On Display With Julia's Kitchen

WASHINGTON—Unlike the thousands of enthusiastic Washington interns with dreams of cavorting with the powerful and hobnobbing over cocktails with members of the Bush Administration, I had absolutely no expectations of my summer in the nation’s capital. I thought my internship in exhibition design would be interesting—certainly unlike anything I’d done before—but had no idea what I was to do. Neither did anyone else, for that matter.

In a scene that has played itself out too many times since my arrival, fellow interns introduce themselves, explaining they work for Senator X, or the Department of Justice, Agriculture, Energy, Labor or Education, and more often than not, the conversation continues as follows:

So, what are you doing in D.C.?

I, um, work at the American History Museum.

Oh.

(Pause.)

Do you give tours?

The first conversation that wandered this path struck me as somewhat insulting. But two or three identical conversations later, and having discovered that some congressional interns must give visiting constituents tours of the Capitol, I’ve become slightly more understanding of the assumption, but only slightly.

Early on, to move past the “What if I really do have to give tours?” anxiety, I took a quick orienting trip to the museum the day before my scheduled start. The unproductive excursion merely revealed hundreds of sweaty, sunburned tourists, sub-zero temperatures and several fishbowl-like working environments where the tourists can gawk at museum specialists. The Digital Archiving Lab and Star-Spangled Banner Preservation Lab are located on public floors, and are fitted with clear windows so that tourists can stare at the working experts and leave finger and nose-prints on the glass. My perusal of the first floor revealed much the same fishbowl-like setup for the exhibition-in-progress about Julia Child’s kitchen—an exhibition on which I vaguely recalled I was to work.

As it turns out, much of my time is thankfully spent outside of the museum’s public areas. I don’t give tours (but if asked politely, I gladly give directions). Had I worked in a glass office, there would not be much to see. About four weeks were continuously spent being very angry with my computer, which crashed incessantly. Another week or so was spent being quite frustrated with the scanner, which made Julia look more like a grayish blob with curly hair than a pioneering television chef. But now that the design phase of the exhibition is complete (and my computer is officially dead, blinking disk and all, for the second time this summer), as an exhibition design intern, my work has dwindled. As such, I have resorted to doing odd jobs—the definition of an intern’s work, I suppose—in the aforementioned fishbowl.

Hard at work behind the glass windows and metal gate to allow the visitors to watch the staff work and to hear the expert discussions inside the gallery, I try to ignore the curious eyes. I now know how those pandas at the zoo feel. For the most part, I do not notice the tourists any more.

Well, I don’t notice the quiet ones, anyway. The tourists can hear our conversations, and unfortunately we can hear theirs too. Every few minutes, a family walks by and has the same conversation in the same manner. The husband shouts extremely loudly in an authoritative voice, “This is Julia Child’s kitchen! It’s not open yet! It will open on August 19!” His family stands just inches away from him as he unnecessarily reads the exhibition sign aloud word-for-word. The family then peers through the metal gate, watches us working for a while, quickly grows bored and leaves, making way for the next family to repeat the process.

I do my best to ignore the endless and repetitive sign-reading going on two feet away from my workspace while I and two other interns scrub Julia’s pots and pans with Q-Tips.

Yes. Q-Tips.

Whereas the relatively clean pans are wiped down with a rag dipped in an alcohol-based cleaning solution, to handle the caked-on grease and other substances that I’m sure at some point were edible, we break out the Q-Tips and scrub away. An excursion downstairs to the cafeteria kitchen, complete with industrial strength detergent and a mechanical dishwasher, is apparently out of the question.

There is method to the madness. Apparently the museum has a bit of an insect problem, which would presumably be aggravated should the crevices of Julia’s cooking utensils not be thoroughly cleaned. And so we clean. And clean some more.

But we’re cleaning Julia Child’s dishes. We interns joke that if all else fails, at least we can get jobs as dishwashers in classy restaurants. I might not have known what to expect of my summer in Washington, but that job prospect I had definitely not anticipated.

Christine C. Yokoyama ’04, a Crimson editor, is a social studies concentrator in Adams House. She is an exhibition design intern at the National Museum of American History but avoids the museum’s public areas during operating hours to repress her desire to kick spoiled children in the shins.