Why Awkward and Art Don't Mix

Last Friday, a woman attending a class at The Metropolitan Museum of Art fell into a large Pablo Picasso painting and ripped it.This is one of many reasons why no one in my family would be allowed to take an art class.

We are not among the graceful people. Although I truly believe my husband is my soul mate, our offspring would have been better off in life if at least one of their parents had even a tiny bit of athletic ability. Or balance.Actually, our shared inability to catch any item thrown at us was probably one of the things that bonded us during our dating phase. That, and the fact that both of us shiver if someone mentions the words "gym class" or "physical education" in our presence.

In my youth, gym class consisted of the following activities: softball or baseball (I still don't know the difference between those two), basketball, dodge ball, running laps, and The Presidential Physical Fitness Challenge. Every last one of those things were pure torture to me.

My gym class always succeeded on one level - I did work up a sweat. Of course, I accomplished that walking to the gym. Just the idea that it was time for gym class made me sweat. I was a complete and utter failure.In any sport that required that I hit a ball with a bat, I never achieved that goal. Never. No bat in my hands has ever made contact with a ball.

I was tall so people assumed I would be good at basketball. Bad assumption.
I hated running laps. I made it about half way around and felt like I was going to die. Plus, how in the world did those other kids get so fast? They must have had bad parents that chased them while mine were sweet and loved me.
Dodge ball was the worst. I think in my youth they used bowling balls to throw at kids in dodge ball. They sure felt like it when they hit me. Which they always did. I was the skinny kid and tried to hide behind the bigger kids. Somehow, those balls would still zoom around the big kids and nail me. Every time.

I never made it past the chin-up part of the Presidential Physical Fitness. Chin-ups were as elusive to me as the dreaded hits in baseball. Of course now that I think about it, we've had a lot of presidents that I bet couldn't have done a chin-up either. At the time, the only thing I knew was that I always had a mad gym teacher yelling at me to pull myself up to that bar. They should have let me try to hit the gym teacher's head with that bat. I bet I could have done that.

Because of my less than stellar physical past, I felt for the woman who fell into the Picasso painting at the Met. I also suddenly realized why those security guards followed my family from room to room a few years ago when we were in the National Gallery of Art. They probably train them to look out for the clumsy people.And come to think of it, one of those guards did look suspiciously like my old gym teacher.