A few of my favorite things: Bridget Balog

Smithsonian staff and volunteers work countless hours in the halls of our museums and research centers, in the field, at the Zoo, in our gardens and facilities. We are privileged to spend time with some of the nation’s most cherished treasures as we go about our duties. Sometimes, these unique experiences find a special place in our own personal stories. Amy Kehs introduces Bridget Balog  and a few of her favorite things.

Bridget Balog began working in the Smithsonian’s Office of Visitor Services in 1994. She is currently in charge of public inquiries—all the questions people ask the Smithsonian, whether they come in by phone, email or even snail mail (yes, OVS still gets plenty of actual mail.) Part of answering visitor questions is knowing who has the answer. During the 2018 fiscal year, OVS answered 22,622 inquiries, 5,176 of which were sent to individual curators or other staff to answer. I asked Bridget what topics seem to come up most often and was surprised to learn that OVS keeps very detailed metrics. Bridget could tell me statistically the kinds of inquiries that were most common last year; a fairly accurate measure from year to year.

Bridget Balog, Visitor Services Coordinator (Public Inquiry Mail). discussed how OVS promotes the Smithsonian museums in the context of One Smithsonian — via the Great Hall banners, the Start Here and Wayfinding graphics in the exterior signage program, and the Smithsonian Guide and Map (in English, 10 foreign languages, Braille, and large-print) at an OVS open house in April.

The top four are so common that information desk volunteers can answer them in their sleep:

• “Someone I know donated something and I want to come see it.”
  (First, we must determine whether the object is on display—of the millions of items in the Smithsonian collections, only about two percent are on display at any given time.)
• “I found X, can you tell me what it is? Or what it is worth?”
  (A curator may be able to help identify an object, but the Smithsonian does not do appraisals.)
• “I have X and I want to donate or sell it to the Smithsonian. How do I do that?”
  (A little more complicated, because the Smithsonian does not accept everything that is offered to it. Collection items go through a thorough acquisition process that includes many factors.)
• “How do I get to__________?”
  (With a map! Volunteers can help you find anything.)

I asked Bridget about some of her favorite letters and she immediately thought of two letters she will never forget. The first was from a dad whose son was so inspired by his first trip to the Smithsonian that he went home and created his own museum. The letter came with photos of all the boy’s hard work, including signage and exhibit panels for his homemade museum. The dad thanked the Smithsonian for being such an inspiration.

The Patterson–Gimlin film is an American short motion picture of an unidentified subject which the filmmakers have said was a Bigfoot. The footage was shot in 1967 in Northern California, and has since been subjected to many attempts to authenticate or debunk it. This is Frame 352 of the film, alleged to depict a female Bigfoot, known informally as “Patty,” looking back at Patterson and Gimlin.

Another favorite is a letter from kindergarten-age budding scientist asking if the Smithsonian has any evidence of Bigfoot and declaring that he would be the first to discover the creature. Bridget passed this letter onto Darrin Lunde, supervisory museum specialist in the National Museum of Natural History’s Department of Vertebrate Zoology, and his response has stayed with her. Darrin let the young resident scientist know that there is currently no evidence at the Smithsonian that Sasquatch exists, but not to lose hope. Darrin wrote that he had lots of experience discovering creatures that no one knew existed before he found them, and that the young scientist may find new species, too. Darrin concluded by writing,

“I’ll end by telling you that our world is NOT completely explored, and that there are still many mysteries just waiting to be discovered. It takes hard work to discover something new, and you will most likely have to explore some of the deepest forests in your area, and perhaps around the world, but if you go where few people have gone before, I can assure you that you are very likely to find something new. Good luck with your adventures, and remember, nothing worthwhile is ever achieved by giving up.”

Bridget is a self-proclaimed Army brat who lived all over the world before settling in South Carolina when her father retired.  She attended the University of South Carolina where she received her bachelor’s degree in Political Science and a master’s degree in International Studies. Her background seems to have given Bridget a bit of wanderlust and an interest in other cultures that are reflected in her picks for her favorite Smithsonian things.

