Department of Bad Falls, Cultural Division

Is it just me?

It seems that ever since my mother took her hip-fracturing spill, I've been coming into contact with all sorts of culture-related tumbles. In yesterday's NY Times, Sarah Lyall, demonstrating a sharp nose for news, described being on location at the treacherous gap in the floor of the Tate Modern at the very moment when the hapless Anne McNicholas, "a 51-year-old medical researcher from New Zealand...caught her foot in the crack and pitched awkwardly forward, ending up sprawled on the floor." We can understand, of course, how this happened, because everything is upside-down in the Southern Hemisphere and Anne was looking in the wrong direction for Doris Salcedo's tricky fissure.

There is nothing at all funny, however, about the second recent cultural tumble: A 17-year-old dancer, Leah Boresow, critically injured herself in a fall from the stage of the Atlanta Ballet.

Speaking of unscripted theatrical falls, Anthony Tommasini's opera review in the NY Times today starts off like this:

The Metropolitan Opera's production of "War and Peace," Prokofiev's epic masterpiece, was a milestone for the company when it was introduced in 2002. [It was great; I saw the then unfamiliar, instantly impressive Russian soprano, Anna Netrebko, as Natasha.]...The production returned to the Met's stage on Monday night, and this time nobody fell off. The stage, that is.

As Met fans may remember, the opening night of this production by Andrei Konchalovsky was marred when, during the last scene, an extra portraying one of Napoleon's retreating soldiers during a snowstorm slipped off the stage, falling into a safety net especially erected for this production, and then tumbled over the net into the orchestra pit.

I starred in my own cultural-fall drama, chronicled here (scroll to #9), on the slippery wood floors of the new Mega-MoMA. I called this "a good bone-density test."

And yesterday, after I got home from visiting my newly hipped mother in the hospital, I bumped into my next door neighbor. After we got up from the floor and checked for fractures (just kidding), she told me her sister had just fallen and broken two bones in her foot. This too qualifies as cultural news: Shortly after I moved into my apartment, I learned that my elderly next-door neighbors happen to be the daughters of legendary former Baltimore Museum director, Adelyn Breeskin.

I will end this precipitous post by thanking all the readers who have extended good wishes for my mother's rapid ascent from hospital hell to the purgatory of a nursing facility (for short-term physical therapy)...maybe by the end of this week. Today happens to be my parents' 64th anniversary. The celebration will be delayed.

CultureGrrl readers being who they are, even your sympathetic notes can be art historical: In an e-mail titled, "Hipsters" (why didn't I think of that?), James Ganz, curator of prints, drawings and photographs at the Clark Art Institute, mused:

I wonder how many great artists were unsteady in later life. Was Leonardo a faller in his 60s? Did Rembrandt ever take a spill? Certainly Renoir...

And, please, let's not forget Boldini.