beetiger

The summer between my junior and senior years of high school, I worked as a volunteer at the American Museum of Natural History, right on the edge of Central Park in Manhattan. I was living in my father's apartment on East 72nd Street, with my new stepmom, sleeping on a futon in the living room of their one-bedroom studio, and commuting in by bus. I'd lucked out and gotten one of the good jobs at the Museum, in Reproductions, not like the hapless kids who worked the gift shop, with all the annoyance of retail with none of the pay, or my boyfriend who ended up counting bacteria in a microscope the summer before somewhere in the upper floors of the complex.

I spent my mornings in the lab down in the basement, learning how to make casts of dinosaur bones by adjusting and sanding plaster and covering ancient bones in clay. And though a seer with just a few years vision would have let us know that before long the T-Rex would be dismantled to change its position to match better research about its life, at the time the smaller bones were considered too fragile to be moved, so we did our work in the afternoons inside the exhibit in the Hall of Dinosaurs. I sat up on the high scaffolding, taping paper shims along the edges of the bones of the spinal column. I told elementary school kids that we were putting the skin back on to the dinosaur and trying to bring it back to life, when their parents and my supervisor weren't listening.

Sometimes on my lunch hour I'd go across the street and eat Ray's Pizza with too much garlic powder. But sometimes, with my volunteer staff badge making me brave, I'd sneak into storage areas in the basement, and peek at piles of boxes of photographs and artifacts, bone and wood and paper and metal, catalogued but cluttered and messy, all the stuff the Museum owned but did not display, until I'd hear footsteps and run back to a place I was really allowed to be.

This new photographic exhibit, particularly the section titled "Exhibition Preparation", reminds me of that time. I looked excitedly at it when I first came across it to see if photos of the duplication of the Tyrannosaurus were in there, but it's all much older stuff. Nevertheless, going through these photos is extremely nostalgic for me. Many of those old dioramas are still there, just like when I was a kid, just like when I was a teen, like when I go back there with my own preschooler.

I'm not quite sure why I never became a naturalist after all. And perhaps it's somehow true, that, as Paul Simon said, (the second time he said it) that everything looks better in black and white. But those photos brought this story out of me, and so you get to hear it.

ETA: I found some old pictures and scanned them for you. Even in the mid-eighties, museum curators took all their pictures in black and white.