Little Shop Of Horrors I – Everything Is Free

Everything Is Free – Gillian Welsh

I can’t believe I am getting all this excitement on a Tuesday morning, and for only two bucks. Sure, the sign at the entrance of New York's Museum of Natural History states you can buy an adult ticket for the grown-up rate of sixteen dollars; but my friend Victor from Amsterdam and his girl Tara (they’re in New York after spending Thanksgiving together with her family in New Jersey) have inside information. They have taken me here to see the Cape York meteorite. It is 4.5 billion years old; so heavy that its supports go through the floor, straight down to the solid rock beneath the building; and best of all, you’re allowed to touch it. Or, as Victor happily suggests, lick it. So off we go, to the museum, to go lick a meteorite.

Tara used to live in the city for years, and, with her being a Jersey girl and all, she knows things that your average NYC newbie doesn’t.
For instance, that the entrance fee for the Museum of Natural History is not mandatory. It is a suggested fee, as the small print on the sign informs the more perceptive visitor. If you wish to make a smaller donation, all you have to do is make your wish known at the cash register. So we decide to get in for less. Or rather, Victor and Tara decide, and I scurry after them with glowing cheeks and that immediate mixture of envy, embarrassment and girl-crush I tend to get whenever there’s a take charge woman around who isn’t afraid to ask for things that are perfectly legal – albeit unorthodox, and, in the long run, quite possibly devastating for (in this case) the museum’s very existence. We can’t just walk in and not pay, I shriek. What if everybody decides not to pay the full amount? What if nobody would pay for anything anymore ever again? What if the museum goes broke and we’re totally to blame? What if the cashier spits in our faces for disrespecting a trillion years of natural history? What if the line behind us turns into a stampeding vigilante, looking for literal payback? Show me a random cluster of people and I'll show you an angry mob waiting to happen.

I struggle to sugarcoat my hesitation with morality, so I don’t have to consider the fact that, for all my exterior boldness, I am a coward at heart. Especially when it comes to buying things. I am one of those people who will pay full price for anything, no questions asked. I never bargain for discounts, even when stuff is clearly damaged or broken. I don’t have any particular ideology to back up my just-pay-and-get-it-over-with mentality, nor any deeply rooted childhood trauma type of explanation. I am generally not afraid to earn the scorn or contempt of strangers. I’m not easily embarrassed; I seldom back away from any opportunity to make a fool of myself in public. I just can’t get myself to go up to a vendor and say, ‘Hey, what do you say I take this junk off your hands for half?’ Just thinking about it makes my ears burn. I’d rather shoot myself in the kneecap; I can’t believe Tara and Victor would have the bravado to just go ahead and barter, without so much as blinking.
It’s simple, Tara figures. She’s an underpaid artist who likes to sniff some culture every once in a while. If she had the money, she’d pay. But she doesn’t, so what’s a poor girl to do? Just because people can’t afford the financial hemorrhage it takes to witness the Cape York meteorite, doesn’t mean they don’t deserve to see it. Or does it?
I got nothing. My friends shrug the shrug of the brave and free, pick up their pace, and trot, heads up high and backs straight, to the nearest cash register – with me whimpering in their wakes. Tara tells the lady behind the counter we would like to pay less than the suggested fee. The lady merely asks us how much we are willing to donate; when Tara puts six bucks for the three of us on the counter top, she takes them and asks if we would like a floor plan. We take one and off we go – full speed ahead to the meteorite!

For about two minutes, I am light-headed with angst. I feel like I have committed some kind of cultural crime, an educational burglary. I am swindling my way back to the origin of man! But after a diorama or two the sensation wears off, and makes way for giddy, glorious curiosity to see the miracles of life this museum has on offer. I promise myself that, next time, I’ll pay double. For now, I plan to absorb it all. So here I am: watching Victor as he's about to lick the Cape York meteorite at two bucks a pop. Good times!

Little Shop Of Horrors II – Several Species Of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together In A Cave And Grooving With A Pict

Several Species Of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving With a Pict – Pink Floyd

The ancient lady holds the antlers up in one furrowed hand, and shakes them over her head like a trophy for the gnarly. 'See, this isn’t a tree – although it sure looks like a tree, don’t you agree? It looks like bark covered in moss. But it’s really bone, growing straight out of the moose’s skull. And sometimes when the moose fights with another moose, the antlers on his head break off. Just like that!' She makes a remarkably nimble cleaving gesture with both hands. Rip! Fretful field trip faces stare up at her from hip-height, hanging onto her every word, breathless. Twenty-something pairs of eyes gleam with excitement – including mine. Shredded antlers! Hostile moose whose furry mouths froth in agony, their skulls torn up and glistening - nature is not a happy place.

