| Cynthetiq |
06-30-2007 04:21 AM |
Why do you toss in coins into fountains?
Quote:
June 30, 2007
Many Wishes, Many Splashes, and the Fountains at the Met Fill Up
By JAMES BARRON
LINK
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v1...iq/coin600.jpg
Dionysos, standing there in his sandals with his arm over that woman, knows. He spends his days watching everyone in the room and everything they do.
He knows it cannot be Aphrodite, on his right. She has no arms.
He knows it cannot be Hercules, also on his right. No arms on him, either.
So who is dropping all the coins in the fountain in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new Greek and Roman galleries?
Not David Mendez, though he knows more about coins in fountains than anyone else at the Met. That is because he takes the coins out, once a week, every week, using an old wiper blade and napkin-size pieces of thin white cloth.
Since the waist-high fountain was switched on in April, it has become the latest of the Met’s coin catchers. The others include the pool known around the Met as “the Nile” that runs by the Temple of Dendur, and the stream in a corner of the Astor Court where the koi swim. Another, now closed, was a pool in the American Wing that had at its center a statue of Pan the museum had to give back to its lender — anonymous, of course.
In all these babbling places, the story is the same: Coins pile up, Mr. Mendez removes them and people’s fascination with tossing pocket change into water continues, unexplained. Their motivation? Their wishes? Mr. Mendez has no more of an answer than Frank Sinatra did when he recorded the title song for the 1954 Clifton Webb-Dorothy McGuire comedy “Three Coins in the Fountain.”
That film began with a shot that Mr. Mendez would love: the Trevi Fountain in Rome being cleaned. But there were a lot more than three coins in the Greek and Roman fountain when Mr. Mendez went to work the other day in his blue plastic poncho, black rubber gloves and flip-down visor — heavier and more industrial than a dental hygienist’s, but lighter than a deep-sea diver’s.
“We don’t want splashes,” he explained. “You don’t know what’s in those coins. You know that workmen’s compensation doesn’t pay much for eyeballs. You know that, don’t you?”
The Met says that the fountain, in the Leon Levy and Shelby White Court, was not planned as a receptacle for discarded dimes, pennies and quarters, not to mention euros, Mexican pesos and Taiwanese dollars. “The fountain was designed to recreate the ambience of a Roman court,” said Harold Holzer, a spokesman for the Met, “but you know, it’s inevitable. From Trevi to Dendur, water attracts coins.”
Mr. Mendez’s haul on Thursday included a handful of dollars from Taiwan and Canada, an old token from the Boston transit system and a nearly new $1 coin depicting George Washington.
The Met says he collected $3,000 a year in coins from the museum’s various watery spots before the new fountain opened. He sends the coins to the Met’s cashier, ready to be counted.
“We wash them and dry them” first, he said. “We don’t know what’s in the water, and we don’t want other employees to handle them and get sick.”
Mr. Mendez’s main tool is a recycled wiper blade that came off the museum’s tractor, now 35 years old and still going strong, thanks to him. “Maybe I should get a regular squeegee, huh?” Mr. Mendez said. “But with this, I can tell if there’s anything in the water. The metal starts to rust right away.”
On the marble floor of the fountain were circles where the coins had been. “They leave their shadow because they interact with the water,” he said.
That is different from what he finds when he retrieves the coins from the koi pond. “From the fish waste, the coins look like they’ve been through a meteor shower,” he said.
In the hour before the museum opened the other day, he filled about a third of a large white bucket. As he worked he talked about everything from the 40th president (a hero of Mr. Mendez’s whom he calls “Mr. Reagan”) to the museum’s director, Philippe de Montebello (“I love the way he talks. He just knows how to say whatever he’s saying.”).
He talked about V.I.P.’s who have visited the Met in the 19 years he has worked there, including Queen Sofía of Spain.
“Mrs. Juan Carlos,” he called her, referring to the king. “She had super-thick ankles. He was so tall and handsome, and she was so petite. I guess it was an arranged marriage. You know how those things are.”
The why question remained unanswered. Why do people throw coins in fountains?
Joan Mertens, the Met’s curator of Greek and Roman art, came up with a story, appropriately enough, from ancient Greece. Amasis, the king of Egypt in the sixth century B.C., predicted trouble for his ally Polykrates unless Polykrates showed some humility. Amasis, Ms. Mertens said, told Polykrates he should throw into the sea his most valued possession: an emerald ring.
“Sort of as proof or a sign, someone in Polykrates’s household came in with a big fish who had the ring in his stomach,” she said, “so it came back to him.”
From that, she said, came the notion of “casting away something that is meaningful to you, and if you’re lucky, you will be reunited with it.”
Mr. Mendez was not thinking about Polykrates. He was talking about his mother, and why cleaning fountains matters.
“I remember when I was a child, I’d tell my mom, ‘Why must you clean the living room?’ ” he said. “She’d say, ‘I want the people who come here to feel relaxed.’ Well, here at the Metropolitan, we want the people who come here to feel relaxed.”
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So why do you toss in coins into a fountain?
As a kid growing up in Los Angeles we'd from time to time go to Chinatown in downtown for dinners. I fondly recall 2 things about those dinners, one was seeing all the kitsch in the souvenier stores. Second was the Chinese Wishing Well with various cups and crevices to pitch in your change. The parents of all the children would distribute change and we'd be there for a good half hour trying to pitch pennies and dimes onto clams and bowls, just like the carnival boardwalk game.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v1...ishingwell.jpg
I don't recall if it had the capacity to skip pennies in. I love to do that, so naturally, I love to be on lakes and ponds with good flat rocks around for skipping. There are some nice flat basalt rocks and bays in Snæfellsnes, Iceland. In fact, one time we were there the happened to be a small frozen pond. Skipping rocks on that was like shooting lasers, the sounds were incredible.
Initially I remember something started it long ago like,"Here toss in the coin and make a wish" But the wishes for me stopped long long ago.
I don't pitch change into fountains any longer, even when they have signage that claims the coins are collected for a particular charity.
But once in a while, I get the urge... because I like to hear "ker-plunk." |
