So What is the Tucson Show, Anyway?

摘要

Trying to describe the "Tucson Show" is a little like trying to nail a blob of mercury to the wall, except that if you chill mercury you can get it to stay nailed for a few minutes. The trouble with the show is that it is so large and sprawling and perversely polymorphous that no two people will have the same impression of it. This show, THE show, the show of mineral shows, is rather like life itself; each of us comes to it ill-equipped and ignorant, and we learn as we go. Each year we know a little more, and begin to pick and choose to suit ourselves, and we hope to eventually reach an accommodation with....whatever the Tucson Show might be. In the beginning, in 1954, the Tucson Show was one show, hosted by the Tucson Gem & Mineral Society (TGMS). This year there were forty shows, if by "show" you mean an organized group of dealers at one location. The 2006 Colored Stone Tucson Show Guide, which has 482 pages and weighs several pounds, lists forty different shows in thirty-eight hotels, motels, inns, resorts, convention centers, exposition halls, tents, and so forth. Individual shows last from four to seventeen days, and most of them run concurrently. This year four of those forty shows opened on Friday, January 27, and twenty-one more on Saturday, January 28. Thirty-nine of the forty shows were in full cry by the second weekend of the show, February 4 and 5. The original Tucson Gem & Mineral Show, still hosted by the TGMS and still the most prestigious and important show of the bunch, starts almost two weeks into this communal orgy. This year it opened on Thursday, February 9, and closed on Sunday the 12~(th), a fittingly explosive climax to the greatest natural history show on earth.