Behind the lady two life-size adult moose specimens loom, frozen in mid-battle inside a colorful diorama. Their antlers look unscathed, but you can tell it’s pure luck that their strange and instantaneous death happened when the clash was still at an early stage, so their antlers and heads were still in one piece when they were handed over to the taxidermist.
The moose's new half-dome home at the Museum of Natural History is like a snow globe for giants; I half expect a pair of monstrous hands to pick it up and shake it, for the bored amusement of watching the moose battle it out in a blizzard. A minute or two ago, I stumbled into this group of kids, as the lady was telling them that a grown moose can weigh up to 1,580 pounds – about twenty times the weight of an average eleven year old. Now I am trying to act casual and inconspicuous. Look at me, intently studying the pastel backdrop that makes for the combating moose’s perpetual arena, hands behind my back for fear of breaking anything invaluable. Inside, I am in turmoil. Is there any way for death and destruction not to ensue in this scenario?

'Ooh, now, don’t you worry', the title holder for Best Antler Storytelling In The World croons, to everyone’s relief. 'For the moose, losing an antler is just like losing a baby tooth. A new piece will grow back over time.' She holds the piece of defeated animal up one more time and slowly turns it left to right for everyone to see. 'Now', she concludes, 'Who wants to touch it?' Forty-something tiny hands swarm out from behind tiny backs, and up, reaching as high as they can, elbows fluttering, cheeks glowing. The smaller kids nearly get trampled in all this antler mayhem, but they don’t budge and they don’t care about their trodden toes. This is not the time to be delicate. Touching a real live bone from a real dead animal! Who doesn’t want a chance to do that?

New York's Museum of Natural History is pretty much the most magical place on earth, especially on a Tuesday morning. Kids swarm across the Hall of North American Mammals where Grizzly bears look ready to jump out of their private, seemingly endless dioramas to wreck dusty havoc. Families trip over each other to look four-million-year-old Lucy in the eye while storybook grandmothers and grandfathers disguised as museum guides tell the flocks about the history of all things, extinct or living. The museum is one of those rare, non-Disneyfied ones where the air is still a bit musty, and it hints of formaldehyde; the quarters and hallways hold endless secrets to discover in low lights and high ceilings. Mounted ferrets, mangy with age, their fierce poses dim from years of being overlooked; dinosaurs towering across mammoth halls, full-sized fossils strewn about; passages of native Indian totems rising like carved hydraulic platforms.

How poor and disappointing is a visit to the museum shop in conclusion of this incredible celebration of never-ending mortality that grabbed you by the throat, scratching, teeth saliving, from all floors. Ears tingling with excitement, nose filled with the smell of a billion years of evolution, you suddenly find yourself in the overly lit, exceedingly dust-free and horridly eco looking Museum Shop. Biodegradable Great White sharks the size of your hand don’t even remotely resemble the mega jaws you saw dangling off a ceiling earlier. You can build-your-own-origami-Cro-Magnon. A My First Excavating Set contains an undersized toothbrush and a tiny recyclable shovel, neatly fitted in with a miniature smiling dinosaur compressed in sand. The chewy models assure parents at first glance that the only excitement they will ever risk to evoke is the feeling of hurt wholesome pride as their kids toss them. Lame! The stuffed moose and bears are unexpectedly cuddly here, and fluffy, stripped of all fierceness and fang.
It's just not right. The entire museum is designed to show you that evolution is an incredible force, thrusting and thumping ruthlessly throughout the ages; that all nature – big or small – is honed to survive, eat, fuck, kill, die, and then do it all again. The museum shop tells you bears are cute. They like honey.

How did a museum with the world's largest collection of vertebrate fossils (nearly one million specimens) end up with such a sterile shop filled with fake, odorless crap? Sure, they have actual astronaut food (you can buy a freeze dried ice cream sandwich in a sealed bag), but that is fake, odorless crap to begin with. Has the evolution of political correctness got the better of the world’s natural history, too?

