This birdcage sits birdless in a corridor in the grand wooden lakeside hotel at the Chautauqua Institution. The hotel is quite pretentiously named The Athenaeum. It's a rickety old place with rotting cornices and sloped floors, no air conditioning, and outlandishly costly rooms--narrow old rooms with mismatched antique furniture that could give you splinters... Actually, I'm glad there are no birds imprisoned in this ornate cage. No matter how spacious and beautiful, a cage is still a cage. I need to remember that. Maybe you do, too.
By the way, the Chautauqua Institution is what you would get if NPR tried to have a campmeeting. It's where upper middle class white people go to talk about what poor people need.
