Purchased by the city of Long Beach in what was generally seen as a folly, she's a tourist attraction now. Permamnently moored, the Queen Mary now shadows another tourist attraction, a Soviet sub, the Red Scorpion.
Not only is the QM an attraction, there's a restaurant and a ghost tour in the bow (front):
There's a large luxury hotel in the mid-section. Hopefully you like 8'x10' rooms with seven foot ceilings:
And there's a theater, the Royal Theater, in the stern (back):
The Royal Theater was where Corrie and I went to see a play, a cheeky comedy about the last days of a physicist, one of the same ones I wrote about in the Demon Core post.
"The Louis Slotin Sonata" is the play in question, and as a comedy it has it's moments, while rare, of gallows humor generally overshadowed with the tragedy of arrogance in the final days in the life of a proud man embarrassed and humbled.
The production's first fifteen minutes, the actual test in question that went bad, takes place on the stage behind large sheets of plastic. The audience sees the blurry players, hears the action, and the idea that history's important moments are always guarded by a layer of experience is successfully passed.
The plastic comes down for the rest of the long play, and we watch the quick deterioration of a scientist, his arms constantly in a large bowl of ice. The play portrays Slotin's final wish was to be forgotten, to not be remembered.
The play portrays that the play itself violates his last wish in one it's many fourth-wall breaks, but I dare anyone to ask any physics majors who Slotin was, let alone folks in the street.
People in the street likely have heard of Einstein. Depending on their age, possibly Oppenheimer. Slotin? If that had been his final wish, it seems almost granted. Being remembered by a handful of science folks and independent theater fans as a tragic figure of history, doomed by his own arrogance.
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