The Philadelphia Art Museum has been doing its hugely successful Wednesday evening openings for 15 months now, but it's never done one like the one it's going to do this Wednesday night.
It's called "Nude Wednesday," and the public is invited (dress optional, but recommended). In fact, the point of the whole thing is to get the public in the doors of the museum. Since the Wednesday night specials started in September 1991, they've been a big hit.
And that's before they got naked.
Wednesday will feature a sketching demonstration of a nude - Augustus St. Gaudens' bronze statue of Diana, who looms, all 13 feet of her, over the stairs.
And a French movie about a gay couple.
And there's a Nude Descending a Staircase, by a Frenchman named Marcel Duchamp.
And there's a course in art history on "Revealing Garments: The History of Women's Underwear."
It's the first in the next round of 26 Wednesday-evening openings at the museum called "Around the World on Wednesday Nights." The program is aimed at bringing to the museum people who've thought of coming but couldn't make it during the day, as well as at people who haven't thought of coming but who might be attracted by the variety of events.
Every Wednesday evening, the museum offers a mixture of films, music, tours, lectures, storytellers, poetry readers and demonstrations - all for the price of admission to the museum (adults, $6; seniors, students and children, $3). Food and drink will be available in the Great Stair Hall, buffet dinners in the museum restaurant.
"I hadn't been here for 20 years until they started doing the Wednesday nights," said John Jastisan - a systems analyst who lives in King of Prussia and works in University City - at one Wednesday night program last fall.
On the average, more than a thousand people have been showing up Wednesday nights at the museum, although attendance drifted off a bit during the Christmas season, according to Bernice Connolly, the museum's Wednesday night coordinator.
The program has been so successful since its 1991 inception that the museum intends to keep it going indefinitely. The evening openings don't pay for themselves - the Women's Committee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art has been picking up the difference between income and outgo - but they have side benefits.
In the last 15 months, memberships at the museum have increased by 1,800, and the museum attributes the growth in large part to the Wednesday night openings, said Robert Montgomery Scott, museum president.
