Temple at the Getty Center

I did it!

Finally, last night and at long last, I mustered up the courage to attend my first Temple University alumni event. Why is that a big deal, you ask? Pretty much for the same reason toughing out the Screenwriting Expo six weeks ago was a big deal. It meant journeying to a land swarming with strangers, small groups of whom knew small groups of others, adding up to a congregation of people who had other people to talk to while I hovered around the crowds of heads like a butterfly who can't make up his frickin' mind about where to land. When I originally got this invitation back in mid October, I hesitated. I'd gotten invitations to alumni events before but chickened out. The last one was in July, I think, when the Phillies came to town to play the Dodgers. This time I spent a week vacillating. And then finally, the same day the Screenwriting Expo started in fact, I shot Temple an e-mail saying basically, "Oh why not? Count me in!"

Are you familiar with Temple University? If you live in the northeast, it's very possible you are. If you follow college hoops, it's also possible, although the last few seasons have been kind of tough. I think the last time Temple made it to the NCAA tournament was 2003. And then a couple years after that, our long-time coach John Chaney started taking drastic measures like ordering one of his players to break the arm of some poor dude on the other team. After that it was like, "Um...John? Does the word 'retire' mean anything to you?" So he left, and now we've got this new coach from Penn named Fran Dunphy. It's only his second season and so too early to tell if he's making a difference. Temple's a fairly large public university in North Philadelphia. And I do mean large. When I went there from 1994 to 1998, it had something like 30,000 students. As of the start of the 2007-2008 academic year, the head count had topped 35,000. Bill Cosby went to Temple. That's right, kids. The Coz. When I was still living in South Jersey in the nineties, I used to see commercials of him getting me all jacked up over the Temple Challenge. "The Temple challenge: Go for it," the Coz said. That's not why I went there, though. Simply put, my dad teaches there, which means I went for free. You got that right. I didn't pay a single dime. Thanks, Dad!

Anyway, the alumni association started up this thing a year or two ago called Temple on the Road where they host alumni events in big cities across the country. But every time they sent out invites to me, I would just stare at the stupid things before recycling them. Not this time, though. I figured I had to face up to it at some point. Parallel with this increased activity in alumni outreach is, not surprisingly, their monster fundraising campaign. It officially started in July 2002, but they're just now getting really excited about it. It's called Access to Excellence, and the goal is basically to raise something like a billion dollars by the end of 2009, when Temple celebrates birthday number 125. It might sound like I'm exaggerating when I say a billion, but I'm pretty sure it's close to that number. It's a very, very high nine-digit number, let's put it that way. So far I haven't paid them a penny. Shame on me, right? Don't worry, I will. Next week.

It was really stupid of me to chicken out all this time about these events, though. Seriously. I have nothing against Temple at all. I had a great time there. Busy as all hell, of course, what with 16- and 17-credit semesters paired with a job at night. But still, I had lots of great professors and learned tons. My major was film and my minor was German, but it was the electives that turned out to be the most interesting. Like in my last semester I took this class on Roman history from about 200 B.C. to 200 A.D. It was awesome! I was really into it and even went out of my way at the end of it to ask the professor about further reading. I shit you not, I actually asked for further reading. Who does that?! I also took a racquetball class in their phys ed department. I don't think I have ever had so much fun in my life. I couldn't believe I got credit for playing racquetball for Christ's sake. Anyway, point is, it was a very fulfilling four years. So why hide from them?

Last night's event took place at the Getty Center. If you live in the L.A. area and you haven't been to the Getty, shame on you. Get over there, stat! If you don't live in L.A., next time you're in town, you have to go. It's a moral imperative that you make the trek in the little tram that winds its way up that gargantuan hill casting its shadow over the Brentwood section of West Los Angeles. That's where the Getty is. It's a massive complex of exhibition halls and research libraries and gardens sprawled across the top of this hill in Brentwood. On clear days you can stand at the outdoor cafe and catch postcard views stretching from downtown in the east all the way to the ocean. We're talking panorama, kids. And the buildings of the complex are stunning. In fact, the museum complex itself could be viewed as a work of art. The Getty Center is a relatively young museum. In fact, it's celebrating birthday number 10 right now. It opened on December 16, 1997. It wasn't the first museum with Jean Paul Getty's name on it, though. That distinction belongs to the Getty Villa out in Malibu. That opened back in '76, just months after Jean Paul kicked the bucket, which kind of sucks 'cause he'd been really passionate about seeing the Villa come to fruition. The Villa, while I'm digressing here, was originally called the Getty Museum because it was the only Getty museum of any kind. Then in January of 1998, a month after the Getty Center opened, it closed its doors for an eight-year overhaul. It reopened as the Getty Villa in January of 2006. I've been there a few times since it reopened. It's awesome. The stuff there is mainly focused on ancient worlds, specifically Rome, Greece, and Etruria. It's good stuff, so go there too when you come to L.A. In the words of Alan Coulter on The Late Show: "You'll be glad ya did!"

