Category: Arts & Entertainment

By Andrea Brown, Herald Writer

You know it’s a hip city when the first thing you see at its history museum is a neon beer sign and a fiberglass truck with fat pink toes.

And it gets better from there inside the new Lake Union digs of Seattle’s Museum of History & Industry, known as MOHAI.

In the atrium, the first Boeing plane hangs overhead and a 65-foot spiky wooden sculpture made from schooner planks perforates the ceiling.

Upstairs, there’s Nirvana music, a Lusty Lady sign, 99 bottles of beer on the wall and a replica of the duct-taped recliner from the TV show “Frasier.”

And, yeah, you can sit in that chair, and hold the stuffed version of Frasier’s dad’s dog Eddie on your lap.

This is a fun museum. So fun, in fact, that the movie about the 1889 fire that destroyed downtown Seattle (but took no lives) is a slapstick comedy.

The Seattle’s Great Fire gallery’s sound-and-light show, complete with the glue pot that started it all, is among the many highlights to behold.

The museum moved from smaller quarters in Seattle’s Montlake neighborhood to the 1940s art deco building that formerly served as the Naval Reserve Armory. It has 50,000 square feet of exhibit space — plenty of room to show off the big stuff, such as the 1920s UPS delivery truck and the funky pink Lincoln’s Toe Truck.

“They did a great job setting it up,” visitor Kathryn Hain Martin said.

That great job came with a $60 million restoration price tag.

The museum has a cafe, gift shop, conference rooms and rooftop deck. Rooms have stunning views of the harbor, with window etchings that accent the maritime romance of the region.

The city’s timeline is exhibited on multilevels in multimedia from sticky notes to touch screens and in galleries that from Gold Rush to Tech City.

To prevent sensory overload, the museum is arranged in a maze of galleries and towers. Tower themes include: Boeing Takes Off, Seattle’s World’s Fairs and The Microsoft Story.

There’s a nice balance between new and old. On display are some of those stiff black-and-white family portraits where nobody smiled.

Down the hall, Elvis Presley gyrates on one of the silver screens in the Celluloid Seattle exhibit, which has vintage theater seats, drive-in speakers and a cigarette machine.

Seattle iconic artifacts in the museum include: the SuperSonics NBA Championship trophy in a sports gallery, a World War II rivet gun, a first-generation Kindle E-reader and the original Starbucks sign.

The list goes on …

Plan to spend a few hours and not see everything. You’ll want to come back for more.

Andrea Brown; 425-339-3443; abrown@heraldnet.com.

Exhibits

Celluloid Seattle: A City at the Movies, through Sept. 8. Curated by The Herald’s movie critic, Robert Horton, it shows Seattle in the movies and how the idea of “going to the movies” has changed.

Punctum/Poetry, through May 27. MOHAI’s historic photo collection is showcased in poetry and the spoken word produced by high school students.

Still Afloat: Seattle’s Floating Homes, on display June 15 to Nov. 3. Centered on the floating home community, with photos, oral histories, diagrams and a scale model floating home.

Upcoming event: Parents Night Out: 6 to 9 p.m. March 29. Kids, ages 5 and older, will make cardboard cars for a “drive-in” and then watch a movie.

If you go

Where: 860 Terry Ave. N., Seattle (in Lake Union Park).

Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily; open until 8 p.m. Thursdays

Closed Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day

Cost: Adults, $14; senior (65 and older)/student/military, $12; no charge for ages 14 and younger, with adult. Free admission the first Thursday of every month.

For more information: www.mohai.org

Article by Jeannie Briones and Kim Kalliber, photo by Jeannie Briones, Tulalip News Staff

Everyone faces their own challenges, the good the bad, the ups and downs, which happen in everyday life. For one young Native American woman, writing poetry is not only a therapeutic way of coping with stress, but also a way of expressing happiness.

Stephanie Spiering, a Southern Cheyenne Tribal member and student at the Northwest Indian College Tulalip site, shared her own poetry on February 7^th, as part of the Poetry Series at the Tulalip Hibulb Cultural Center.

Stephanie’s interest in poetry began in grade school and has remained a large part of her life. Her mother and fellow poet, Renee Roman Nose, read poetry to her as a child, introducing her to a world of diverse forms of poetry.

After experiencing a traumatic event in her youth, Stephanie’s mother and aunt encouraged her to write down her feelings as part of her healing process. “It became a way for me to cope with things,” said Stephanie.

By high school, Stephanie had taken a serious interest in penning her words on paper. Now, just twenty-four years-old, she is busy creating poetry, working towards an associates degree in Native Environmental Science and serving as a court clerk for the Sauk-Suiattle Tribe.

Whenever she is overwhelmed with feelings of sadness, happiness or stress, poetry is her way of dealing with them. For instance in a recently written poem about feelings of homesickness, Stephanie writes about the loneliness she feels by being apart from her family and friends living in her home state of Florida, and dealing with cultures that she enjoys but is unaccustomed to.

Stephanie was delighted and nervous about sharing her poetry at the Hibulb Cultural Center. As she began speaking, her descriptive words and theatrical tones brought her poems to life, taking the audience on a journey through one woman’s self-revelations.

“When I write a poem, I put all my feelings into that poem and I go from there,” said Stephanie. “It gets stuff off my chest.”

Her choice of poems for the evening touched on a variety of subjects such as dealing with relationships, being a student, Native cultures, and the environment, and she encourages others to take the plunge and try writing their own poetry.

For more information on Tulalip Hibulb Cultural Center events, please call 360-716-2600 or visit www.hibulbculturalcenter.org.