Sometimes You Feel Like

"You can never be lonely when you have nuts around," Elizabeth Tashjian, the "Nut Lady," told Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. But Tashjian's fleeting celebrity as the nutty maven of late-night TV yielded only a glimpse of her life's passion, which concluded with her death at age 94. By then, she was the embattled owner of the Nut Museum in Old Lyme, Connecticut, a roadside attraction where visitors were serenaded with a tune called "Nuts Are Beautiful" as they gawked at Tashjian's nut Nativity scene and her 35-pound, buttocks-shaped coco de mer nut. Tashjian's charming quirkiness caught the attention of filmmaker Don Bernier, who rolled his cameras as the elderly artist fought to save her beloved museum, even as she'd been declared legally incompetent. Tonight at 7, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (4525 Oak, 816-751-1278) screens In a Nutshell: A Portrait of Elizabeth Tashjian in conjunction with the Electromediascope series. Admission is free, but tickets are required. Johnny Carson
Fri., Feb. 22, 7 p.m., 2008