It’s safe to say he was objectified: a hunk of flesh, chiseled and polished. In a museum full of objects, including a few idealized men, he was a living statue.
The occasion was the 1985 Rose Fete, an annual public party that the MIA had held since 1959. In the early days, it was organized by Goldthwait Higginson Dorr III, an MIA administrator and curator whose name the Coen brothers would later appropriate—unbeknownst to him—for the pompous Tom Hanks character in The Ladykillers. The party always included a local art show and a fashion show for the ladies, which on this very ’80s occasion featured, well, a nearly naked bodybuilder.
The Rose Fete was inspired by a famously fabulous party of the same name at the Morrison estate, called Villa Rosa, which the family pledged in 1911 to become of the site of the Minneapolis Institute of Art. The party was back in July 1892, the fin de siècle. “Even the garden party thrown by the Prince of Wales at Marlborough Palace, in London, which I attended, fell far short of the gorgeousness of this,” exclaimed the guest of honor, Chicago matron Mary Logan.
Several hundred people arrived under the elm trees, which were strung with electric globe lights. Former Governor Alexander Ramsey was there; President Benjamin Harrison and his wife, the vice president and his wife, and Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant telegrammed their regrets. Guests received a white satin book as a souvenir, including a portrait of the guest of honor and a hand-painted sketch of Villa Rosa.
Nothing, in other words, compared to what partygoers got at the Rose Fete in the ’80s: this guy.
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