From dusk 'til dawn

Checking out the art and the drunks at this weekend's de Young reopening.

By Heather Smith

FOR ONE MAGICAL evening this weekend, the de Young Museum was Denny's restaurant, minus the civil rights lawsuits and Moon over My Hammy. It was Sparky's minus the milkshakes. It was Little Orphan Andy's minus that waiter with the belt with "Nudist" spelled on the back in tiny nail heads.

One can build a giant, copper-covered building surrounded by palm trees and fresh sod and receive laudatory reviews in the New York Times. But the kind of attention one receives for being open 24 hours is a very special kind of attention, and not usually extended to institutions housing Kiki Smith installations.

The new de Young was open from noon on Saturday, Oct. 14, to 5 p.m. the following Sunday. By 10 p.m. on the first day the line to get in stretched six people wide from the front door to the Panhandle. People were passing bottles of wine, hash pipes, baguettes, and cheese up and down the line. Interviewees started referring to themselves by their playa names. There were rumors of coitus in the sculpture garden.

During the 14 hours I managed to remain standing, and walking, I encountered two zombies, a bruised clown in a corset, more Winslow Homer paintings than I have ever seen in my life, and a rather monumental collision of subcultures. The following is a partial recording of events that ensued.

5:45 p.m.

It takes me about 15 minutes to get into the museum. The docents are handing out rave-tastic lime green plastic bracelets with "de Young Opening 2005" on them. "This is so you can exit and reenter the building without waiting in line," one of them explains, sweetly.

All of the docents are 60 to 70 years old and unfailingly pleasant. Even when it gets to be 4:45 in the morning and people are cussing them out about the viewing tower being closed, they are unflappable in their floral dresses. Plus, they don't seem to need sleep. Ever. I am not sure what fuels the docents. They are like the Yodas of the de Young.

5:52 p.m.

The building is packed with people milling around, lots of them families. Everyone I've talked to so far is from Alameda or Marin. "What did I tell you about not touching the paintings!" a woman says indignantly to her four-year-old daughter, who has just high-fived Frederic Edwin Church's Rainy Season in the Tropics. A few minutes later I'm standing near the massive Mother and Child sculpture from 19th-century Nigeria. "There is nothing nasty about that," I overhear another woman saying to a flock of children. "That is a woman nursing her child!"

8:30 p.m.

Up in the observation tower, people migrate to the corners, where, but for a line of glass caulk and the reflection of the entire room behind them, they could be floating in space over the park. A woman holds her baby up to the glass and bounces it up and down, cooing "We are so high! We are so high!"

10: 04 p.m.

The techno dance party area has been set up in the basement, where a chain mail curtain is all that stands between the dance floor and the gift shop. On one side people serenely float through the yellow light, inspecting displays of gift books and holiday cards. On the other, a rollicking light show of whirling, Escher-like forms is projected on the high walls, and a clot of maybe 30 people is pressed up as close as the musicians will allow.

They are watching a lithesome, sweaty, kohl-eyed belly dancer fling herself around energetically to DJ Cheb i Sabbah's set. I marvel, not for the first time, at how gyrating women in batik have managed to become one of the city's most enduring archetypes. Their outward manifestation changes slightly – for instance, they're more likely to twirl fire these days than to play the acoustic guitar. But they've outlasted just about every other subculture at this point. They need a plaque.

10: 38 p.m.

The most striking feature of the new de Young is the unparalleled opportunities it provides for museum voyeurism. I'm reminded of the underground penguin viewing rooms often found in zoos. In other art institutions, the windows are commonly set into the building to provide an nice view of, say, a tree outside in a courtyard. Or a rock garden. At the de Young, virtually every time you look through a window, someone else is looking right back at you. Or, even better, they're looking at someone in a third window, who is either drifting by like an absentminded jellyfish or looking right back at the both of you. It's like a mutual-viewing zoo, but with art in it.

As I learn during a brief oxygen break outside, in the five hours I've been here, the line has grown to six people in width, stretching all the way to the entrance of the park. The grounds are full of people wandering up the sides of the building, looking through the plate-glass windows that line its sides like a series of dioramas.

The first window looks down two stories onto the dance floor and half a story up to another window full of people, also looking at the dance floor.

Some demonstrative soul has left a row of lipstick prints on the glass offering a view into the Piazzoni Murals room, home to the murals from the old San Francisco Public Library. The room looks like what it is – a classy venue for business luncheons and cocktail parties (daytime rental: $4,000. Evening: $7,500) – and is empty save for one small boy chasing another around the slick floors with a plastic light saber.

The next window, opening onto the upper level of the gift shop, is an exercise in consumer voyeurism. Also bored-clerk voyeurism, since no one is buying anything.

People get really excited as they approach the fourth window, because it is covered with copper paneling. To see inside, you must bend over and peek through one of the holes in the panel, and at this point, given how kinky and voyeuristic architects Herzog and de Meuron seem to be, it's hard not to think you're going to see something really cool.

In point of fact, the window provides a view of the bread cart in the cafeteria storage room. Someone could do an art piece solely composed of the different disappointed ways in which people intone the words "Oh ... bread" after peeking through one of the holes.

"Well, at least it's artisan bread," says one onlooker to another.

11:01 p.m.

On my way back inside, a man breaks through the line and makes a dash for the front entrance. He is efficiently wrestled and pinned down on top of the Andy Goldsworthy sculpture by two cops. "Hey man!" he yells. "My civil rights are being violated!"

Heading toward the dance floor, I see a tiny old couple in evening wear doing the fox trot to the pounding techno beat. I lean back against the wall and realize that the plaster is vibrating.

A group of art-schoolish guys in nerd glasses wanders through the room, furtively pulling bottles of Sierra Nevada from their corduroy sports coats in unison and taking a swig before moving on.

1:12 a.m.

My friend John has arrived with a thermos full of hot coffee, and we stumble into the Trompe L'Oeil room, for which a better descriptive might be the "dead everything" room. The paintings range from dead ducks, dead oranges, and an enormous phosphorescent dead swan hanging upside down by its feet to a dead rabbit and what seems to be a dead piece of toast signed by Jasper Johns.

We strike up a conversation with a woman in her mid 30s with pink-streaked platinum hair. She and her friend waited an hour and a half in line before cutting to the front. "In the last half an hour we were just about 20 feet from the entrance. And we didn't move an inch," she says. "For half an hour."

We learn that the bar, which was supposed to stay open until 2 a.m., has been closed owing to people getting too rowdy. "I did get a hit off someone's flask in line," she concedes.

She tells us that some artist friends of hers dressed up in fancy garb and snuck in last night, when the mayor and all the socialites were there for a private party. "They just dressed up and apparently went through the front door. I regret that I didn't think of that myself."

The pink-haired woman remembers the old de Young, but says they were hard-pressed to get anyone to come there. "This is still the same collection. But I don't recall the toast," she says, gesturing toward the Jasper Johns.

Her friend is of the opinion that most people are just here to see the building. "It feels like the Getty," she says. "The art's not so great, but the building is pretty."

2: 34 a.m.

We loan our map to "Furry," a big-eyed woman in a velvet evening gown that is slightly too large for her. She's here with "Dodger," who's wearing a tuxedo and a pair of mouse ears with Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Label glued to the front. He's mildly annoyed that frat guys keep pointing at him and singing the Mickey Mouse Club theme song.

Dodger and Furry both remember the old de Young, and Furry misses the turtle pond most of all. (The turtle pond comes up in conversations about the old museum tonight more than any piece of art does. There is a serious yen for the turtle pond.)

They approve of the new building's Disneyland-like ability to make everyone feel they have enough space to move around in. "They've applied a lot of modern concepts based on shopping mall research to make traffic flow," Dodger says. "It pulls you in, like IKEA does, but it doesn't make you feel trapped. You can find the exits, for example."

It turns out that Dodger refers to himself thusly because of a more than passing familiarity with Dickens. Which naturally leads to a duet from Oliver!

Dodger (as the Artful Dodger): Would you tie my shoe?

Furry (as Nancy): Anything ...

Dodger: Paint my face bright blue?

Furry: Anything ...

Dodger: Fly to Timbuktu?

Furry: And back again?

Dodger: Anything ...

Museum guard: This section is closed

Furry: The whole 20th century or just this room?

Guard: Just this room.

2:47 a.m.

Abruptly ejected from the 20th century, we wander over to the educational room, which is dark and filled with nifty glass touch-screen panels that look like they're from the not too distant future. When you touch them, a female voice narrates soothing information about Mayans and maize while pictures of Mayan sculpture whiz back and forth.

For this reason, the room has turned into something of a chill space. "Do you have any idea how lucky we are to be here, looking at this deity?" a woman is saying to her friends, in the histrionic tones of the very stoned.

People are sprawled out across the little kid chairs, which are made out of something pleasantly firm yet squishy. They look like gum drops.

At the back of the room, a few people are taunting passersby on the other side of the window through the inventive use of mime.

As we're leaving, we look out the window and see a herd of people stampeding toward the revolving doors. They burst through and spread out into the lobby like a herd of gazelles in party-wear. Most of them dissolve into the crowd, but a few unfortunates run smack into the police and are strong-armed out of the building.

4:30 a.m.

The pounding techno music has stopped by order of the fire marshal. The crowd inside the museum is pretty sparse, but then, most of the staff and volunteers are gone. The museum is essentially being guarded by the police, and a couple of 70-year-old docents. Outside, people are cheering as they approach the front of the line.

Me: How long have you been waiting?

Woman at front of line: Hours. Well, minutes. But there's a girl behind me who's been waiting in line for four and a half hours.

Irate finger puppet with a little gold crown (on finger of man in gray V-neck sweater): I've been waiting in line for so many hours! I fell asleep! And when I woke up, I was still in line!

Heather O'Brian, 31, is wearing a red clown nose, a fluorescent yellow tutu, and a corset. Perhaps understandably, she was allowed to cut to the front. "People were letting each other cut," she says. "We came to hang out in line. We'll be back to see the actual art."

On entering the museum, she immediately runs upstairs and begins dancing in one of the windows overlooking the atrium. A crowd forms. Another woman, obviously inspired, joins her and moons the crowd.

Upstairs in the American wing, I meet Jed Holtzman, 28, who came here straight from shooting a zombie movie in Santa Cruz. He's wearing a ratty tuxedo, dripping zombie makeup, and what appears to be a sucking chest wound. He and his girlfriend, also a zombie, were allowed to skip forward in the line.

I've noticed that in San Francisco a lot of social largesse is given to people wearing bizarre outfits. It's sort of understood that they're entitled to perks other people aren't, having gone to the trouble, say, of dressing like a robot, or a giant chicken.

"It is ethically questionable to skip ahead," says Holtzman, "but you know, we only have so much time on the earth before we're just rotting on the ground."

A woman in a wheelchair approaches Holtzman and asks if she can take his picture in front of a painting of a naked woman surrounded by lush greenery.

The woman in the wheelchair is in her mid 30s and has a dry, sardonic bearing. "My friend and I were trying to see how many things we could lick without getting caught," she confides. "But there were no guards. We could lick whatever we wanted [gestures toward the rest of the American section]. So it kind of lost its appeal."

Me: Did you lick her? [gestures at naked lady painting]

Woman in wheelchair: No, she had a rope in front of her.

Me: So you licked everything that didn't have a rope in front of it?

Woman in wheelchair: Anything that seemed ... lickable.

Jed Holtzman: You know, as your attorney I have to inform you that I think there's lead in that painting.

Woman in wheelchair: Shit.

5:27 a.m.

Martha Olson has been working the information desk since 8 a.m., barring a break in the afternoon for a few hours of sleep. She and her compatriot, Charlotte Hemenway, 69, are the only people left at the information desk. Their unshakable cheerfulness boggles the mind.

Random guy: When does the observation deck open?

Martha Olson: It's 9 or 9:30.

Random guy: Today?

Martha Olson: Today. It's just a few hours. Just four hours.

Random guy: You want to know how long I waited? Two hours and forty-five minutes. I can't wait in line again.

Martha Olson: You can take off your jacket and use it as a pillow.

5:45 a.m.

Esther Jennings, 72, has been a volunteer at the de Young for the past 25 years and has been working this weekend since Saturday at 9 a.m. "I'm a native San Franciscan," she says, "and I loved the old de Young. It had such charm. Very San Francisco. This one, we'll get used to it."

Me: I hear this is a little rowdier than the time it closed down.

Esther Jennings: It's mostly the young people. They're having such fun. It's good for them. I'm so glad to see the young people in the museum. So sweet, and very appreciative of everything.

Joshua Sperling, 22, is wearing a three-piece checked suit and looking very dapper. He waited in line four and a half hours. The friends he originally came with all drifted away into the park long before he made it to the door.

"I was in Golden Gate Park with such a cross-section of society that the line itself almost stole the show. I found myself having conversations with people that ordinarily I would just see on the bus," he tells me, adding, "I came to see standing in line as really the most unique aesthetic experience that I could get out of the night. I wasn't even particularly thinking that I would make it into the museum."

6: 30 a.m.

First inept graffiti tag on the de Young Museum. It's scrawled in silver paint marker on a glass inset overlooking the main stairway, in a style that I would describe as "Bathroom Mirror Mission District." A sign of how jaded I've become is that my first reaction is surprise it didn't happen sooner.

7:10 a.m.

"This is a performance piece." says Scatha G. Allison, who looks to be in her 20s and is sitting on a bench outside the museum with a group of people in flowing, Technicolor outfits. "It's called 'groups of people, drinking port.'"

It's been a long night for the group. Some of them snuck in by climbing over the wall. "It was apparently not necessary," says a woman in a turban, "but worth it. We felt heroic. What was funny is that as soon as we got inside and looked outside, there was no line."

I look up and see my first jogger, loping across the pavement like an antelope, faintly backlit by the rising sun.

Early as it is, the families have returned, with their strollers, and glide on into the museum.

Nothing remains of the line that was, almost certainly, bigger than the museum itself. People with dustpans scoop the smashed beer cans off the sidewalk. The sky is sherbet colored. The zombies and clowns have left the building.

Heather Smith is a San Francisco writer who privately thinks that the new California Academy of Sciences is going to look like a very fancy hobbit hole. You can e-mail her at cupandsaucer@sbcglobal.net.