Spiritual Experience at the Museum of Jurassic Technology

My very favorite place in Los Angeles is the Museum of Jurassic Technology. For its strangeness, its eccentricity, its wonder. It's hardly a museum at all, if by "museum" one means a place where one goes to find out about the world. You see, in this museum not everything is to be taken as a fact, or it might be some fact, some whimsy, or just that someone had too much weed when he was writing the copy for the information plaques. You never really know.

First off, you have to be buzzed into the museum; you can't just walk through some grand entrance. The exhibits don't change, but that's OK because you have to keep going back to soak it in. There is an exhibit about folk remedies, like eating mice--fur, tails, and all--on a slice of toast to ward off bed-wetting. Then there's the Napoleon library and the wing devoted to the cat's cradle, yes, that string game you may have played in elementary school. Miniatures figure prominently, micro-miniatures, to be exact, teeny weeny sculptures balancing on the eyes of needles and delicate crystals fashioned into baskets of flowers that can only be seen under a microscope. And don't miss the trailer homes of the mid-1930s with two maps of the world that are lit up where trailer parks and trailer-home manufacturing operations were located in 1936, or so the map contends. If you didn't know, there was one of the former in Greenland and one of the latter in Mozambique. Hmmmm...this is precisely what I was mentioning earlier--authentic-looking photographs from the era showing families happily preparing meals within their tin homes juxtaposed with fabulist maps.

Upstairs is the Russian tearoom, complete with silver samovars and staffed by a Russian woman in her mid-30s. Next door is the theatre, which shows bizarre flicks, and between the two is a beautiful water closet with a toilet that has a silver handle that you pull in order to flush it. When I was at the museum last night, I used the toilet, only to find that others who had gone before me did not know what the silver handle was for.

Last night at the museum was a spiritual experience for me. I heard, along with friend Bob Martinez, a concert by Aurelia Shrenker and Eva Salina Primack, two beautiful young women who were backlit by candlelight and sang like angels or gypsies, take your pick. Bob and I sat in the front row, near enough to touch them. On my right sat two ladies adorned in costumes of the 1800s with touches from other time periods thrown in. Aurelia played the dulcimer, and Eva, the accordion. Both sang Georgian, Albanian, Greek, Corsican, and Appalachian tunes, some so painfully sad and beautiful that I was close to tears.

As they sang, I fell in love with them, there's no other expression that describes the way I felt. They were so beautiful and their souls, which poured forth through their music, were so beautiful, and I wanted to be as close as I possibly could to that beauty. Isn't that a good definition of "being in love"? I hugged and thanked both of them afterwards and told Aurelia that this had been a spiritual experience for me. Bob and I then wandered about the museum, but returned for the 10 o'clock concert to hear the same songs once again.

Ah, what a magical evening! Two angels at my favorite place in LA. It just doesn't get much better.