buy their wedding dresses made of wire, self published comic books, and pen and ink portrayals of childhood nightmares.

I don't go often, but I did this last Thursday. This last First Thursday. That's just fun to say. I saw things. Strange things. T-shirts glued together to make a giant tidal wave.A gallery entirely dedicated to paintings of water towers. Hula hoops. Anyway...Marie, Kansas and I were wandering the streets when we happened upon two gaunt, scantily clad, nondescript personages standing in a doorway.

Nondescript personage 1: Would you like to sit inside a womb?
Us: Yes.
(some things don't even need considering)
Nondescript personage 2: Then follow the red string.
(points through doorway behind him/her)
Nondescript personage 1: It's the placenta.

Gross.

Then it's through hallways, around corners, up stairs, around another corner and the "placenta" stops through another doorway where some people are taking off their shoes. And crawling into the "mouth" of the "womb"...a small, puffy, red satin opening attached to a red, puffy, satin dome. Huh. We watched the others go in first. You don't just go jumping into wombs all willy nilly. There was some "ooohing" and "ahhhing" from inside and then they emerged, put on their shoes and went away.

Now it was our turn. Shoes came off, Marie went in first. I followed...Kansas brought up the rear. I've always loved that term. We had to crawl through a puffy, red, satin crawl way (is that a word?) until we reached the puffy, red, satin chamber. There was music playing. The kind of music you hear going through that neon light extravaganza tunnel in Chicago O'Hare airport. You know the one. So there was that and in the middle of the chamber was an "egg". It looked like a cracked glass/plastic lamp with a yellow bulb. It hung from the ceiling like a spider egg. And there was a heart beat coming from it. Not a real one...just the sound of one. No need to call Social Services or anything.

We sat there for a while, not sure of what we were supposed to take away from this particular piece of instillation art. Something other than the feeling that this was completely ridiculous, I'm sure. Oh well. Some other dude crawled in. Kansas cracked some joke about how he was welcome and there was plenty of "womb". Then we all crawled out and made the prerequisite jokes about now all being siblings. Which made me look at Kansas and did the ol' "we must be from Kentucky" bit...it just all snowballed from there. The jokes kept coming out...we couldn't seem to stop them. We could tell that the artists were openly ready for us to leave. So we did...just in time to see some more people come down the hall. Some large people. People that were obviously following the "placenta" to the "womb". People who might not fit through the entrance. It took everything I had not to turn around to go back and watch that go down. Everything.

Nothing else in the night topped that.

Wait...that's a lie. I had tachos. TACHOS. Know what they are? Tater tot nachos. Yes.