Bodies: The Exhibition opened in here Columbus, June 27 and runs to October 28. I’m looking forward to going, by myself of course. John doesn’t have the interest in it and the kids are too young IMO. It’ll be like my visit to the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia; I’ll leave the weaker souls & stomachs to go get some Philly-style water ice while I forge ahead on my own.
When I germinated a fascination with the weird (I think it was pre-school or Kindergarten), I couldn’t imagine my interests would span most of the -ologies: physiology, anthropology, pathology, entomology, archaeology, paleontology, epidemiology. Over the years they ranged from nose-in-book edification about the gory excizing of hearts at Teotihuacan to details of Cotton Mather’s persecution of New England housewives, the devastation wreaked by outbreaks of influenza and the black plague, the incredulous efficacy of Dr. H.H. Holmes during the Chicago World’s Fair, how Joan of Arc’s heart did not burn and how ebola morphed into the deadliest infectious disease in known history.…
So back then, there were no Goths, Geeks or Nerds, only creeps and freaks, friends. You were either Category A: disturbed (which you were expected to grow out of by adulthood) or Category B: disturbing (which you were expected to be remanded to the state institution for juvenile psychotics). I’m surely the only first grader who with my cousin Craig (and a funeral procession of my younger sister and brother) buried goldfish alive in baby food jars in my grandparents’ woods, returning at intervals to excavate and observe various decomposition stages of our piscean subjects. Rest assured, I didn’t grow up strangling kitties or setting fires but later learned more empirical, acceptable methodologies for m scientific interest. Thank Jeebus, eh?
I tried to keep my weird fascinations undercover through junior high until the librarian at St. Andrew’s found out that I was the only student who repeatedly checked out the same books on witch trials, feral children, freaks of nature and accounts of human aberrant behavior. The nuns must’ve had a field day with that. Next semester someone mysteriously pulled all those books from the shelves and instituted ”Girls’ Program.” In one of the first “program, Sister Frances volunteered me to be the 7th grade makeover candidate for the visiting Mary Kay represenative. As if a mere cosmetic makeover would exorcize the true freak in my soul.
Aside: Doesn’t it seem ironic that the exhibit runs in Columbus and Branson as well as Prague, Lisbon, NY and D.C.? Just struck me as unusual, but I’m not a native Ohioan. If I were it might not seem ironic at all.
