Asakiyume mita

Marilyn Monroe, the Tattooed Lady
Just over the border at the south end of town is a tattoo parlor with some great associated art, including a series of circus-poster-style portraits of various random famous people that the artist must admire. Here is Marilyn Monroe as a tattooed lady--she has JFK on her left shoulder and the legend "Enter if you dare" on the ribbon underneath her.



The artist also painted this much-tattooed guy menacing the van beside the shop:



A Bell and Its Stories

Very close to the tattoo parlor is a small park with this bell at its center. It's all that is left of a grammar school that once stood there. wakanomori did some Internet research and discovered that the school was built in 1891 (to replace a school built in 1828), was in use until 1991, and burned down in 1994. (Great photos of the school at this site.)

The bell apparently went missing in the 1960s, only to be found in 1974 ... in the bell tower. Surely more to that story there than meets the eye . . .


Even its origin story is interesting: it was made in 1877 by one of two competing bell foundries, both called Meneely Bell Foundry, located in what's now Watervliet, New York. You can make out part of the word "Meneely" in this close-up:



Mailboxes
Meanwhile, closer to home: these mailboxes. Are they waiting in line for something? Or are they part of a parade that's temporarily stopped while a band performs for the judges? Or are they just loitering? They had better watch out, if so. I'm told the police take notice.

A lot of the inmates at the jail have amazing tattoos on their necks or arms, often swirling words that I mainly can't read because of the loops and flourishes of the design. This past Friday, though, it was one of the corrections officers, one I hadn't met before, who had a really fabulous tattoo.

At first I saw only that it was a lot of words, in different fonts, some of them quite cool (like the font of seventeenth-century books, for instance). Then I saw that it was a series of quotes--I recognized first "I'm nobody! Who are you?" from Emily Dickinson.



"Hey, you have Emily Dickinson on your arm!" I said.

"Yeah," she said with a grin.

"And 'Spiritus Mundi,' from . . . not Shakespeare, it's TS Eliot--no! Yeats," I said, and she nodded.

"But I've got Shakespeare too," she said, and sure enough, she had "All the world's a stage." She also had "Nevermore," and "It is the strangest yellow, that wallpaper," which she confirmed came, indeed, from "The Yellow Wallpaper." She told me some of the others, but I forgot them.

"They look really excellent, too," I said, thinking of the spacing, and of the different fonts. "Did you design it yourself?"

She said she did.

Pretty cool. It's not every day you meet a corrections officer with literature embedded in her skin.

Oh yeah, I nearly forgot. Here's what the jail looks like.



P.S. Later in the day, a guy behind the counter had a tattoo of the state of Massachusetts on his arm, with a star slightly left of center. "You are here," it said under the map. I guess he doesn't travel much?