Two of Bridget’s Smithsonian favorites are Folklife Festival programs. The Smithsonian Folklife Festival has brought culture, art and music to the National Mall for over 50 years. For the Smithsonian employees who work in the museums on the Mall the Festival means 10 days of “exotic” lunch breaks where each day can transport you to a different country or region for a unique food menu, shopping trip or cultural experience. It may also mean that instead of rushing to the Metro after work, you hang around for the evening concert.

“To be able to be in the midst of the iconic Smithsonian buildings, the Capitol and Washington Monument and simultaneously experience cultures from all around the globe sounds like a once-in-a-lifetime experience but Folklife makes it happen year after year,” says Bridget.

Visitors on the National Mall for the popular Smithsonian Folklife Festival “Silk Road” program in 2002 (Smithsonian Photo)

Her favorite Festival program is the 2002 program The Silk Road: Connecting Cultures, Creating Trust —a Folklife Festival milestone, celebrating the living traditional arts of peoples of the ancient Silk Road, a vast network of trade routes that spanned the mountains and deserts of Central Asia to connect East Asian and the Mediterranean. Bridget remembers hearing a lecture about pasta, seeing a demonstration on paper-making and attending a fascinating talk on guitars. The memory she treasures most was buying a blouse in the Festival shop. The next time she went shopping at the Festival, she wore the blouse, and at the checkout counter, met the woman who made it! The artist didn’t speak English, but made it clear with hand gestures, “I made that!”

The Smithsonian Folklife Festival seems to have a lot of those full-circle moments for the adventurous and observant visitor like Bridget who can take in and appreciate everything going on around her. Another of Bridget’s favorites is the 1997 Folklife Festival, which included programs on “African Immigrant Folklife,” “Sacred Sounds: Belief & Society” and “The Mississippi Delta.” It was one evening during this Festival that another uniquely Folklife Festival magical moment happened for Bridget.

Performers at the Mississippi Delta Program at the 1997 Smithsonian Folklife Festival. (Photo by Richard Strauss, courtesy Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections.)

Performers from the African Immigrant Experience program at the 1997 Folklife Festival. (Photo by Hugh Talman, courtesy Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections)

“I very clearly remember the feeling of sitting on the National Mall with the Capitol on my right and the Washington Monument on my left, eating BBQ from the Mississippi Delta program while watching a woman in a pink sari dance to ska music from Ghana. So amazing! Mixing and celebrating cultures is what the Smithsonian does best!” says Bridget.

Bridget’s third Smithsonian favorite is a teeny tiny vial of milky liquid on display in the Mineral Hall at the NMNH. Odds are that you’ve rushed past this case countless time on your way to a meeting or to meet a colleague, not even realizing what it is. In that tiny vial is most definitely the oldest material that you will ever see. It is proven to be older than the Solar System itself. It is stardust. Yes, real stardust! In the tiny vial of milky liquid are minuscule diamonds that were forged when a dying star exploded. The dust was blasted across space and came to be part of the cloud that gave birth to our Solar System. It was preserved inside a meteorite that fell to Earth in 1969.

“That stardust just charms me,” says Bridget. “It gives me chills and makes me think of the line in the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young song ‘Woodstock’ that says, ‘We are stardust. We are golden.’”

The milky liquid in this vial contains tiny diamonds forged in the explosion of a dying star. Blasted across space, they were incorporated in the cloud that gave birth to our Solar System and were preserved inside a meteorite that fell to Earth in 1969. From such grains, we learn how the chemical elements form within distant stars. (Smithsonian photo)

It seems that each letter or email that Bridget opens from around the globe sparks a sort of magic and sense of adventure. Bridget Balog, through her work in the Office of Visitor Services, not only helps spread that magic but also feels it herself. She is just as “wowed” by all the Smithsonian has to offer as she was when she first came to work here in 1994.

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