Today in 1911, the Mona Lisa was stolen. The cover story is that it was recovered two years later, but nobody is allowed to inspect the painting and there are thousands of excellent copies out there. Rumor is that the original is in a private collection in the USA, smuggled in as a copy while the one in France is the fake.
This recent picture has special meaning for me. The first time I stopped and dined at the Space Needle was in my 30s. Yet, I had been only a few miles away countless times. The significance is how isolated I was kept from the world in my childhood, I thought Seattle was somewhere near the mouth of the Mississippi. I'd driven past the city a few times in the rain in my 20s, but never knew it was there. I'd seen photos of the structure in the Encyclopedia of 1962, but I had been told the World's Fair was temporary. That all of the buildings were torn down afterward.
Then, one day twenty-some years later, the weather was clear and I saw it out of the car window. That was driving my first car, a Ford Maverick, the only new car I would ever own. I remember thinking, "Damn, it's still there." But I was on my way to SeaTac (the airport) and it was another year before I went there. The revolving restaurant. I had the beef stroganoff.
[Author's note 2014 - the Space Needle has one excellent web site. But what do you expect from the real birthplace of the computer? Alert: although the revolving rooftop restaurant is billed as family dining, there is a minimum food order per person and it was $10 back in the early 80s. And that was for lunch. It was only the strangest twists of fate that I never wound up in Seattle.]
