speak to me, lion

If you’re a careful reader of the blog, you might have noticed that despite my Lenten resolution to blog once a day, I – how you say? – lack the motivation to do so on some weekends. I just skip it. And I can’t say I’m proud of all the weekday entries either. We can’t crap gold all the time, I guess.

This weekend, though, I got some much-needed writing inspiration. Along with my editor and friend Katie (a faithful blog reader), I headed over to the Margaret Mitchell House, because there was a deal to get in free if you said “Southern Literary Trail.” I had been to the Margaret Mitchell House once before, with my parents, but that was before I even went to college in Atlanta, so I was ready to revisit the place in which one of my favorite books, the basis for one of my absolute favorite movies, was written.

If you want to re-live the tour I took, then you can click here: http://gwtw.org/tour.html. But here were my impressions:
You enter the home on Peachtree Street level, and you go into a room with lots of photographs. A tour guide explains who all the people are, how Margaret Mitchell knew them, and how they formed the basis for characters in “Gone With the Wind.” For example, on one side of Margaret Mitchell’s family, there really was a lady named Melanie who fell in love with her first cousin. But instead of marrying the man, she became a nun, and instead of being a pansy ass, the man went west and became Doc Holliday, a far superior outcome than that that awaited Ashley Wilkes. You see a few pictures of how the house and Atlanta used to be at the time; Katie was quite taken with the pharmacy for some reason. I guess she takes a lot of drugs.

Then you go downstairs, to the apartment where Margaret Mitchell lived with her husband John Marsh. There were 10 apartments in the home at the time, and Margaret Mitchell would have entered below the street level we came in on. The tour guide pointed out that while the furnishings we would see would not be originals, the floor we were standing on was. STANDING ON THE SAME FLOOR AS MARGARET MITCHELL DID!!! At first that was really exciting to me, and I was trying to breathe deep and get a hole of that southern writing magic. But then I remembered how many people had stood on the floor in the meantime and the feeling was a little diminished.

The tour guide said that Margaret Mitchell was very superstitious, and as she came into the tiled hallway that we were standing on right that very minute, she would rub the nose of the lion’s head that formed the bottom of the stairway, so that she would have productive writing sessions. The tour guide said we should do it, too, even though it was a reproduction. So I did, because I was trying to capture the spirit of Margaret Mitchell, and also because my editor was watching and if, God forbid, I have any trouble finishing my assignments this week, I don’t want her to say that I missed a golden opportunity by not touching that lion.

Then it was into Margaret Mitchell’s apartment. You enter her living room, which was also where she wrote the book. She kept a towel at her desk so that if she had any visitors, she could throw the towel over her typewriter; she was very self-conscious about what she was writing. As I glanced at the tiny typewriter replica, I couldn’t help but think that my apartment just doesn’t lend itself to writing the way this apartment immediately screamed “Write!” to me. It is probably because I am lazy when I am in my own apartment, and inspired when I am in an apartment that has already produced something notable, but all the same. I don’t care that the apartment was tiny, or that Margaret Mitchell called it “the dump”…Margaret Mitchell House people, please let me move in. I think if I had a week there I could write a book too. Not one as big as “Gone with the Wind,” but maybe a thin volume of quatrains or something. At least 10 good blog entries.

Then into the bedroom, which has a beautiful bedspread and a very tiny bed. Then into a tiny kitchen. They don’t let you linger too long in these rooms because you might steal all the Margaret Mitchell magic. Instead, you go into an exhibit hall where there are letters from Margaret Mitchell and her husband which prove that both had an excellent sense of humor.

Then you get to go to another exhibit hall that has movie memorabilia. The highlight for me was the painting of Scarlett that was hung in Rhett and Scarlett’s home….the one where she’s wearing a blue dress, the one that Rhett throws his drink at after Scarlett tells him she doesn’t want to have any more babies? That one was there. Apparently the painting is owned by the Atlanta School Board and has been hung in places like elementary schools but was being loaned to the museum. Can you imagine going to school and sitting in the cafeteria and getting to see that painting? I THINK I WOULD FAIL SCHOOL SO I COULD CONTINUE TO LOOK AT IT.

That’s pretty much the whole tour, and frankly my dear, I am glad I got to go for free because otherwise it’s a little overpriced. I don’t know if I would have felt quite so much Margaret Mitchell magic if I’d had to pay $12 for it. However, for the very same price that admission would have been, I got to take some of that inspiration home with me. In the gift shop was a bookend of that lion’s head that Margaret Mitchell used to touch on her staircase every day, so I got one, brought it home, and set it up next to my laptop. Now, when I don’t want to blog, I shall touch the lion’s nose and try to have a productive writing session. Then maybe one day girls will get excited when they stand on a floor where I once stood.