Well, here I am, featured in another museum. First it was the ‘Museum of Still Mirrors’ which was, really, just a man who drew caricatures so quickly that he could have a picture of any given guest ready before they’d finished perusing the other displays. There was the ‘You-seum,’ a sort of new age therapeutic experience led by a guy that can’t have had any real credentials in the field. Tangentially, that was a drastically different experience than the ‘You See-Em?’- which was a museum, I guess, except that it consisted only of landscape shots blown up to a pixelated blur and grainy video footage collected by a woman that would, occasionally, shout “you see ‘em?” while pointing at the empty spaces between trees. After 90 minutes of telling her I didn’t see anything she just shrugged and said “Well, they see you.”
This is all beside the point. The ‘As Seen on TV Museum’ is not one that features me as a technicality or a gimmick. I am featured under the theme and, worse, I am named.
‘Few descriptors boast, with such confidence, the low quality of a product as the phrase ‘as seen on TV.’ The ‘As Seen on TV Museum’ is the exception that makes the rule, it being a surprisingly thorough examination of everything that has ever been featured on television at one time or another. Yes, you have some dresses from soap operas and some costumes from sitcoms to bolster the foyer, but the vast majority of the sprawling collection spotlights that which is normally outside the spotlight altogether.
Here you will find various cardboard props, made so that they will pass muster only in the far backgrounds of scenes. Here you will find newscaster’s desks and politician’s podiums. Here you will find profiles- analyses, even- of the headless models that sometimes feature in stock footage for illustrating the obesity crisis. Everything that has ever been seen on TV has a place here. Of course, this has not been proven, because absolute proof seems an impossible task. This has not been unproven either, for every person that has entered the ‘As Seen on TV Museum’ with a challenging snippet of footage has found a display devoted to it, often emerging fractally from unrelated displays and so seamlessly that they might have grown there naturally.’
What I find out, very quickly, is that the ‘As Seen on TV Museum’ has a highly sensitive security system in place. It issues a light warning ping when I reach in to remove the little model of myself from a scene- one in which I was captured in the back of a news story about migrating geese. It pings again when I scratch at my name on the small placard which gives a concise but surprisingly accurate biography of myself. It makes a much louder, much more piercing sound when I tug at the model again and feel one of its feet give from the display.
I step backward and reassess the situation before a new ping startles me and I see that Hector, left to his own devices, has begun to nibble at a small model tree under the main display behind me. Finally, the system issues a low, almost sarcastic ping as I make a note of the fire escape and of the folded map I was given when I bought my ticket.
The sirens start before I’ve even leaned over the display again. I yank the model-me from the base of the display and bolt into the fire escape though, in this case, ‘into’ literally means I run into a stationary door- a prop fire escape that I mistook for the real deal. Hector bolts back to the model tree and the siren squeals indignantly. The footfalls of a surprisingly robust security team grow nearer as I gather the wayward rabbit and push through the real fire exit on the opposite side of the room.
The siren is sounding in the parking lot, much to my dismay, and any hope I had to blend in to the crowd disappears as I plow through the only other people visiting- a previously happy family with a dozen kids of indeterminate age and gender. I force any sort of shame I might feel into the back of my head, saving it for later when I’m trying to sleep. All I can think, now, is that if I linger too long, if I start a police chase, I might end up back on TV and all of this will have been for nothing.
-traveler
