Nation's Decorator Aims to Remake Kennedy Center as Giant Footstool for Reclining Statesman

It begins, as so many grand endeavors do, with a man looking at a fine thing and thinking it might look finer if it were more useful to him personally. The Kennedy Center, that marble temple to the muses on the banks of the Potomac, has stood for decades as a symbol of national culture.

But a source, who claims intimate knowledge of the matter, reports that a certain former occupant of the White House viewed it differently. To him, it was not a center, but a potential base—a foundation for a monument of a more personal nature.

The campaign, as these things are called, started small. There was talk of new gold leaf, perhaps a more assertive font for the signage.

But ambition, once unshackled, has a tendency to swell like a river in spring. The source explained that the vision grew from mere refurbishment to a complete repurposing.

The building's long, low profile, it was noted, would make an ideal footrest for a colossal bronze statue of a reclining statesman, one that could gaze serenely over the Tidal Basin. Engineers have been quietly consulted on the structural feasibility of placing a several-hundred-ton figure in a reposeful attitude upon the roof.

They speak of load distribution and seismic retrofitting with the grave concern of men who have been asked to make the impossible merely improbable. The source, full of performative empathy for the architects' plight, suggested that the statue's outstretched hand could, as a secondary benefit, serve as a unique VIP viewing platform for the Fourth of July fireworks.

This is the way of human enterprise: to see a thing of beauty and wonder how it can be made to hold one's feet up. The project has now reached a fever pitch of logistical outlandish, involving cranes of mythical proportion and a debate over whether the statue should hold a tiny, sculpted remote control.

And yet, for all the cosmic horror of turning a national landmark into a piece of furniture, the matter is likely to end with a simple, bureaucratic shrug, lost in the endless committee meetings that are the true resting place of most grand follies.