St. Pete, Florida
Why we were there: Mainsail Art Festival
When we were there: April 2022
The Hallucinogenic Toreador by Salvador Dali
How was the show: To be perfectly honest, we did not have a great show. That is not to say that Florida is not full of great shows, but this one didn’t work for us. The weather (hot!) the weekend (easter!) or something else. I am not going to dwell, instead I will use this as an excuse to tell you about one of my favorite Florida sites - The Salvador Dali Museum.
The story: I was 16 when my family moved to the Clearwater/St. Pete, FL area from upstate NY. I attended a boarding school in Troy, NY, so I never had much time to make friends in my new hometown. So when I came down for my high school breaks I would hang out at The Salvador Dali Museum. The perfect place for an artsy misfit teenager like myself. At the time the museum was small, a room or two with a gift shop. I would examine The Hallucinogenic Toreador - which is literally huge - and then wander to the gift shop to buy plastic flies glued to magnetic as gifts for all my friends, perfume in lip shaped bottles, and the autobiography The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí. I heard the book is all lies, but lies Dali wrote them himself so more performance art than untruths. It was in this book where I first saw the Lobster Telephone.
Melanie at 23 with a freshly touched up lobster telephone and fly swarm tattoo.
And, in 1988, when I decided to get my first tattoo in my senior year of high school, it was definitely going to be a lobster telephone. The tattooer had the great idea to make the phone more dramatic by adding electricity complete with an electrical cord and plug. As if he had heard the song Aphrodisiac Jacket by The Cult with its reference to the “plastic fantastic lobster telephone”. I had recently gotten that album which came out the year before.
I had that tattoo until 2006, when I finally decided to cover it up with something else similarly dramatic in my view but without the plotline. My lobster had spread and gotten fuzzy to due lack of care and terrible touch ups. Nothing lasts forever. Except for my now invisible bond with lobsters. That has remained and I might - in the near future - get a new fresh lobster telephone.
Snapshots: Here is a look at the 2017 Dalí & Schiaparelli exhibit. (FYI, another memory is that my grandmother had an Elsa Schiaparelli hat. Black and beaded in a shocking pink box. I wore it in high school and college. Pretty much destroyed it - as my lobster - with lack of care and maintenance. I live hard and things are sacrificed. Nothing last forever.)
