Post ILD Meetup - Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

Hey everyone! This past Saturday the 13th I held a meetup for my comm. There was nothing planned for ILD and it a lot of people seemed to have made plans that weekend already, so I put something small together for the weekend after. It was supposed to be a picnic actually! But a few days before the meet, there were varying percentages of 50%-60% rain that day, so on the suggestion of someone else (thank you Julia!) I decided to just change the activity to visiting the ISG museum. However, closer to the day of the meet, it turns out the rain forecast had changed and there would be nothing! I remember I was also worried that because the pride parade was happening in Boston that day, that things would be a bit busy and chaotic, but there actually weren't as many people in the city for pride that I thought there would be + festivities stayed pretty much in the areas near the parade and other specified festival locations. Damn. But I think it ended up just fine anyways - some of the highs that day were 90 degrees, which is somewhat hot I think but not entirely unusual for Boston. (We just aren't used to day in-day out 90+ degree weather like other areas of the country are, so dealing with the heat in lolita can be a challenge.) The indoor activity seemed to be better since I think a lot of us may not have had as much of an enjoyable time in the sun. Including myself just six people total attended the event, which I was very thankful for their attendance, patience, and understanding, since I changed the event activity about 3 days before the event! I was worried there would be some confused and annoyed people but everyone seemed pretty fine with it. This was my first time hosting a meet, so I definitely learned a few things to keep in mind for the future.

I stood and watched these goddamn geese hold up traffic, it was great. Love the awkward babies.

The Isabella Stewart Gardner museum is a "living museum"; it is literally Isabella's house that she used to live in, and all the art (three floors worth and a courtyard with a glass roof to boot) is her own personal collection. She was a Boston socialite, a philanthropist, and of course, an avid art collector. She has been noted for being quite eccentric back in the day!

This is the modern facade of the building, didn't get a picture of her house where the all the actual art is.

Unfortunately, the museum is noted for its infamous art heist on March 18th, 1990. You can read more details here and on the musuem website but here's the basic gist of it: Two men pretending to be Boston policemen gained access to the museum, where they were able to restrain the museum guards, and make off with about $500 million worth of artwork. With only a few guards on duty, convincing disguises, coupled with the rest of the city's preoccupation with St. Patrick's day festivities at the time, I suppose it was the perfect storm for the thieves to be able to get away with a Vermeer, some Rembrandts, a Flinck, a Manet,  a few Degas drawings, an ancient chinese bronze cup, and a Napoleonic-era finial (a decorate object that goes on top of something such as a dome).
The stolen objects sadly have yet to be recovered; when you walk around the museum there are some empty frames that you can see up in the various galleries, eagerly awaiting the return of the stolen pieces. It is considered one of the largest robberies due to the value of what was stolen. Despite this, experts remain puzzled over exactly what the thieves chose to steal as they passed over other more valuable items in the museum. It's quite sad either way, and I hope that the art is safe somewhere, hopefully not destroyed or affected by poor environmental/conservation conditions. I hope the art is found in my lifetime so I can go back to the museum and see!

The museum itself has an amazing collection, but I think due to the robbery, unfortunately you are not allowed to take pictures in any of the galleries, except for the lovely courtyard. Actually, I think this isn't a bad idea; I think sometimes in museums I get too caught up in trying to photograph all the exhibits. I felt like I was really able to take it all in and enjoy my surroundings and just appreciate the moment. Luckily, the museum isn't that expensive at all - $15 regular admission and there are discounts with student ID or if you get a museum pass from your local library (I got one of these and only had to pay $5! Good deal!), so if I get the hankering to come visit again, I definitely won't think twice about it. It's also free to those who are named Isabella ;)

Before we entered, I took some coordinate shots of everyone. I finally took photos of every single person at the meet, hurray!

After that, we headed straight for the courtyard, which features a lovely mosaic in the middle, as well as some fountains and statues. The garden is all real, with different flora and fauna that bloom during the different seasons!

As for the galleries, they were quite amazing. There are three floors, and all the different rooms have particular themes relating to certain eras of art, certain countries, or particular types of art. To name a few, there's the Macknight Room (featuring objects meaningful to Isabella, such as objects from her travels), a Spanish Chapel, a Dutch room, a tapestry room, a Raphael room (with paintings and furniture pieces from the Italian renaissance era), a Gothic room, and another chapel. The rooms did not feature just paintings on the wall like a typical museum or art gallery, but had all sorts of wonderful furniture that she collected. Things like sofas made from spectacular red velvets, beautiful chairs with musical instrument shapes on the backs with silk and brocade upholstery, all sorts of wooden and metal chests and trunks, tea and plate sets, a piano, beautiful carved tables, lamps, light fixtures, and candelabras with floral designs...even the wallpaper was beautiful. It was just amazing. Of the art museums I've been lucky enough to visit so far, I think this has to be my favorite. The living museum concept is very interesting - I think it's quite incredible to think about how these beautiful galleries were her literal home and personal collection.

