By Paul Lieberman
Los Angeles Times
ROCKLAND, Maine — It doesn't have to be the Fourth of July for Victoria Wyeth to tell her wildest fireworks story — the one about how they blew up Aunt Carolyn's ashes.
"She was crazy in a really fun way," Victoria explains. "She hated people, so she had like eight dogs around the house. ... So we decided to do something really cool for her funeral, so we cremated her ... then we took a big bomb with a big shell and stuffed her in it ... and we lit her up in front of her father's house. It was so loud it set off all the alarms, and the priest was there and he was drunk.
"It was too much," she sums it up, and if the nature of her family isn't obvious in the unique museum tours she leads, she drives that home, too. "I always talk," she says, "about how nuts they are."
She's been doing that for more than a decade, telling strangers about the Wyeth art, sure, but mostly overflowing with the stories about how Aunt Carolyn "went kaboom" or how Uncle Jamie played classical music to calm his pigs or how Grandma Betsy came to buy up islands like other women buy shoes.
Victoria Wyeth is shown in front of the Olson House in Cushing, Maine, the setting for her grandfather's famed painting "Christina's World." Victoria Wyeth now leads tours of the home.Andrew Wyeth's self-portrait "Dr. Syn" painted in 1981, tempera on panel.More:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003821093_wyeth04.html