Iowa Girl on the Go

Do you remember when you were a kid and the Sears Wishbook arrived in the mail? It had that plain brown paper wrapped around it, right? You couldn’t wait to rip it open and see all the new toys…it was almost better than Christmas!

I sort of feel the same way about the new 2011 Iowa Travel Guide. Does this make me a total geek, or what? I sent away for the book a couple of weeks ago, and it came to my house over the weekend. I was so excited! I spent many hours going through the book, writing down all the things I want to do this year once the weather warms up.

I guess it’s possible that THE WEATHER WARMING UP is the key phrase here, but I really am excited to start exploring more Iowa towns, historical sites, state parks, and festivals. I think my list is long enough to get me through about five years of weekly Iowa Girl posts! I thought when I started this project that I had seen a lot of the state, but it turns out that there are towns and attractions I never even heard of that I now really want to visit. Here are some examples:

• The Iowa Rock ‘n’ Roll Museum in Okoboji (I can go there after Arnold’s Park)
• Art Deco architecture in Spencer (and visit the library where Dewey, the world’s most famous library cat, used to live)
• Onawa, home of the Eskimo Pie (and then drive through Loess Hills)
• Iowa Falls nature center
• Whiterock Resort
• Latin Heritage Festival in nearby Marshalltown
• Laura Ingles Wilder Museum in Burr Oak
• Pearl Button Museum in Muscatine (a whole museum devoted to pearl buttons – can you imagine?)
• The Mines of Spain Recreation Center in Dubuque (I don’t know exactly what this is, but it sounds so exotic!)
• A swinging bridge in Columbus Junction
• The Vedic Observatory in Fairfield
• A Prairie Christmas at Living History Farms

Seriously, I’ve got my whole year planned! Let me know if you have ideas for me, because I am telling you, this is just the tip of the iceberg. I could do this for a living!

Another weekend, another trip to Des Moines for a mid-winter event. My husband is starting to get bored with these things, but the event last night, dubbed “Indulge: A Wine, Cheese, and Chocolate Affair,” definitely hit the spot with me.

Held in the wondrous West End Architectural Salvage building at the corner of 9^th and Cherry downtown, Indulge was more than a wine-and-cheese tasting party, although it was certainly that. Event-goers were offered limitless samples of wine (both local and international), local cheeses, chocolates, bread, granola, and other goodies. But, to me, it was the environment that made this party special.

I’ve been to the West End shop many times, and I love prowling the floors and floors and floors of stuff – they have everything from vintage light fixtures (gazillions of them, none of which I can afford), doors, tin ceilings, tables, mirrors, doorknobs, all sorts of fixtures, wine racks, and an assortment of other architectural bits and vintage finds. Each time I’ve gone there, I’ve taken note that they have event space (mostly on the first two floors), and it’s occurred to me that I should try to get myself invited to one of these events someday.

This Indulge party wasn’t by invitation – the second-annual event was advertised in the paper and on various Des Moines websites. The cost was $20 per person, including a cute wine glass, and the cost didn’t seem high at all to me, especially considering how many tiny glasses of wine a person can potentially consume in four hours.

I didn’t stay that long, but long enough to thoroughly get my fill of Maytag blue cheese on crackers (why does Maytag blue cheese always taste better when it’s scraped off the giant wheel than it does from the little foil-covered triangle in my refrigerator?), blue cheese drizzled with honey (a new taste sensation), and Maytag’s other cheeses (cheddar, aged white cheddar, and baby swiss). I started worrying that the Maytag ladies would recognize me, I went back so many times.

Other favorite treats were chocolates from Chocolaterie Stam and Bochner Chocolates (everything I tried was melt-in-your-mouth delicious), more cheeses from Frisian Farms (a superb Iowa cheesemaker), hummus and olive tapenade spread on crackers from Sbrocco, bread and granola from Big Sky Bread Co., and, of course, wine, wine, wine. I drank many glasses of an excellent cab blend from Madison County Winery, plus Italian reds from Sbrocco and The Grapevine…all the while coveting the tin ceiling panels and funky furniture and listening to live music by Brian Congdon. Not a bad way to spend a frigid Saturday night.

What could be better on a cold, snowy January day than listening to live blues in a tropical rainforest?

For two hours each Sunday this winter, it’s possible to forget you’re in central Iowa at the Des Moines Botanical and Environmental Center’s “Botanical Blues” series. The series is held every Sunday through the end of February, from 1-3 p.m. Ticket price is the same as the Botanical Center entrance fee: $5 for adults.

