Like everything else it produces, even the obituaries in The New York Times are superb. While at Aunt Bert's yesterday for our version of an indoor Superbowl tailgate party, I plowed through the Sunday edition of The Times. When I got to the obituaries, I was stopped short by a touching tribute to The Nut Lady of Connecticut, Elizabeth Tashjian. This charming and in many ways, unintentionally funny dedication was preceded by a photograph of Ms.Tashjian, clutching a large species of nut shaped exactly like a fine pair of tan buttocks. It takes all kinds of nuts, I suppose.

For your reading pleasure (and because I must start packing for an early morning flight to the West Coast), please enjoy some excerpts from this delightful and, yes, nutty memorial (note: use of bold face in the article is mine).

From The New York Times, February 4, 2007 edition:

Elizabeth Tashjian, who debated whether she was a nut culturist or a nut artist, but was indisputably, well, nuts enough about nuts to win fame (but not fortune) as matriarch of the Nut Museum in Old Lyme, Conn., died last Sunday in Old Saybrook, Conn. She was 94. Ms. Tashjian hated being called “the Nut Lady” and died without fulfilling her dream of opening a nut theme park certain to surpass Disneyland. (Her reasoning: Squirrels are cuter than a certain mouse.)

Her death was confirmed by Christopher B. Steiner, a professor of art history and museum studies at Connecticut College, who in 2002 rescued Ms. Tashjian’s nuts, nut art, nut jewelry and a Nativity scene made completely of nuts from being thrown away. That collection, the Nut Museum, had filled a room of Ms. Tashjian’s 17-room Gothic Revival mansion. The objects have since been in museum and library exhibitions. “She became a visionary avant-garde artist,” said Dr. Steiner, who is dedicated to preserving, interpreting and communicating Ms. Tashjian’s legacy.

Dr. Steiner said that Ms. Tashjian began as an academic painter who liked nuts as a subject and started her museum in 1972 as a “cabinet of curiosity.” These“cabinets,” which emerged during the Renaissance, were rooms stuffed with intriguing objects about which people told stories. Or sang songs, in the case of Ms. Tashjian. She performed her composition “Nuts Are Beautiful,” the nut anthem, for visitors, to whom she also gave free cider and coffee cake. She told stories about a bearded dwarf dwelling within every peanut embryo. (Admission at first was one nut, later rising to $3 and one nut.)

Her museum fits comfortably within an American tradition of enthrallment with odd collections, including museums of vacuum cleaners, toilet seats, mustard, postcards, potted meat, Antarctic dogs and dirt. But it aspired to be an art museum. It contained mainly artworks by Ms. Tashjian, including her “Mask of the Unknown Nut” sculpture. The many varieties of nuts, including the 35-pound Cocode mer, which resembles buttocks, from the Seychelles, were gifts from patrons. So were many of the artifacts, like toys derived from nuts.

She often took along her huge, disturbingly suggestive Coco de mer nut [for television appearances]. Mr. Steiner said it was arguable whether she was exploited by the news media, exploited it or played it to a draw. His suspicion that she was the joker, not the joke, is reflected in the title of his forthcoming book, “Performing the Nut Museum: Elizabeth Tashjian and the Art of the Double Entendre.”

In her twilight years as a gaunt, four-foot-tall woman with a sing-song voice, she became a symbol of defiance, as she vainly fought to keep her home-cum-nut museum. A court declared her incompetent, and named guardians who sold it to pay her bills. In 2005 the filmmaker Don Bernier made a documentary, “In a Nutshell: A Portrait of Elizabeth Tashjian.” Marian Masone of the Film Society of Lincoln Center wrote, “Bernier’s lovely, touching film asks the question, was she really nuts?”

She claimed not to know the word “nut” meant crazy until a patron shocked her by offering his wife for the “nut” portion of her admission fee. She resolved to end this pejorative use of her favorite word, in the process becoming, she said, a nutty philosopher. In an interview with The Washington Post in 1999, she shared an insight: “To reveal its inner self,” she said, “the nut needs the nutcracker.”