I think my personal favorites were the Gothic room, the tapestry room, and the chapel. For this meetup, I did a 180 degree from my usual gothic coords I've worn the past few times and showed up in a very sweet Metamorphose coordinate, lol, but too bad I didn't wear my Stained Glass of St.Giles, as it would've fit in perfectly with these rooms! Again, no photographs are allowed, but these are some photos taken from the museum website:

As you can see in the center of the photo, the gothic room features a portrait of Isabella herself! Unfortunately it was on loan to another museum when we visited, so it wasn't on display.

The tapestry room had so many large tapestries all along the walls! There were also plenty of portraits and religious/bible related paintings and art pieces, and other various portraiture.

The chapel was a real, personal chapel that Isabella put together. The stained glass was incredible, and she had a number of chairs/pews along the walls. Not pictured are the various art pieces and religious items like bible paintings and crucifixes and crosses.

Some of the other rooms we visited also had neat things like fire place sitting areas with pretty velvet chairs and sofas, fountains, Degas paintings and charcoal drawings, a violin, floral light fixtures, there were even some letters from Marie Antoinette and other French Napoleonic era pieces as well. Some of the rooms had balconies with a view into the courtyard. So much inspiration for my future mansion when I become a millionaire! There were some historical artifacts from Isabella's life as well (like letters she had written and received).

You can view more information and photographs here. I do encourage everyone to have a look at the photographs of the other rooms!

Afterwards, the six of us had split up for lunch. Julia, Jackie, and I decided to try museum's own restaurant, Cafe G, with seasonally-changing menu items inspired by artwork featured in the galleries as well as recipes from the woman herself, made with locally sourced ingredients. It's kinda one of those swanky-type places that sell more pricey dishes with small portions and fancy plating. It wasn't too bad actually! I don't often go to restaurants like this (nor are there too many interesting options within a short walking distance of the museum heh) so I decided to treat myself, especially since I had the meet with ILD in mind.

Julia got the steak and egg special, and Jackie got the salmon special. I got a gruyere, tomato, and fennel quiche! For desert, I decided to try the vanilla pot de creme and the other two tried a cake with an odd name that I cannot remember right now, but had rhubarb and some ice cream on the side and was very nice when I tried some! My pot de creme actually was not dans un pot, but smeared on a stone tablet-like thing, haha. It was very artsy looking~ The restaurant was pretty as well, it was really open and inviting, but I forgot to take pictures because I was either entranced in conversation or in food!

ETA: OH MY GOD I ALMOST FORGOT....THERE WAS A SINGING HOST AT THIS RESTAURANT? This man with like, a baritone voice who was the host also sang...I remember while waiting for a food he started singing "Happy Birthday" to a table near us, and then there was an old lady sitting next to us who asked him to sing for her, and he just started sing some sort of Italian opera song. It was wild. I took a snapchat video of it. Maybe I'll post it on my tumblr? But it was amazing and I totally forgot to write about it. Go to Cafe G for the singing opera man if you don't want to go for the food.

All in all I had a really fun time even though I chucked the picnic idea last minute! Thanks to everyone that came, I really appreciated it + your patience in the last minute venue change! Also big thanks to Julia for coming up with the idea of visiting the ISG museum - I had been wanting to visit this museum and didn't get the chance to until now. This is definitely a place I will come back to with friends and family and I hope we have another meet here in the future as well!

Like my last post, you can stop reading here if all you are interested in was details of the meet, the rest of this is just my time after Julia, Jackie, and I had left and then split up. The end of posts are always just for my really long rambling about other details of the day.

Like I mentioned before, the pride parade and festival was happening that day. My friend Aria was actually in the city as well because she was volunteering for the Worcester Pride booth, so I went to go meet up with her. My whole day had been going swell so far, but unfortunately Aria wasn't having as nice a time! She got into the city but couldn't find her booth in the area that it was in, she ended up just walking around the hot Boston Common and Faneuil Hall area and grabbed lunch somewhere until she came to meet me in the common. While waiting for her, a dude walking with his friends tried to hit on me I think...which was weird. Boston Common wasn't exclusively pride territory but the parade was still going on when I got there. I feel like...people are not known to go to pride to romantically/sexually mingle with straight people, so to me I just thought that was kind of a weird thing to have happen to me at this event...oh well.