I wasn't kidding about that tram, by the way. That's how it works at the Getty Center. You park in a garage that goes underground a whole bunch of levels, then take an elevator back up to the surface and catch this tram that winds up the hillside like a big albino serpent or something. And it really takes its time too, just sort of gliding along, giving you plenty of time to take in the awesome views of West L.A., Hollywood and, way off yonder, downtown. And if you peer straight down, you get to see all those poor suckers sitting in gridlock on the 405 freeway. Ha ha ha!

The alumni event last night coincided with this terrific exhibition the Getty Center's got going right now. It's called Medieval Treasures from the Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum is apparently undergoing some major overhaul and has generously decided to share its Medieval stash with other museums. Actually, just two museums. First it went to Munich, Germany for a spell, and now it's at the Getty. After this, it's back to Cleveland. Before I delve into the exhibition, let me talk about the actual alumni event.

So it kicked off at 6:30 p.m. at the Getty restaurant which is on the west side of the front part of the complex. That meant things were looking up already. On weeknights the Getty usually shuts its doors at 6 p.m., so by starting the event at half-past, we Owls had that whole joint to ourselves! When I walked into the restaurant, I stopped at the welcoming table where they had a sticker with my name on it to slap on my shirt. It also included the school my field of study was in (SCT, which stands for School of Communications and Theater) and the year I commenced ('98). Also on the table was tons of free schwag, such as bumper stickers, fridge magnets, lapel pins, little desk flags, notepads and whatnot. And these really fancy silver and black pens. I hawked several of those suckers. Here's where it gets even better, though. Way toward the back corner of the restaurant they had...(wait for it)...a free bar! Suffice it to say that I wasn't in the place two seconds before I had an Amstel Light in hand. They had other beers too, like Sierra Nevada and Guinness. But I'm not big on the pale stuff, and I wasn't in the mood for something leaden like Guinness. Meanwhile, waiters were making the rounds with trays full of shrimp on sticks and butternut squash. I'm pretty sure that was my first time ever having butternut squash. Not bad 't'all.

So for like the next hour or so, I stood around the restaurant throwing down Amstels and slowly bulging up my pockets with the cherry and white school schwag. Easily half the attendees, if not more, were age 50 and up, and the vast majority of them came with their significant others. And they pretty much stayed at the side of their significant others. I made the rounds of that friggin' restaurant I don't know how many times, feeling braver with each passing Amstel, but for the life of me I couldn't find a way to strike up a conversation with anyone. I suppose I could have cut into some of the small groups of people sitting at the dining tables or standing at those taller, smaller round tables near the bar, but that's just too weird for me. I can't just cut in while a group of pals are catching up on old times and be like "Hiya, kids! What's cookin' with my fellow L.A.-based Owls?" Okay, I wouldn't say exactly that, but you see my point. That's not to say I didn't enjoy myself. Aside from the free booze, nibbles, and schwag, I got to see in person Ann Weaver Hart. She's been the President of Temple since mid 2006, so she's still sort of new. And she's the first female president Temple's ever had. I've been reading about her in the quarterly alumni mag since she came aboard, including a great cover story on her in the summer '06 issue. Plus she writes her own column in the front of each issue. So it was cool to see her in person at last. During the reception she was talking to an older couple who were very well dressed and looked very distinguished. I stood nearby and eavesdropped while pretending to people watch. Ol' Ann was basically talking to these cats about all the stuff happening on campus, like building projects and whatnot. Don't you know this couple were probably big donors.

At around 7:30 p.m. the waiters stopped serving us the squash and the shrimp and told us to adjourn to the Harold M. Williams auditorium on the east side of the front of the complex, on the other side of the tram stop. Like the restaurant, the auditorium was another building at the Getty Center where I'd never been. It's quite huge with plush seating arranged stadium style. Down at the front there's a stage with a giant screen and a podium to the left. When we walked in, the screen was displaying the Temple logo with the words Access to Excellence along the bottom. By this time I'd thrown down three or so Amstels, so instead of sitting to the side and/or toward the back, which I would've done under more sober circumstances, I sat all the way down in the center of the front row. The auditorium had far more seats than there were alumni and friends, so everyone sort of spread out. No one else, I might add, sat down in the front row.

