Someone posted an article talking about Meow Wolf's "House of Eternal Return," which somehow ended up in my timeline, and in my consciousness, and, ultimately, on my 50 for 50 list. Because this is my type of thing. Here I am in front of it. Inside it. Whatever.
Yeah, OK, if you go to their website, you'll see a video where everyone says they can't describe wtf it is (beyond "immersive art installation") or compare it to anything. I agree that it defies easy description, but I can come up with comparisons: A Punchdrunk show. The Beast. The first time I played Myst. I thought of all things while I was wandering the multiverse in the house in the bowling alley. (And we now add THAT to the list of sentences I never thought I'd say. Like, "Why is everyone going inside the ice machine?") But, truly, at one point I thought you could do a Punchdrunk show in here and my brain kind of exploded. Because, what with the interaction and the videos and the clues, it WAS a Punchdrunk show, except with the actors removed and us being allowed to talk and play and investigate and climb on everything.
I'm ... at the end. The beginning is, yes, Meow Wolf is an immersive art installation in a converted bowling alley. And when you walk in, you're faced with the exterior of a perfectly good Victorian house. And you go inside the house and discover some shit went DOWN in the house. High level paranormal shit. "Little Girl Lost" shit. (The "Twilight Zone" episode, not the TV movie nobody saw.) Except it's a boy. And maybe his whole family. And he isn't in the wall. But possibly the toilet. And things have gone very, very wrong.
And you spend a good deal of time -- perhaps too much time -- reading the clues and looking at the photos and deciphering the symbols and trying to figure out what melted the chandelier (and the, um, wall), until such time as you realize this place is much MUCH bigger than you thought because there's a portal or two (or six) into another dimension or ten (or fifty) in the house.
And when you're walking through what we'll politely call the very bizarre rooms of this here multiverse (my favorite was a room in utter black and white -- with a convenient mirror on the wall for selfies!)
ANYWAY (hey, what's that green E doing in my picture?), when you're walking through the different dimensions you think, "the whole mystery of the house is bullshit; this is just about giving the Meow Wolf artists a bunch of rooms to design totally crazy stuff in." And EVERY SINGLE TIME YOU THINK IT (seriously, it is timed to the second), you stumble upon another clue to the puzzle and you get interested in the mystery again. And it's insanely well done and pitched right at the point where you can spend a good four hours in the place and feel satisfied that you understand some of the broad outlines of what went down; but still curious enough to want to come back again and play in it some more. Because there are more puzzles than you think there are. Hell, just when we got ready to leave, we started to realize that WE might not be on the side of this that we thought we were. (And what the hell was going on with Not Morgan's Bedroom?)
Probably the coolest thing about Meow Wolf is that Karen and Bits agreed to go to this thing to humor me, but ultimately ended up enjoying it. (Bits more than Karen; Karen got a bit of vertigo and had to leave the house -- me and Bits stayed inside and we ... you guys, we Found Out Where The Socks Go. (!) This, alone, was worth the price of admission.)
But, of course, the 50 for 50 part of this is that I was enjoying it with friends -- and the whole day was full of that. The time I spent in Meow Wolf with Bits was fun because we were both into the mystery and really trying to piece it together. And afterward, we came back to the hotel where Karen is refurbishing an old (1888) quilt. Well, refurbish isn't the word. She's tidying it up, but having friends and family add stitches and things that have significance for them. So, back in the room, we're sitting on the sofa -- I'm adding some (easy) stitching around a little field of velvet on the quilt, while Karen is sewing something else, and we're talking about family and life and it's probably very similar to how things went back when ladies worked on quilts in the late 19th Century. And THEN, I suggested Karen put the Yale Law School shield in the little blue velvet field I'd sewed around -- for to represent where we met and became friends. Which she's doing as we speak. :)
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