I definitely do understand now what everyone means though when they say that they get more attention (both positive and negative) in sweet lolita, though. The past 3 meets I've gone to I've been in gothic and I definitely didn't get as comments as I did while in sweet, however, I will say most of my compliments when I weren't with the group being collectively complimented, came from either people obviously commuting to pride or people at pride in general. The pride-going people just seem like the type of people to appreciate alternative fashion more? I wonder what sort of reactions I would've gotten if I went wearing Nameless Poem, lol.

Oh right, relatedly, in other weird interactions with people, when I was buying a charlie ticket before I hopped the T to go to the museum, there was this lady who I'm pretty sure was taking my picture. I went to a ticketing machine in the corner of the train station, the corner is dark and gloomy and there's...literally nothing exciting to take a picture of.  While waiting for my ticket I looked around and saw this lady approaching, I just assumed she was gonna buy a ticket as well and, hey, she even stood behind me! But on approach I noticed she had her phone in hand. I think we all know there's a difference in stance between just looking at your phone and when you're taking a picture...this lady was clearly either taking shitload of photos or even perhaps a video...she stood behind me and I kept turning around and staring at her as I walked away and she just kept her phone out on me. Like, when I left the ticketing machine I remember turning around and watching her phone just straight up follow me.

If you're going to take photos, if you're a lolita, you know that everyone always prefers that you just ASK. I find that most of the time, lolitas are fine with being asked permission, and will gladly pose for you. It's really, really creepy and weird to stand there and fail at trying to sneakily take a photo. Hell, if you're gonna be a creepy asshole and take photos from afar without permission, at least be good at taking sneaky pics! Everyone I see is just so god-awful at trying to pretend they aren't taking a photo, but as you can see, there are even people who are super brazen about it and seem to not care. The worst offenders IMO are the people who then try to pretend they weren't doing anything when confronted about it. I was already a little far away and also just wanted to get on the T by the time I figured out this lady was definitely taking pictures of me so I decided to just let it go, but I kind of regret not speaking up and making this lady feel like an ass, mostly due to how obvious she was being. Next time I definitely won't stand down.

Anyways, back to meeting up with Aria, I found her and we proceeded to try and figure out how to get back to her car she parked in Newton. For some reason no one we asked could give us clear directions on how to get to Federal street (even the park rangers? who seemed kind of disinterested in dealing with us tbh) so I just decided to use the map on my phone. (Another good reason there were no pictures allowed - I had a lot of battery life left, and I just use my phone camera to take pictures which can eat up a lot of battery.) Federal street has a bunch of bank and corporate buildings. It was kind of amazing - since it was a Saturday there were practically no people in that area of Boston and I had never been in that area of the city here, so I was mostly just delighted by the fact that there weren't really any people and cars around! We met another guy who also had been at pride waiting for a bus though. He said he was waiting for a different bus from ours (and had seen our bus come by on the regular) but he was waiting for his for two hours. Another girl from pride also joined us. After waiting and waiting I pulled up the bus time tables on my phone cause I wanted to know when the next bus would come, I decided to look up the dude's bus first since she had been waiting so long, and, well...I hated to be the bearer of bad news, but I found out the weekend schedule for that bus in particular was different on the weekends and didn't even come to Federal street! We found out that he was going to our stop though, and so was the other girl, so we all got on the bus together. The bus was also empty so that was nice :) I freaking hate public busses so I rarely go on them, only when I have to (like when bus service replaces some areas of service on the t due to track work).

Aria and I ended up getting back to Newton just fine and she drove me home, yay! Last time I was on the train, no one collected fare, and then I didn't take the train back home either. No one collected fare again when I was on the train, and then since Aria gave me a ride, I still have a round trip ticket I haven't used yet! I'm not sure why they keep not collecting fare though...the last time the train was busy due to people going into town for the ball game, this time around there was the ball game + pride...it seems to me like both of those are times you would really want to collect fare from everyone since there's so many people there to get money from but whatever, I'm not complaining! For two round trip tickets? That's nearly $40 in my pocket. (I live farther out from Boston so a round trip is about $18)

Again, all in all I had a pretty swell day! I was anxious for this meet just cause I was anticipating bad things happening but it all worked out in the end, yippee :')

Thanks for reading!