January 4, 2006
Gross

Gross.  Push came too queasy last week at Denver’s Museum of Nature & Science.   Jan and I spent a couple of Christmas break days with grandsons 8 and 5.  Rather than permit a Cartoon Network watch-a-thon, a field trip was suggested. Want to go to the park and play, wander the zoo or see “Chicken Little”?  Not a chance. Schoolmates said they had to see the “gross” exhibit.  “Honest Grandpa, the gross thing is really, really cool.” 

Thirty minutes later we arrived at the City Park Museum in the middle of least ten thousand boys under the age of 10 and their parents.  All wanted to see “Grossology” an exhibit subtitled “The (impolite) science of the human body.”  Trust me, the show lived up to it’s billing. 

Enduring a twenty-minute ticket wait, we were finally inside but standing in another line.  Only this queue was headed toward an inside the nostrils, up close and personal, nose tour.  Slowly moving toward the ten-foot proboscis one mother was overheard; “If you think I’m going to stand in line for a half hour to tour a nose you couldn’t be more wrong.” 

Unfortunately, for the grandparents, the stroll was through a very lifelike nose.  The boys each insisted on being lifted high enough to touch the nose hairs.  They turned out to be made of hard rubber causing the 8 year old to shout, “Boy grandpa you pull one of those out and your eyes would really water.”  However both boys felt the highlight of the nose tour was the snowman size booger on the back wall. That discovery was followed by considerable giggling about what size finger it would take to dig it out, a thought Grandma found disgusting, making the whole concept even funnier. 

We moved on past the cootie cart, deemed not gross enough, and headed for the skin-climbing wall.  It was just what the name implied.  Then came the “gurgle guy” a machine explaining the cause of tummy noises.  The “gurgle guy” was adjacent to a “gas attack” pinball machine.  Here the “pinball wizard” attempted to guide the ball toward bumpers that corresponded to gas making foods.  A hit on cabbage awarded 5,000 points, beans a thousand, onions and garlic 2,500 and when you reached 20,000 points the machine gave forth a gigantic belch which every 8 year old within fifty yards found fall on the floor funny.  Even Grandpa’s had to smile listening to a pinball machine that sounded like it really appreciated a cold PBR.  

Thankfully the boys missed, “All About Poo” because the “toot” exhibit all their friends had raved about was close by.  While the five year old went on the intestine slide (just what the name implied, the kind of slide you find in a fast food playland only this one looked, inside and out, like an intestine) the eight year old seemed to be thirsting for “toot” knowledge.  He asked the meaning of the word “average” after reading the “average” person toots fourteen times a day.  Once he had a handle on the word he assured his grandma he and his friends were way above “average” when it came to toots.   

Grandma thought it time to go.   I tracked down the five year old at the gift shop, called the gross-ery store.  By then the 8 year old was engrossed in a computer offering called “Urine-the game”.