Little Shop Of Horrors III – Little Shop Of Horrors

Little Shop Of Horrors – Theme Song Little Shop Of Horrors

All is not lost. Two blocks away from the Museum of Natural History you can find the shop that should have been the museum’s, and it would have been, if only the museum had been run by Tim Burton or David Cronenberg. Maxilla and Mandible, Ltd. was founded in 1983 by a former Museum of Natural History night watchman – or so the story goes. I picture him, a visionary, slowly but surely tunneling his way out of the museum (spoon-style) in the dark of night, over a period of years, burrowing right to the basement of the store. His pockets would be filled, at first, with trinkets found in the museum’s dust bowled depot, no longer on display, slowly eaten away by the toothless mouth of oblivion. Later on, I imagine, he would start to get more reckless and free small stuffed mammals from their sectioned up niches in some of the dimmer halls; he would carefully tuck them under his wide coat and walk to the nearest exit unnoticed. The specimens would not be missed until the day some watchful boy or girl would point at a dust-free outline of little paws on the floor behind the glass. The kid would tug at a grownup sleeve and ask, 'Mom, where does the armadillo go when it has to pee?'

Well, it went to Maxilla and Mandible, where it curled up and is now hanging from the ceiling behind the counter. Next to it, a glassy-eyed ferret can’t seem to decide whether it wants to jump the armadillo or make a run for it. The shop shows a wildly random reverence to anything to do with nature’s remnants. Stacked on racks from floor to high ceiling are baskets filled with dog’s teeth, emu toenails, and minerals; collections of beetles and butterflies hang off the wall; plastic dinosaurs lie next to fossilized shark teeth, a cast of a baboon’s head, snake vertebrae, a pile of chicken feet that contract and relax as you pull and release the tendons still sticking out; posters display the evolution of nature and the anatomy of man; an entire freeze dried mouse in a glass cube ogles the black capuchin monkey with the white face that is wondering how the hell it got here; a camel skull (in two separate parts) sits next to the shrunken human head – unfortunately, says the guy behind the counter, the head isn’t real. It’s a prop from an eighties horror movie. Rumor has it, he says, they used to have a real head on display, back in the day when the shop had just opened – until someone bought it. At Maxilla and Mandible, everything around you is the real deal, unless the price tag specifically says it isn’t.

New customers ring the doorbell, a man with a little girl. As they walk in, the man points out the assortment of 3 million year old shrimp fossils, and a bear’s head. The girl carefully pats the bear on the head, then lets her fingers glide oh so cautiously along each of its fangs, before she crouches and starts rummaging through a basket on the floor, filled with miscellaneous dinosaur bones.
A thick-set guy has come in with them. He waltzes straight up to the counter where he stops, leans over and stares at the shopkeeper for a full minute. Then he booms, 'YOU HAVE… YOU… YOU… YOU HAVE A…' He sways lightly on his feet as if the act of thrusting the words out is throwing him off balance. The shopkeeper is polishing the glass cube in which the mouse stands on its hind legs, paws in front of its chest like a tiny boxer. 'HAVE A VERY NICE DAY!' the guy spits out. He turns on his heels and pushes out to the street again. The shopkeeper shrugs as he watches the door fall shut behind the guy.
'Look, Yayla, it’s Marcel from Friends', the man in the shop says. 'You see the little monkey up there?' But the girl is fully engulfed in the vials that hold lightning captured by sand. 'When the lightning strikes the sand, it gets so hot that the sand that’s hit by the lightning bolt melts and then solidifies around it. So what you get is a little hollow tube in the shape of the lightning', the shopkeeper explains. He turns back to me. 'Ever since I was a little boy and my dad took me here, I dreamed I would one day work in this place', he says as he holds the freeze dried mouse up to the light, a trophy for life and death eternal.

I end up buying seeds to grow my own carnivorous plant (it will get rid of any fly problem I might have in my apartment, promises the bag. I am thinking, if my scientist sweetheart can spur this thing on a bit, it might get rid of any rodent problem the city might have, too) and a little silver bracelet with stringed together ceramic dentures from the nineteen forties the owner of the shop managed to pull from a dentist’s practice (although it makes for animated dialogue with the shopkeeper, it turns out to be somewhat of a conversation stopper outside the shop. 'Aww, what a cute little bracel… Ewwww! Are those real teeth?')

Maxilla and Mandible is a Natural History Museum shop the way a Natural History Museum shop should be. Like nature (and history), it is not for the faint-hearted. It is for those who realize that everything in existence has a beginning and an end – and it could have an afterlife in your very own window-sill.