Yesterday I caught sight of something that stopped me cold:  I saw three African Americans hanging around the local park, behind the soccer fields. My heart leapt with joy. People of color are moving to Wyoming! In groups! Ordinarily, the only time I see non-whites here is in the summer, when hotels hire Caribbean natives to clean the rooms. 

Unfortunately, the “three African Americans” I saw was in reality a brass sculpture. Of white people.

I’m not even going to begin to blame anything but my failing eyesight for the mistake. In fact, this isn’t the first time I fell prey to a similar snafu–I’m still trying to bury the memory of apologizing to a muscle-bound blue collar sculpture when I stepped on the damn thing’s toe. But I have to say, Sheridan WY is far and away the most sculpture-friendly town I’ve ever lived in.  That is, if you sculpt in brass.  And stick to lifelike representations of, say, a gang of happy folk laughing in the park. A kid catching rain on his tongue. Or a rhinoceros.

I wouldn’t consider myself exactly a patron of the arts, since I only earnmark money in that category to entry fees for writing contests, but I certainly support the arts. In spirit. (Picture a fist-pumping “go, art, go!”) And though I may be the only person in the world to have broken off a relationship in the sculpture garden at the Rodin Museum in Paris, I thoroughly enjoyed everything I saw–even if I’d seen most of it before at the Metropolitan in NYC.

To sum up: yes, of course I like sculpture. But no, I can’t really appreciate it when it’s on EVERY FRIGGING STREETCORNER and it all looks like, well, someone poured a mould of the San Diego zoo. Seriously. It’s impossible to walk past it. People here don’t understand the “dip into the street when the street is too crowded to get past other people” move. So the streetcorners get backed up in the summer, as slow-moving, overfed folk try to finagle past all the brass animals.

It’s overkill. Too many sculptures are–yes, I said it–a bad thing. And I’m not being “sculpturist” either. If the town painted every wall with Monet’s water lillies I would feel the same way. Unless Monet himself came back from the grave and covered up every available space on Main Street from the Beaver Creek Saloon to the Vac-n-Sew with a certain painting of a certain bridge to a certain town named Giverny, I would have to say I come down firmly on the side of “less is more.”

Here’s a concept: let’s build a museum. Then we can house all of our brass in one place. And when it burns down, we could start a foundry! That way, I wouldn’t have to apologize to sculptures, anymore. Or experience my blood pressure rise at the thought that Sheridan might, gasp, be a home to a more integrated population.

I can live with the embarrassment of having bad eyesight. But the disappointment of seeing that I really do live in a white-only world is too much for my poor heart to bear.