Java jive

Taken in March of 2004, this photograph is of three of the people I had coffee with each morning at the museum. They are (from left) John Balasa, an extremely talented painter who specializes in faux finishes; Patricia Jagoda, who runs the museum's summer concert series, Jumpin!, as well as other special events; and Les Smith, now retired, who created and managed the museum's Web site and wrote the whole of it in code without a WYSIWYG program. (Don Dale photo)

For a quarter of a century, the VMFA staff got more work done in 30 minutes during morning coffee break than in the rest of the day's meetings, phone calls and, later in the game, e-mails.

There was a malleable rigidity to the ritual. At precisely 9:30, most of the middle chunk of the museum's staff would make the trek to the Café in the North Wing. If the weather was nice, we'd take our cups and saucers to a table in the Sculpture Garden. (The Café and the garden are gone now, demolished to make way for the new James W. and Frances G. McGlothlin Wing.)

Almost always, we'd sit with the same group of people. In the 1980s, I mostly sat with a group from the Virginia Museum Theatre. As the museum's second in line in public affairs, I was responsible for VMT publicity and advertising. The theater was in its heyday, with the number of annual ticketholders hovering above 10 thousand. As befits a theater within a fine arts museum, productions ranged from a Postmodern "Macbeth" to a new telling of the Dracula story.

The VMT coffee-break group included carpenters, painters, designers, stage technicians, front-office people and, sometimes, actors. It was at coffee break that I'd learn about new story ideas that I could successfully pitch to reporters -- from the backstage intricacies of making ghosts appear in a puff of smoke in "A Christmas Carol" to the fact that an actor in "The Fantasticks" was once a Mousketeer.

When the theater split from the museum's governance and became merely a tenant organization, I switched my allegiance to a coffee-break group made up mainly of professional staff from the education division, although we had regulars at the table who were exhibition painters, carpenters and designers.

The groups were loosely defined, and members would sometimes switch allegiance. There were rare occasions when a trustee, the museum's director or a curator might join us, but for the most part, it was the middle-managers who found time to get away from their desks for a half hour.

What we had in common was our jobs. After we'd catch up on each other's personal lives, we'd gossip about work.

Gossip can be good and bad, and a bit of both transpired in the VMFA Café. I'm happy to say that little of our time was devoted to discussing the personal lives of others. (Although there was that one time when a division head described her previous night's dream of slipping slowly down a roof towards the edge with nothing to cling to. Shortly thereafter, she left the museum, where, to be frank, she had been done in by her clumsy personality exacerbated by too much responsibility. We talked about her dream for days.)

But most of the time, the morning ritual was where we learned what was really going on at the museum. A theater set designer would talk about an ingenious method he'd devised for making a lit candle "appear" out of thin air. A backstage techie would complain about the difficulties of managing stage-fog production with the theater's air conditioning running full blast. One of the museum's education specialists would talk about her plans for leading public tours for visually disabled people or Alzheimer's patients. Or a special-events organizer would tell us about how immigration laws were making it almost impossible to book a young music group from abroad.

In that 30 minutes each morning, we heard details from each other about what was really happening at VMFA. In a disorganized fashion, yes. But in an extremely effective fashion, as well.

When the Café and Sculpture Garden were demolished to make way for the new wing, the tradition of gathering for coffee went with them. I found myself knowing less and less about what everybody else was doing on a daily basis. We lost contact with the heartbeat of the museum, its people, its problems and its successes.

Now there's a topic for an academic paper: Museum Management by Coffee Break.

That morning ritual met a valuable business objective for a quarter of a century.