i feel slightly embarrassed by how depressed this makes me...

After an amazing going away party, I've been holed up on 42nd street trying not to feel such an inappropriate amount of depression about this. 

"Who gives a damn about Scarlett O'Hara's Dresses."

(I tried to embed the player, but sometimes NPR won't let me do it..)

I feel a strange, genuine loss about the slowly evaporating, living evidence of Gone with the Wind.

Every time something else goes away, I feel another piece of my grandfather go away, and another step closer to when all the things I loved about being a child will be gone. The last time I left for a foreign country, my grandfather told me I wouldn't see him again. So naturally, I feel a little dread about going away again. I wish I could just have one more summer with my grandmother where we watch Gone with the Wind, and make lists of the related museums, houses and exhibits before we got in the car for our little pilgrimages. One more summer where we always stopped Uno for lunch with Papoo and iced tea and sandwiches. Those were the first summers where I really learned to daydream. And the first summers where I learned to accept that simultaneous sense of content/restlessness was actually happiness.

Don't fall apart, Scarlett's dresses!

Great balls of fire, Mammy, Miss Scarlett's dresses are falling apart! The iconic costumes worn by actress Vivien Leigh in Gone With the Wind are suffering loose seams, fading colors and other signs of old age. Where shall they go? What shall be done?

Enter the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin. The center is trying to restore five of Scarlett O'Hara's gowns to their cinema splendor. "These dresses were only made to last as long as it took to shoot the movie," says Steve Wilson, the center's film curator. Scarlett's famous "curtain dress" is one of the few survivors.