Williamsburg: Part Deux

A breakfast outing to Mama Steve's Pancake House fuels us for our final day of Williamsburg exploration.  Having conquered the majority of the historic area, we set our for the merchant district where we make good on some tax free shopping to add to our trunk collection.  We can already see mayhem in the classroom as boys fight over felt hats and frilly collars!

Next stop: the Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg--a large brick building that once was a mental hospital "for these miserable Objects, who cannot help themselves."  A small exhibit pays homage to the old institution whose patients were thought to have diseases of the brain, and were treated with full restraints, isolation, torture, and bleeding.  A small concrete chamber containing only a small cot and chains large enough to hold an elephant, and eerie childlike drawings on the wall was among the attractions, as well various torture devices and disturbing recordings of doctors with their patients.

The mood downstairs is of a very different aura, the gallery showcasing folk art pieces donated by the omnipresent Rockefeller family.  Beyond that is the well-endowed exhibit of the DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum which displays artifacts of all manners from the 17th and 18th Centuries.  The collection boasts everything from aging wooden rifles and leather ammunition satchels to heavy copper and iron cooking utensils (which are more reminiscent of the hospital's torture devices than relics of a culinary nature!), and long corridors of silver platters, jugs, candelabras, kettles and trinkets.

The next wing of the exhibit is most impressive with its ornate wooden grandfather clocks, gilded armoires, and plush velvet and silk recliners--constant requirements of the gentile elite.  Perhaps most telling are the series of portraits... snapshots inside the true nature of the period's upper class.  Last among the museum's corridors are the rooms of instruments such as the oh-so-influential banjo (yet another high jacked piece of African culture), and an entire room dedicated to sociable activity of drinking tea!

After finishing the museum tour we make our way to the auditorium in time to catch "Mother, Sister, Wife: the Women Around George Washington."  The hour long performance features the female relatives of our Founding Father gathered around a quaint kitchen table careful to observe customs of elegance and propriety while discussing their anxieties over the war for independence and their cloudy, impending fates.  George's mother, Mary, is portrayed by a bitterly outspoken old lady hell-bent on getting what's owed to the widowed woman responsible for raising the Commander in Chief.  The play is an honest depiction of the period's women who were torn between being strong for the men who needed them in times of war, yet helpless as inherent victims of their sex.  All three woman were clearly guided by moral compasses of love, honor, patriotism and faith.

We weren't sure we could do it, but we've actually accomplished all we set out to see in the colonial town of Williamsburg, and are anxious to join the ranks at Yorktown--the backdrop for America's final victory over the limey Brits, and the setting for the birth of a new nation.