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So today I wandered on down to The Magic Gardens, to get a wedding gift for some folks who got engaged there, and find the site makes them feel like there really is limitless potential for this city...

And so I got engaged, imagining where all our class might go.

I thought:

We could start w/ the Philadelphia Art Museum: it’s such a fortress, so safely inaccessible.

It might be interesting to compare that experience with a jaunt to Eastern State Penitentiary
(which offers “playful” Halloween experiences….)

(and/or we could also ask the students to go, afterwards, on their own, to another museum of their own choosing…)

We could then go, as a group, to a show in an established venue, like the Wilma.

We could then ask them to go, in small groups, to something out-of-doors, @ the Live Arts Festival…

We could then give them maps (see the trajectory? ever more less boxed and bound…?) and ask them to check out a dozen of Zagar’s mosaics (I loved a quote I saw from him today, about the whole city as a landscaped mosaic…)

They could also do a walking tour of the Mural Arts Program, and compare what’s going on with the two initiatives.

And then we could ask them to each go up to the observation deck in City Hall tower, to get a sense of the city from above, and then go do the Rittenhouse Square Sound Walk before visiting the three remaining “squares” of the city.

Great reading for this venture would be Michel de Certeau’s Walking In the City and Carmen Paplia’s complementary Caning the City.

And then there's the Reading Terminal Market, in cf. w/ the Italian Market...

Okay. So I think I have a vision of how the jaunts might work.

Now I want to pin down some readings, ways to prod ‘em beyond their experiences into something more reflective. Second thoughts…

Stay tuned…