With a group of my work colleagues, I emerged from the subway station in front of the Museum of Natural History into the amber light of an usually warm fall day. ‘Look how beautiful the sun is,’ someone said, and I took a photograph to prove that this assertion was in fact true (subjectively speaking).
I admired the lumbering bears on one side of the steps of the museum.
I was amused by a pigeon sitting on the head of ____.
Walking through the front doors, I was momentarily entranced by the beautiful metalwork design that filled the archway. ‘Don’t you wish this was your apartment?’ I asked my friend J___. ‘Yes,’ she instantly agreed. In the lobby, we waited for the rest of our group and were divided into ‘teams’ by a representative of a ‘scavenger hunt’ company. We were given packets of information and told to choose a name for our team. J___ suggested ‘The Tale of the Dinosaur,’ and we all concurred that it was a clever idea, since we were in fact sitting only a few feet away from the tail. Choosing a good name was not unimportant, because the best one — chosen by the representative — would result in an additional point for the team in question.
Before we could begin, we each had to sign a waiver (via life in the modern world).
While everyone else signed, I admired a nearby torch lamp, which was even more ornate than the deco one Stephen and I just had repaired. Then, once everyone was ready, we were told to begin. I regretted that our organizer didn’t say ‘Your time begins now!’ like Padma on Top Chef, but we all quickly dispersed to begin seeking answers to the lists of clues that were provided to us. Because it was a work function, everyone maintained an appropriate balance between seeming enthusiastic and ‘chill,’ because nobody wanted to seem ‘like an overly competitive a-hole.’ This made it actually pretty fun! I knew that if I had ever done this in my family growing up, the museum would have been littered with corpses by the end. I enjoyed myself as we looked for clues by taking in some of the dioramas in the museum. I’m not sure anyone would create a museum like this in 2k9, because you can see all this stuff IRL on YouTube.
The dinosaur bones were awesome, of course.
ROAR! I remembered taking my nephew here when he was ___ years old, and how all he was interested in was eating astronaut ice cream in the gift shop. Even though I was a non-heterosexual child, I was exceedingly fascinated with dinosaurs, and so was probably a lil dismayed that my nephew didn’t share my interest.
Time passed until all the teams reconvened in the lobby and turned in our answers. A winner was declared after a suspense-filled tie-breaking question — how many miles underwater can you hear a great blue whale (500!) — and we returned outside into the fading sunlight.
We walked en masse to a nearby bar and ordered drinks. It felt like the last warm day of the year.
The moon was out and we wished that we lived (but not together) in the sweet penthouse on top of a nearby building. We wondered what life would be like ‘post-scavenger-hunt’ and one thing was certain: it would never be the same.
