by Robyn Metcalfe | May 30, 2024 | Substack
I clutched my glass of cold milk in my tiny hand as I sat in front of our black and white TV, waiting for Engineer Bill to cry out either “red light”, or “green light.” Depending upon what he chose to say, I would either glup down the milk in my glass or unflinchingly keep the glass in front of me.
These were the early days of gamification. Along with my two brothers, we competed for first place milk drinker, emptying our glass of milk in response to Engineer Bill’s unpredictable prompts.
These were also the early days of content for new formats, in this case, television. Only half of the households in the US had a TV by the mid-1950s, and only a few of those offered color. The first programs on TV were for kids, experimenting with easy-to-please audiences, like the three of us in 1955. We were gleefully entertained with cartoons, puppets, and cheery TV hosts, such as Sheriff John, Kaptain Kangaroo, and Buffalo Bob.
The Howdy Doody show was one of these early shows and was hosted by Buffalo Bob who was joined by his sidekicks Clarabell, Thunderdud, and Phineus T. Bluster, among others. The first shows were low-budget, clunky, with advertisers often providing content until The Mickey Mouse Club appeared and swept us away with a torrent of delightful cartoons and films.
I wonder if we’re following the same path today with new, promising technologies that are far ahead of content.
Read the rest and subscribe on Substack: https://robynmetcalfe.substack.com/p/borderless
by Robyn Metcalfe | Apr 25, 2024 | Substack
If you’ve been following my story about museum-building in my backyard chicken coop, you’ll know about my propane tank. Outside my “coop-museum” sits a propane tank that provides the gas for our home appliance: gas for our fireplace and kitchen stove. You can’t approach the coop without seeing the tank and for a while, I walked around it, not noticing it had potential as a contribution to the museum.
Framing a project can mean everything. Perhaps the frame I had, conceptually, for the museum was too small. So, I stood back. Perhaps I was missing something.
One day, it occurred to me that instead of walking around it, I could embrace it. I couldn’t unsee it and it became part of my quest to understand how a chicken coop could be a museum. In a way, the tank is part of the coop story.
Read the rest and subscribe on Substack: https://robynmetcalfe.substack.com/p/finding-stories-where-they-already
by Robyn Metcalfe | Mar 28, 2024 | Substack
The chickens have flown the coop. What remains is an empty coop holding possibilities.
What you may know now, if you read last month’s newsletter, is that I have a museum in my backyard, in an abandoned chicken coop.
I began raising backyard chickens in 1985, when we lived Woodside, California where there was room to spread our wings in a rambling, redwood tree-fringed backyard. We built a chicken coop and filled it with a dozen hens, and one rooster. Together they produced a steady flow of fresh eggs with bright yellow yolks.
Our backyard chicken project continued for decades and eventually ended in Austin, Texas where we moved in 2010, where the summers were on fire and chicken predators were determined and evil.
I built a coop that eventually took on the appearance of a military armored tank. And even then, racoons and skunks had their day with our dear hens. One night, after making my usual security check and bed turn-down service in the coop, a skunk that had entered the coop and was most likely ready to pick off another unsuspecting hen, sprayed me as I was about to leave. That ended years of backyard chickens and now the coop is becoming a museum.
Read the rest and subscribe on Substack: https://robynmetcalfe.substack.com/p/my-museum-its-not-about-me
by Robyn Metcalfe | Feb 29, 2024 | Substack
While sifting through boxes of old family photographs, random mementos, and dusty souvenirs last week, I felt oddly disconnected from all of them. Who were these people in the photographs, where were they, what were they doing, and most importantly, why? It was almost as if a stranger had given me an archive, somehow waylaid on its journey to another family.
The meaning of things, even these torn and cracked things in my possession is the story of our lives. Apparently, these represented my story, even though their meaning escaped me for the moment.
Would it be worth trying to recapture those stories? Could I? Even now when I recall past family outings with my brothers, we all have wildly different recollections of what happened. Are there lessons there that would make my last decades more fully lived or would a recap of the past only create a drag, build headwinds, entangling future adventures with unwanted baggage?
One reason for retrieving this family archive was the coincidence of writing my memoir. Writing a memoir, something I thought I’d never do simply because I thought memoirs seem so self-absorbed and certainly no one would find my memoir of interest. A review of those photos and mementos revealed a rather uninteresting and unexceptional life, or so it seemed to me. Would a search for a more meaningful life dig up a more interesting past?
Perhaps I should find out.
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by Robyn Metcalfe | Jan 30, 2024 | Substack
During a recent visit to Las Vegas, I visited a museum that invites you to question what you perceive as reality.
This museum provides a refreshing look at what we think is real and what might just be an illusion. It raises the question that…perhaps we can’t always trust our rational mind.
Where does that put us in terms of science, our emotions, and our senses?
Today I’ve published two pieces on Substack, one inviting you into my plans & projects for the new year, and the other, my next installment in my series on senses (oh, and you can see what I look like scaling a wall): robynmetcalfe.substack.com/subscribe
by Robyn Metcalfe | Jan 30, 2024 | Substack
During a recent visit to Las Vegas, I visited a museum that invites you to question what you perceive as reality.
This museum provides a refreshing look at what we think is real and what might just be an illusion. It raises the question that…perhaps we can’t always trust our rational mind.
Where does that put us in terms of science, our emotions, and our senses?
Today I’ve published two pieces on Substack, one inviting you into my plans & projects for the new year, and the other, my next installment in my series on senses (oh, and you can see what I look like scaling a wall): robynmetcalfe.substack.com/subscribe