The Botanical Center is a tropical paradise inside a dome made up of 665 triangular plexiglass panels within an aluminum frame. The dome, built in 1979, houses all manner of tropical plant life including palms, banana plants, rubber trees, orchids, and hibiscus. It’s warm and lush enough to make you forget about winter for awhile.

Yesterday’s blues concert featured Brad “bebad” McCloud and “The Bear,” a duo who entertained the crowd with a nice mix of original songs and classics from the likes of Muddy Waters.

Adding to the idyllic environment is the opportunity to purchase beer and wine in the adjacent Riverwalk Café and bring it to your seat. Paradise!

The Botanical and Environmental Center is located at 909 Robert D. Ray Drive, just east of the Des Moines River in downtown Des Moines.

I waited until the last minute to order tickets to see one of the last performances of Triple Espresso (at least for now) at the Temple for the Performing Arts in downtown Des Moines. I’ve been wanting to see the show…but I was afraid to commit to buying tickets too far in advance in case Mother Nature decided to drop a foot of snow on the ground.

I almost waited too long. I got two of the last tickets in the next-to-last row at the third-to-last performance. Whew!

The show is legendary in Des Moines, running for 16 months in 2002-03 and returning for multiple repeat engagements. Two of the show’s three performers, John Bush and Patrick Albanese, spent so much time in Des Moines that they decided to move here.

Triple Espresso is a light comedy set in a coffee house in 2002. The storyline begins with performer Hugh Butternut (Robert O. Berdahl) celebrating the anniversary of his coffee house performances – apparently half his life has been spent there. To celebrate, he invites his old partners, Bobby Bean (Bush) and Buzz Maxwell (Albanese) to join him. The show alternates between the present-day 2002 and flashbacks to the trio’s earlier performances as far back as the 1970s.

As I was watching the show, I was thinking, “This is a show about a goofball, a sadsack, and a lounge lizard.” The three diverse personalities play well off each other and the plot (if you can call it that) is just plain fun – no more, no less. It may be the last show directed at adults that isn’t a bit R-rated. (So bring the kids if you want, but I guarantee they’ll be bored.)

Highlights for me were Albanese (as Buzz) performing a sad, pathetic – and therefore hilarious – magic act. He was so nervous that he had to keep stopping his act to breathe into a paper bag. At one point, as his trick was clearly going into the toilet, he asked the audience if we could close our eyes for just a minute. It was a truly inspired bit of bumbling.

Another funny bit involved the Bobby Bean character performing shadow puppets like I’ve never seen shadow puppets before. And the dance the trio performs with six pieces of construction paper is indescribably funny.

Triple Espresso involves some audience participation – we sang and did hand gestures and called out our favorite songs of the 1970s (“Did I hear Muskrat Love?”) – and I was glad that I was on the next-to-last row to preserve my anonymity…those folks in the front got picked on a lot.

The current run closes today (Sunday, Jan. 9), but I’m sure it will be back soon in all its caffeinated glory.

Happy 2011!  This is my first blog of the new year, and it’s my first blog on the snazzy new MacBook Pro that I got for Christmas.

This weekend I finally made it down to the Science Center of Iowa to see the Leonardo da Vinci exhibit. My main interest in da Vinci, and my previous knowledge, is mostly about his art. This being a Science Center exhibit, it didn’t surprise me that many of the galleries focused on his many inventions. He truly was a Renaissance man – possibly the definition of Renaissance man – and his interests and talents ranged from flight to war to the human body to travel to music to, of course, art.

I watched the 50-minute BBC documentary first, showing in the Science Center’s comfortable John Deere Adventure Theater, and although the film ended right about the time I thought da Vinci’s life was getting really interesting (he was just beginning his rivalry with Michelangelo and had not yet painted the Mona Lisa), it did show his early years (as an illegitimate child who was not allowed to have a formal education), his life in Florence and then Milan, his fascination with seemingly everything in the natural world, and his probable homosexuality. The film was the perfect set-up for the exhibit, and I recommend watching it first (it starts on the hour).

The gallery exhibits include scale models of da Vinci’s inventions, as they appeared in his sketches: flight, physics, hydraulics, you name it. More interesting to me were the enlarged sketches of the human form in great detail, Vitruvian Man, The Last Supper and other artistic reproductions. Best of all: a whole room of the Mona Lisa, dissected by French engineer Pascal Cotte, whose highly detailed infrared photographs answer the “secrets” of the artist’s most famous painting. It’s an absolute delight.

Probably the most amazing part of the exhibit is just thinking that all of this happened more than 500 years ago. The exhibit is on display through March 20.