I guess you know that we went to Tampa last weekend, right? I didn’t forget to mention it? Oh good. It wasn’t all late nights in bars with a lot of dykes and cool stuff like that, it was educational too. (Not that late nights in bars with a lot of dykes isn’t educational, because it definitely is. Michelle always learns a lot about how NOT to behave, about why it’s NOT good to get falling down drunk and then there are all of the lessons you can learn by visiting bathrooms with drunk people – those are serious educational moments, important to every teenage girl’s growth and development) Where was I? Oh yea, educational. Right. OK fine, I cannot tell a lie. The trip wasn’t about education at all. It was pure selfishness on my part. Any lessons learned or knowledge absorbed was purely accidental.
The trip to MOSI was for me. Not for Michelle. Surely not for TW, she’s been there before. Seeing the Bodies exhibit was for me. Because I want to be plastinated or plasticized or whatever the process is called when I die. I do. I’m not kidding. I never joke about death. OK fine, I do joke about death but in this case I’m not joking.
We read Stiff last year and it was then that I decided that this was what I wanted to do, or have done, after I die. No cremation, I want to donate my body to a plastination exhibit. There’s a problem though, according to the Stiff book, when you donate your body you don’t always get to decide how it’s actually used. So I have to figure out how to make sure that I’m not donated to a forensic school and left out in a field somewhere. (the little kids found this idea fascinating over the summer – because I made the mistake of telling them about dead bodies and flatulence and stuff but it’s not my idea of a good time so no – that is not what I want to happen to my body when I’m dead)
OK so now that you know WHY we went to MOSI to see Bodies, I’ll tell you about the actual exhibit.
It was cool. Smaller than I expected but cool. As I expected, by the second room Michelle was feeling "ill". Hypochondria is alive and well. Though I suspect there are a lot of people who begin to feel ill or at least feel their "bodies" a little bit more while at that exhibit. She really didn’t like the blood room aka the circulatory system room. I, however, thought that was pretty cool. I have a thing for blood though.
Here are some things that bugged me about the exhibit. First, lack of female bodies. Do women not donate their bodies to this? Is it not done, for some reason? The bodies were overwhelmingly male. Next issue, almost all of the bodies had black lungs. Does this mean that the only reason people die is because they have lung cancer and/or are smokers? By the 5th black lunged body I was feeling like I was in some stop smoking organization’s propaganda website. Weird.
And somehow Michelle and I missed the plasticized fetus room, I blame a weird woman who decided to tell everyone that her urethra is smaller than the normal urethra – at first I thought she was talking about her clitoris but no, it was her urethra and I got distracted. I should have gone back inside to see it but by the time TW informed me that I’d missed it, we were upstairs and pining away for the bicycle high wire thing and it felt like too much work to go back down and explain my predicament to the weird guy (who reminded me of Kirk on GG) so I could go back in. Oh well, another time maybe.
Now about the woman with the smaller than normal urethra – what is it about that exhibit that made people feel like they needed to share their health history with everyone in the room? Or the health history of their great aunt ____ who had ____ and this is what it must have looked like?
What was also a little scarey were people who don’t have any idea about anatomy or how things work. People in awe that the stomach was that small or the intestines that large. Or the fallopian tubes, 50 year old men and women should both know what the fallopian tubes do. You people scare me!
The best best best question I heard while in the exhibit was from a child, probably around 7 or 8. "Mama, why aren’t there any children?" The look on mom’s face as she tried to come up with an answer was good. I wish I knew what she said. I hope she gave her a good answer. Not an "I don’t know" or "They don’t do that to kids" or "Kids don’t die" sort of answer. A real answer. The kid deserved it.
Oh and to the woman in the wheelchair who pushed her way through the folks enjoying various displays, your disability does not give you the right to be rude. Nobody barred your way, nobody pushed past you to get to the exhibit first – they were there before you and when they moved to the next one it would have been YOUR turn. Quit it. That behavior is unnecessary and not appreciated.
Cool exhibit. Knowledge was gained, totally on accident of course. And now Michelle has a real idea about what will happen to dear old mom when she’s dead.
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