1210. You may think I was talking about myself when I said all of this, and I could have been but I was actually thinking about my art teacher, Mrs. Festini, and some of the lectures she gave us when she was teaching our sculpture class on Saturday afternoons at the museum.
1211. Mrs. Festini was fond of bringing to the class clippings from art magazines and journals that for some reason were especially important to her. In the classroom there was an opaque projector, one of those old ones that weigh fifty pounds and have a bulb so hot it almost sets fire to the pages you are trying to project. Sometimes she would project pages from a book, at other times single sheets from her collection all of which she kept in an old hat box.
1212. I have to say something about the hat box itself. I imagine she had started saving the clippings many years ago when the box was almost new, but over the years it had been used so much that it had fallen apart, discolored, been taped back together with masking tape so even though she did not intend it, the box itself had become a complicated art-object in its own right.
1213. It was a military hat box, the sort that an officer's hat would have come in back in the Second World War, in-other-words a real relic which seems to be looking for an opportunity to tell some sort of war story. Mrs. Festini never once said anything about the hat box, but it was very obvious that she had not kept hold of it so many years if it did not have some significance for her.
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