Before President Hart took the podium, this very official-looking guy from Temple came up and gave a little preview of the evening's agenda, which included free dinner up in the entrance hall followed by the exhibit. Then this younger, more casually dressed guy came up. He's an alum who helps organize the L.A. events for On the Road. His whole thing was just giving us a preview of various alumni events coming up in 2008.

And then President Hart came to the podium. She thanked us all for coming out and spoke for about 15 minutes or so. She pointed out that this was by far the largest alumni turnout for L.A. And it could very easily be bigger next time, what with the more than three thousand Temple alums living in the L.A. area. The highlight of her talk was a little video that was basically a series of snippets with current and former students talking about what they loved about Temple. It also showed all the current building projects underway on the main campus and how Temple student enrollment is going up, etc. In other words, the future for Temple's looking darned bright. The whole point of the video, of course, was to get everyone in the audience all motivated to give money to the Access to Excellence campaign. And I have to say, it worked on me. Plus, Ann Weaver Hart seems like a genuinely nice woman, not a slick car saleswoman type at all, just very professional and smiley and sweet. So I'll give her money. No really, I will. Next week.

And then finally up stepped Amy Powell to the podium. Good ol' Aim is a Harvard-educated art historian who only just joined Temple's art school faculty in 2006. Being at the Getty was kind of like a mini alumni event for her because before Temple, she did a post-doctoral fellowship at the Getty Research Institute. Aim gave us a half-hour lecture about the Medieval Treasures exhibit and used a slide show to show some of the artifacts we'd be seeing later that night. The exhibit was far too huge and comprehensive to do full justice to in thirty minutes, but Aim highlighted stuff we should be sure to look for. Thank God she did, too. As you'll see in a minute, there ended up being a bit of a time crunch.

But first, supper time! After Aim's lecture, we all got up and walked over to the entrance hall. During regular hours, the entrance hall is where the information desk is located. And then off to the side you've got the gift shop and lounge area, restrooms 'n whatnot. On this night, the entire central part of the hall was set up for a huge dinner buffet with long rectangular tables with tons of food, big round tables nearby with tons of desserts, and then of course a sea of little square dining tables all over the place. Even though I'd been sitting in the front row, I somehow got up the steps to the top and out of the auditorium and over to the entrance hall before anyone else. Part of that reason may have been my starvation. It was now somewhere between eight-thirty and nine o'clock at night, well beyond when I usually eat dinner. Let me tell you, though, it was worth the wait. Want to see what they had? Not much. Just heaps of tri-tip pepper-crusted steak that was melt-in-your-mouth tender. Oh, and thick juicy salmon. Side dishes included steamed carrots, a kind of salad with Italian dressing, and polenta. Like the butternut squash during the reception, the polenta was a first for me. You ever try it? It looks a lot like cornmeal mush, grits or what have you. Only it's the Italian version so there's raisins and stuff in it. Not bad 't'all. The dessert tables didn't have much, only stuff like pecan melt-aways and these little baby lemon tartlets and hunks of dark chocolate bark with cherries inside. I wasn't sitting alone long before a fiftysomething couple joined me. The guy was a Temple alum, but he'd gone to Temple so long ago that it was when Temple still had a high school in addition to the college. So he was a graduate of Temple High School, not the university we all know and love today. I told him I had no idea Temple had ever had a high school. He said he figured if people just looked at him, it would be self-evident. The wife had no connection to Temple at all. In fact, she was a West L.A. native. Her alma mater was UCLA. After I told her I got my masters at cross-town rival USC, she smiled and didn't speak to me for the rest of the night.

There was only one rub to the magnificent feast: We had no time to eat it. I mean okay, we did, but not that much. I was still letting the steak melt in my mouth when a woman came around to all the tables and said the exhibition hall would be closing in a half-hour or something. Knowing how massive this exhibition was, I wasted no time in wolfing down everything, scarfing some of the desserts, and hurrying out into the center of the complex where a wide flight of steps leads up to the Exhibitions Pavilion. The Getty actually has five pavilions for exhibitions, the other four being North, South, East, and West. Those four have mostly permanent installations, but the Exhibitions Pavilion is always set aside for major visiting stuff like Medieval Treasures.

Okay. Now for the exhibition. Medieval Treasures covered a huge time period, from around the year 200 all the way to 1500. To make things more organized, the exhibition was split up into four general time periods: Early Christian and Byzantine (200 to 800), Early Medieval (800 to 1200), High Gothic (1150 to 1300), and Late Medieval (1300 to 1500). The "High" in High Gothic, by the way, just means the stuff in that part of the exhibition was made in northern Europe ("high" up in Europe), places like Holland, Flanders (present-day Belgium), northern France and what have you.

