Geeky Gothy Road Trip: Salem, MA

This weekend I took a much needed road trip with my most excellent of travel pals, Eliyanna (who used to be my co-executive editor at $pread). We’ve also had fun traveling together on my 2007 summer East Coast book tour, and this past summer we went to Amsterdam together. We’ve also done a variety of $pread-related adventures together (including Vegas in summer 2006). We have three objectives on our trips: 1. get lost on purpose, 2. eat awesome food, 3. learn about weird stuff.

This weekend, I had the bright idea to go north and explore Salem, Massachusetts. It had all the right elements, and we had a totally awesome weekend. We drove up Friday night (drives both ways involved talking, consuming sugar, and listening to Pseudopod and Radiolab) and pretty much just crashed at the Salem Inn, a lovely B&B with a variety of staircases and hallways that made us confused, but whatever. In the morning we discovered that they have a bunch of zebra finches, in addition to several fire places. We didn’t get a room with a fire place, but we did score a room with a whirlpool bath, which was totally awesome.

On Saturday we got right to the witch tourism. There are a few layers of cheesiness to the witch experience in Salem – mostly there are a lot of dioramas that light up and have some quantity of dust on them, but the storytelling was pretty damn good. And though I know this stuff from reading The Devil in the Shape of a Woman, it’s always disturbing to be reminded about the price that non-conforming women have paid throughout history. Eliyanna and I had good talks about feminism, forms of hysteria, and witchery all throughout the weekend.

There are a bunch of cemeteries in and around Salem, but this one we’re bundled up in is Old Burying Point, which was established in 1637. John Hathorne, who was the judge at the Salem witch trials, is buried there. Though others involved in the trials later admitted they’d lied and made stuff up and said that the accused weren’t really witches, Judge Hathorne publicly stood by his role in the trials (and the death of 19 condemned men and women). He’s an ancestor of Salem resident Nathaniel Hawthorne, who altered the spelling of his name to distance himself from the shame he felt about the Judge’s role.

We were impressed by the headstones and the stories they do and do not tell. This guy died in 1790 at age 97 – impressive, as most other folks in this cemetery were dying in their 50s and 60s.

After several hours of history goodness and me torturing Eliyanna with my jokes about it being colder than a witch’s tit, we defrosted with a wine tasting and some quality time at the Derby Square Bookstore – Eliyanna is pictured trying not to disturb the carefully stacked books. The store’s two keepers kept popping out from behind the piles to urge us to ask for help instead of trying to retrieve books ourselves. Every book in the store, all used but in good shape, was 50% off. Most excellent, and most dangerous for book hoarders like us.

Before dinner we headed to the House of Seven Gables. The only way to see the historic house was to take a guided tour – which actually was a series of performances of Christmas scenes from famous works of literature including A Child’s Christmas in Wales, Little Women, A Christmas Carol, ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas and -uh- The Diary of Anne Frank (the last of which was traumatizing enough when Eliyanna and I went to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, a little too much for the holidays). I whined a little about attending something called A Classic Christmas, but overall it was really awesome. And wholesome. But we counter-balanced the wholesomeness on day two.

Sunday morning we did the continental breakfast at the inn and then set out for the Salem Wax Museum. I’m not generally an enthusiast of wax museums because I find them kind of tacky, but Eliyanna convinced me with promises of death masks. It was satisfyingly creepy. For example:

After the witch trials of 1692, the hanged witches (all 19 of them) weren’t given Christian burials on account of them being agents of the devil and all. Instead, they were dropped into shallow graves in the woods surrounding Salem – no one knows exactly where. Note the placid looks on the gravedigger’s faces. But wait, the best part is yet to come!

Also in this massively creepy diorama is an illustration of the fact that shallow graves and rains meant that body parts would poke out of the soil. It’s hard to see in this picture, but there is a rat snacking on the blue, bloated foot. I don’t think the limbs would be so well preserved and bleeding though. But still – awesome.

At the end, we got to make wax casts of our hands. I got excited about being able to make a red right hand a la Nick Cave, plus an added flourish. So, this is now in my home office right next to my Feminist Porn Award:

We lunched, and then on our way out of the cafe, we saw a striking postcard, for a burlesque performance called The Slutcracker (beware auto-playing sound file and pop ups for all menu items). It was on our way home, and we had an hour to make our way to the Somerville Theater for the matinee performance.

The show was awesome. A burlesque, fully choreographed satire of the Nutcracker, with a giant dancing pink vibrator instead of the nutcracker figurine, plus lovely burlesque ladies of all shapes and sizes. This pic from my iPhone shows a moment in the first act that involved a 10 foot tall cock and balls painted like a candy cane and spurting fake snow. Amazing.

And to top it all off, the basement of the Somerville theater houses the Museum of Bad Art, which I’ve wanted to go to for years. They spent a while without a public exhibition space, but have found a home. And, whoa. Most of the art is not bad on purpose, and it’s been curated from yard sales, thrift stores, and trash piles. They are getting more and more intentionally bad submissions however. The descriptions and titles for the pieces really make everything extra-awesome (for example, there was a painting of a vase-less bouquet of flowers standing on a table called “No Apparent Means of Support.”) This particular piece is from the “Pointlessism” school of painting: