I was recently in Nashville, landing a great hotel rate because of the unfortunate flooding incident. When I wasn’t listening to radio ads for floor tiles sales and construction bargains, I visited the Chihuly glass exhibit at the Cheekwood Gardens. If you have a chance to go, I’d highly recommend it.

Dale Chihuly is a renowned American glass artist, who has a permanent exhibit here in Indianapolis at the Children’s Museum, which is the only reason I knew how to pronounce his name. The Cheekwood exhibit is part of a bigger Chihuly in Nashville celebration where his work is also displayed at the Frist Center downtown. Cheekwood is a 55-acre botanical garden and art museum which would have been pretty enough all on its own. When I visited, the glass sculptures had been installed all over the estate. Chihuly’s work is strongly influenced by nature, so you could almost believe Nashville happened to have glass flowers and plants flourishing in its soil.

I stopped to sit in a theater halfway through my visit to watch part of [...]

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“Would you like a glass for your soda?” my friend Jenny asked after she handed me a can of Sprite Zero. Usually I just drink soda straight from the can, leaving me one less dish to wash and saving me all that time pouring. But when I’m visiting other people I like to pretend I’m not the low-rent individual that I am who has reused the same bowl three times without washing it, so I said yes.

Then she brought out the Charlie Brown glass.

“OMG!” I exclaimed, only I actually said “Oh my God” instead of shouting out the acronym, because even I am not that geeky. “We used to have glasses exactly like this! From McDonalds!”

“We also have a Smurfs glass from Burger King,” she said, showing me her Smurfs glass.

“Oh, we never went to Burger King. We were McDonalds people,” I said as I admired the glass. It was perfectly preserved, as if someone had reached into the china cabinet directly into 1984. Our McDonalds glasses took hundreds of trips through the dishwasher [...]

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