The Museum of Natural History

The American Museum of Natural History is my favorite museum in the world and why I ended up working in museums, although I probably should have kept up with that early anthropology/archaeology interest instead of veering towards art, so as to avoid the doomed career path I find myself on today. However and alas, it is true, I love museums, and I love that one, in particular. I love the heavy mahogany boards around each big diorama** of death. I love the Tyrannosaurus Rex and the Brontosaurus of my childhood, and I refuse to admit that they might have been assembled wrong.

The whole thing is so Victorian: marble, and high ceilings, and strange lighting, and big enormous hunks of mahogany everywhere, and arches, and nooks, and all the oddities that neo-gothicism could ever have gifted us with. Plus, dead animals, and mannequins dressed in "tribal" clothing. How could you not love this place? When I was a kid I wanted to grow up & work there; I thought I would have an office filled with bones, and a big dusty mahogany desk, and every so often somebody would come in and bring me a new bone, and I would look at it. That would be my job: looking at bones.

** NOTE: Their website SUCKS! I mean it SUCKS, in a big big way. It sucks just as badly as the website of the nameless museum where I work, which I assure you sucks on a professional level. I wanted to link to a picture here from the Hall of African Mammals, which is so awful and so awesome, so oddly 19th century - and I can't, because they bite. I'm doing it anyway, but I know they bite, I am not ignorant, just willful. Hee hee.

ANYWAY. The AMNH, if you have never been there, is full of dinosaur bones, and the Irish Elk, (that one's from Chicago, the NY one isn't online) which filled me with weird nationalistic pride at age 8, and the giant blue whale, which used to be over the entrance but now is beautifully situated over a BAR (or was, the last time I was there which I admit was 5 years ago,) and lots and lots of dioramas of taxidermied to the nth extreme animals shot by intrepid 19th century Explorer-Scientists in frock coats and top hats. Dioramas, yes, just like the ones you made in shoeboxes in grade school, only these are BIG, and have real dead animals in them, and beeee-yooo-ti-fully painted backgrounds complete with Renaissance clouds and birds, and hills, and horizons. The animals are posed in exciting tableau vivant, or, I guess, mortant, kinda poses, like the polar bear , who has just killed this seal, which is looking even deader than usual, fake blood and all. Meanwhile, the other seals are beating a hasty retreat in the background, going "FUCK! What the fuck was THAT?! WHOA!" This, in all it's strange mahogany Victorian glory, was one of my favorite places as a kid, and remains one today.

So, of course, I brought my own kids there. My daughter A., aged 5 or so, ran from water fountain to water fountain, all the way through the halls, and hardly stopped, the first time. We went back, though (we lived there, then, in a rat infested East Village tenement with a hermaphrodite homeless person on the steps and a crazy Puerto Rican lady on the first floor and a bathtub in the kitchen) and one day, in the Hall of Asian Peoples, she turned to me and said, in a hushed whisper "Mom? Are the people stuffed too?" And I don't think she ever quite got over it, or believed me when I told her no, of course not.

Some years later, in a stroke of mad divorced parental genius, I arranged to hand her over to her father for the summer there. All divorced parents know these handover points, so strange, so strained, so . . well, so. I hit on the bar under the whale, because I wanted to go to New York anyway, and I loved it there, and by that time I had M, who was about 3 or 4. A. was 10 or 11. We went there, and did the whole museum, and I was exhausted and very happy to sit under the whale with a beer, while the kids roamed the hall around it, exploring the polar dioramas. M had already had to be pulled off half the exhibits in the place, trying to climb the dinosaurs, of course. So A, never one to miss an opportunity, says to her younger brother, "Do you know these animals are DEAD?" "Dead?" he said uncertainly. "DEAD!" said his sister, "COMPLETELY DEAD! Everything here is DEAD!" M is charmed by this idea and yells "DEAD! DEAD! ALL DEAD!" at the top of his lungs. A eggs him on and they start racing from diorama to diorama, wailing "DEAD! DEATH, DEATH! DEAD AND STUFFED!" Sometimes M. throws himself down on his back, wailing "DEATH!" and the tourists and school groups parted like the Red Sea before them as they went. I nearly fell over laughing, meanwhile, of course, pretending I had never met these horrible morbid children. It was brilliant.

This is the kind of thing that makes my friends and family wonder about me and my kids. And it's the kind of thing that reassures me about me and my kids.