One of the definite highlights of the Early Christian and Byzantine stuff was a quartet of little marble sculptures from the late 200s that dramatize scenes from the Old Testament book of the prophet Jonah. He's the guy who was swallowed by that giant sea monster and spent three days in the monster's tummy praying and whatnot. And then on the third day, the giant sea monster puked Jonah back out onto the beach or something. The story is thought to foreshadow the whole story of Jesus dying and coming back to life. But the really big deal about these little marble bad boys is that they're very rare examples of marble artwork from that time period with Christian subject matter. Other stuff from this part of the exhibition included a tapestry icon that featured Jesus as the divine ruler, an ivory plaque that featured the Virgin Mary with little baby Jesus on her lap, and this gorgeous gold octagonal pendant with a gold coin mounted in the center featuring the profile of Emperor Constantine holding a globe and raising his right hand in salutation.

My favorite piece from the Early Medieval section was this portable altar from the German state of Saxony. The story goes that back in the year 1030, Count Liudolf I of Saxony and his woman Gertrude founded a church and then donated a whole bunch of relics and liturgical objects to the church treasury. Countess Gertrude was the one who commissioned the portable altar specifically for the new church. The Early Medieval works also included a copper water vessel shaped like a lion, also from Saxony. You also had this heavily gilded and richly colored page taken from a Gospel book in a German abbey. And then there was a gilded copper and enamel pendant that featured Jesus and his mom. That piece was made in a region called Bosan, which is part of present-day Belgium.

One of the artifacts I kept going back to in the High Gothic section was this gilded silver table fountain from Paris that was made in the early 1300s or so. Besides the fact that it just looked really neat, it was also clever in a technical sense. Someone obviously poured a ton of time and effort into this thing. The way it worked when it was actually being used was that water would be pumped up a central pipe and then cascade down stepped terraces, turning wheels that rang little bells. Apparently the main point of it was to entertain guests. I just hope whoever made the thing was well paid. Another work here that caught my eye was a trio of alabaster figurines from Burgundy. They're part of a grand total of 41 such figurines that stand around the base of Philip the Bold's tomb. Phil was the Duke of Burgundy back in the late 1300s. Another piece from the High Gothic was a work that Phil himself commissioned as a wedding gift to his son and daughter-in-law. It's an ornate gold panel that depicts the Annunciation. Other works here included a missal from France that was richly illustrated on gilded pages. A missal, by the way, is a book that contains all the instructions and texts for the celebration of Mass. And finally, I can't talk about the High Gothic stuff without mentioning this neat little ivory mirror case from France that shows a man and a woman on the front playing chess. Apparently the scene was inspired by a popular epic poem of the 1300s that narrates the adventures of Huon of Bordeaux. Huon, right? He's charged with playing chess against the daughter of a Saracen admiral whose castle he entered in disguise. If he wins, Huon gains the woman's favor as well as some cash. If he loses, he gets his head lopped off.

And with that we reach the fourth and final section of Medieval Treasures, the Late Medieval period. These works included more Christian-themed stuff, like an illustrated Book of Hours from Flanders, an Italian altarpiece with little oil illustrations of Jesus, his ma, Mary Magdalene, and various saints on a gilded panel background, and an alabaster figure of Saint Jerome from Germany which shows him removing a thorn from a lion's paw. Among the non-religious stuff was this huge oil painting from the 1400s by a German guy named Lucas Cranach the Elder. It shows a hunting scene near a castle called Hartenfels in eastern Germany. My favorite part of this time period, though, had to be the various suits of armor and weaponry. They had this one sword, right? It was called a long sword, and that name could not have been more apt. The thing was easily six or so feet long, including the hilt, which accounted for maybe a quarter of that length. They also had a halberd, which I'm not sure I'd ever seen in my life outside a movie. The suits of mail and armor included this one sort of half-armor from Italy made of gilded steel. It's called half-armor because it only protects your noggin and your upper body. This is the kind of armor people would wear during foot tournaments, which were basically like practice combat sessions with your fellow troops conducted with a barrier separating you from your opponent, hence there being no need for lower body protection.

I actually didn't have to rush through the exhibition quite as quickly as I'd feared. The Getty people were such good sports that they kept the joint open until past ten o'clock. I actually had time to scarf a few more desserts before calling it a night. I may not have made any acquaintances the way I did at the Screenwriting Expo two months ago, but I still had a blast. I'd been wanting to see this exhibition anyway, number one. And number two, President Hart and friends really spoiled us rotten with all the food and booze. I've never had so much fun at the Getty in my life.