Livin’ on Tulsa Time

We rolled into Tulsa to stay at a very nice AirBnB called the Artist’s Loft. (Translated, that means a lot of stairs to haul our luggage up after a long hot day on the road.) But the two bedrooms, two living rooms, all decorated with a found-artist’s eye for detail and color made it worth it.

The continued heat wave, coupled with midwestern humidity has us still curtailing our activities. Which is too bad, because Tulsa has a lot of Art Deco buildings, and we’d planned to walk around oogling them.

There are also dozens of colorful murals, but again, we were limited to those we passed in our air-conditioned car and were able to leap out and take pictures of.

This Land is Our Land…

But we did spend a couple of delightful hours at the Woody Guthrie Center. Guthrie was a singer-songwriter, and you all know his music, because you’ve all sung “This Land is Your Land.” He wrote more than 3000 songs, only about 300 of them that he recorded. Most were performed live with other singers, like Pete Seeger, who focused on songs of social justice and socialism. This later got some of them, especially Seeger, into hot water with the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

Guthrie had his own column and a radio show. He performed in the fields for migrant workers. The rode the rails, and worked day work jobs, so he spoke the language of the migrants and other working people. He was a tremendous influence on singer-songwriters right down to Springsteen.

The museum is a small gem. Very accessible, not an overwhelming amount of information, and presented in a variety of formats. And the docents are superb. We learned that Guthrie also made hundreds of drawings and cartoons and produced thousands of documents, in the form of articles and letters.

Dash and I also had our first VR (virtual reality) experience. Part of the exhibit is about the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma, particularly Black Sunday. This VR exhibit lets a person live what it was like during the height of a dust storm. Extraordinary.

More Giants

It was so hot, we almost passed on tracking down the Golden Driller, and glad we didn’t. The fiberglass Muffler Men would crawl in a hole from shame if they confronted this gigantic concrete statue, about seven stories tall.

Dining at the Mother Road

We had lunch at the Mother Road Market, a great collection of small food stalls, like a food court, but with much better food and a wider variety. Or perhaps, like an indoor food truck park. We walked around, checked them all out, then made our choices. There were also several small craft booths set up. It was a great place, and we thought maybe to return for breakfast, except we had to leave Tula very early and the Mother Road didn’t open until 11. Alas.

Liz