Mr. and Mrs. Gwon's Home for Wayward Singles

My two favorite cousins spent the holidays at my parents' house this year. Both had, within recent weeks, split up with their significant others, with whom they had originally planned to spend the holidays, and so, wound up at The Gwon Home for Wayward Singles. Bad news for the brokenhearted, surely, but good news for me, because having your favorite cousins in Baltimore makes the place less dull.

Now, typically, I am content to spend my time in Baltimore doing absolutely nothing. And by that, I mean eating 'round-the-clock and watching HBO, since it truly is so great and I can't afford to have it in New York. (My sister just gave me the first two seasons of "Entourage" on DVD -- rock on, sis!) The thing about Baltimore is, there is stuff to do if you want to be all touristy about it. There's just no middle ground between going to a museum and seeing a movie. It's either a big production or totally mundane. (The social place-to-be of my high school days, for instance, was the local bookstore, a fact which manages to be both cool and really lame.)

Anyway, my cousins and I wanted to aim high without touring a schooner with a fanny pack and camera in hand, so we opened the local paper, and found our only options: looking at model trains or building our own sock monkeys at Sock Monkey Saturday.

(Beat.)

I grabbed the car keys and eight pairs of old socks, and we were off to Sock Monkey Saturday.

Sock Monkey Saturday was a free event being held at the American Visionary Art Museum (which, I will say, is one of the coolest museums ever; go there if you're in Baltimore and feeling museum-ish). Basically, the blurb in the paper said: Grab two pairs of socks and c'mon down! Learn how to make your own so-ugly-it's-cute sock monkey. Sure, you'll probably throw it away when you're done, but won't it be fun?

We thought so.

FYI, an example of a sock monkey, below:


Hideous, right? But don't you want one?

We read about this whole affair around 1pm on Saturday afternoon, and it was going until 3pm. So faster than you could say "Sock Monkey Saturday?!" we were driving downtown with a bagful of old socks and a hankering to sew:



We got down to the museum, and rushed into this warehouse which is an annex of the main building, where we were told the monkey business was taking place. As soon as we stepped foot in the door, a security guard hopped in front of us and said, "Are you here for monkeys?"

"Why, yes," we replied, "We are here for monkeys."

"I'm sorry," he said. "The workshop's full. They're not taking any more people."

"What??" we shrieked.

"Lots of people here for the monkeys," he explained. "They filled the first room, then the library, then the classroom. Then there's people sitting in the hallway. Making monkeys," he said.

"Making monkeys..." we sighed.

We took our bag of socks and wandered around the exhibits, which, of course, were really cool. But we were bummed about our lack of sock monkeys. To remind us of this fact, the museum was littered with pieces of unfinished sock monkeys from the workshop. A headless, purple torso here, some argyle limbs there. (Yes, it was a little bit disturbing.)

Lesson: when the only remotely interesting options for a day's activity are watching model trains and making sock monkeys, the sock monkeys win. Go early!