The Museum that Jumped the Shark
The picture below is from an Inquisition museum in Guanajato, Mexico. I wasn't having fun. Walking among iron maidens and thumbscrews and crow-cages and portraits of priests whose eyes seemed to follow you as you crossed the room, all I could think, in Spanish, was "I'm in the house of my enemies."
While I was lost in low-blood-sugar disgruntlement, Lisa was in photographer heaven, running around getting snaps of each new device, each successive skull unearthed in the lodge's ancient walls.
But wait. Really there were only a couple of bones that had been dug out of the walls. The rest of the skeletons on display were mockups of skeletons discovered in other places, dead for normal reasons. Part of what was amusing Lisa became more and more clear as we walked deeper into the museum. The guide stopped claiming that the instruments assembled had anything to do with Guanajato. Torture devices, yes. From here? Maybe not. And why were most of the devices covered in fake cobwebs, the kind you use at Halloween to make a haunted house? And why were the freaking paintings covered in fake cobwebs? And why was this looking more and more like a backlot from a Pirates of Caribbean warm-up, skeletons coming out of picture frames wrapped up like something from Shelob's Lair?
We turned a fateful corner and the shark's dorsal fin whipped beneath our feet. Directly ahead of us, occupying the entire wall of the passageway, was a five-foot wide hologram of Count Dracula, whirling on us in red-eyed fury to Suck Our Blood. Two lesser holograms shared this antechamber with the Count. One was a ring that invited you to reach out and try to pick it up, only it wasn't there, silly, it's a hologram.
Turn the next corner and sure nuff, the Count was just the warm-up. The final exhibit was a room of random holograms. The Dracula piece was closest to the museum's theme after all, otherwise we were in the secular 20th or 21st century. I thought the mime smoking a cigarette was particularly cool and she blew smoke at me as I blew by her and the thirty or forty other holograms scattered around the walls. The guide had more to say about the final room than she had about the history of the Inquisition but I was outside watching the warm-up for a soccer game on the field below, regaining my good humor thanks to Count Dracula's intervention. Silly Inquisition. Silly museum.