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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Gauguin who wrote (32804)	7/22/1999 9:43:00 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71178

The Baton Rouge Museum used to be basically pathetic. I can't really remember anything they had, except the mummy. It was mostly stuff like those glass things they used to put on telephone lines, just oddball stuff. An old typewriter. A really, really long tapeworm in a jar, boy, just imagine who thought that they should put a tapeworm on display. The mummy looked pretty pathetic, all wizened and black in a dusty glass case with a few flies here and there next to the glass. Her face was uncovered. The plaster on her mummy case was kind of corroded. There was also a baby mummy, all wrapped up, plaster intact. They were arranged in such a way as to suggest that they were mother and child. I used to take the bus downtown when I was a teenager, my mother let me run wild. There was no charge to get into the museum, and nobody even really took notice of me, when I wandered around, looking at minie balls and arrowheads and, of course, the mummy. Nobody really ever came to see the mummy. And then maybe 10 years ago, Baton Rouge spiffed up the downtown, they wanted to attract tourists. They voted to call old Baton Rouge down by the river Catfish Town, which it never was. They were trying to legalize gambling in Baton Rouge, I guess Edwin Edwards was, and they built a lot of stuff down by the river to attract money. A Centroplex, which is just a covered arena, sometimes they have concerts there, and prayer revivals by big religious stars. Jimmy Swaggart (he's Jerry Lee Lewis' first cousin, you know). The U.S.S. Kidd, a Navy destroyer, permanently docked next to the Louisiana Arts and Science Center, it calls itself, with a discovery room for children, some nondescript modern sculpture, and, the piece de resistance, the Egyptian room. A diorama about Egypt, and some Roman coins and glass, and, in a replica of an Egyptian tomb, the mummy. She is in a newer case, all gussied up. Someone x-rayed her, and determined that she probably died of an abcessed tooth, which may be why she looks so sad. And the "baby" mummy turned out to be a cat. No explanation, ever, of how she came to be in Baton Rouge, which would be a very interesting story, but people in Baton Rouge don't really think Baton Rouge is very interesting. They do have gambling now, people drive up to the casino, and go inside, and when they are done, they get in their cars and drive away. Nobody goes to see the mummy except when there is a new art show in the museum.