The 10 people you meet in every living history museum

I was back in the 18^th Century saddle today, volunteering at Bethabara Park doing a craft demo. I tend to nostalgia-ize the years I spent as an interpreter at Old Salem before I graduated college and started my “real” career. Except for the negligible salaries and benefits, there’s really no better job for someone who loves history, loves talking about history and loves showing off one’s skill at some folk art form that no one under the age of 50 (in Germany) can do.

But the thing is, like any service profession, an interpreter can’t pick and choose who she talks to. It’s your job to talk with everyone who buys a ticket, no matter how annoying, irritating or downright weird. Until today, I’d forgotten how nearly every museum visitor falls into one of the following groups:

The Looker
When I go to museums, this is me. The Looker already knows all the basics because The Looker did her graduate thesis on whatever it is your museum specializes in, or at the very least read the guidebook. The Looker's feet hurt, or she's not an auditory processor, or he just doesn't feel like wading through Floorboard Guy, Quilt Lady and/or Susie Homeschool to listen to your standard Historical Disney spiel. It's nothing personal. It's just that The Looker has been through many, many museums, and as such already knows that she won't see a TV in the parlor. The Looker is above these things. Fortunately, The Looker is usually courteous enough to tell you that he/she's "just looking" as soon as he/she comes in the door. Do the both of you a favor, and let The Looker roam free. If The Looker should have a question, The Looker typically is capable of determining that the person in the costume/Park Ranger outfit might be able to answer it.

Floorboard Guy
Floorboard Guy is fascinated with the wider-than-he’s-used-to-seeing floorboards to the exclusion of everything else in the entire museum. Moreso than the clothes, the hearth cooking demos and your attempts to describe documented facts of life in 1788, it’s this 18-inch wide slab of pine under his feet that really brings it home that, holy sh*t! Life was different back then! [RANT: floorboards in backwoods houses were big because the trees from which they were cut were big. Until recently, skinny floorboards meant more cuts at the sawmill. Lots of cuts = expensive. So, even in the 1780s, super-rich people sometimes had fancy “modern” skinny boards. To a 1780s person, big floorboards weren’t all that cool. Kind of the reverse of quilts…I won’t go there, the rant’s too long as it is. End rant.] Floorboard Guy typically comes in two varieties. Most common, and generally harmless, is the golly-gee type, who just wants to marvel at the giant boards and the square nails holding them together. (Don’t get him started on the nails.) Ignoring the dozens of other paying customers streaming past, he’ll cheerfully monopolize you with tales of his great-grandmother’s farmhouse that had boards just like this! With square nails, too! Far more obnoxious is the second type, who’s deeply skeptical of your claim that the floorboards are original. In his mind, there’s just no way that a floor could’ve survived 200-odd years under any circumstances, even if the building was in use up until the point when it became a museum, and you can introduce him to the person who did the restoration. His laser eyes will spot every two-square-inch patch or uneven spot in order to bolster his claim. Floorboard Guy is often married to Quilt Lady.

Quilt Lady
Quilt Lady knows more about fabric than you ever will. So you’ve devoted years to researching 18^th Century garments and construction techniques, practiced them yourself and maybe even have an advanced degree in history/anthropology/textile studies. Well, Quilt Lady will have you know that she personally earned an Honorable Mention in the Harnett County Fair Craft Show (adorable kitten division) so you can f*ck off. Quilt Lady doesn’t care that the pieced Becky Home Ecky “patchwork” quilts she’s used to seeing didn’t show up until around the Civil War, when cheap fabric and sewing machines came along. She’s blissfully unaware of the whole-cloth and appliquéd quilts that rich people paid other people to make for them back when quilts were a pain in the keister to make. She’s deeply committed to the prairie fantasy of her foremothers saving scraps of their wedding dresses to painstakingly cobble together quilts so they wouldn’t freeze to death. (Why her idiot foremothers didn’t just walk to the dry goods store and buy a damn blanket, I don’t know.) Quilt Lady has trouble distinguishing “Little House on the Prairie” and the Harnett County Fair from life in 18^th Century North Carolina, and this doesn’t really trouble her. Also, whatever it is you’re doing, you’re doing it wrong. But she still wants to buy it from you.

The Super Darwinist
The Super Darwinist is so passionately devoted to the concept of biological evolution that he or she fervently believes that human beings grew two feet within a single century. Oh yes, it’s true. Just look at those low doorways, it’s all the proof anyone needs that the average man in 1780 was no more than five feet tall. No wonder they looked up to Washington and Jefferson so much! (Ha, ha, I kill me.) Okay, really. The issue here is that it’s natural to look at things through your own life perspective, ignoring the fact that “back then” was a foreign culture. So you’re used to doorways that come a good foot or so above your head. But Joe Blow the Colonist didn’t go down to Home Depot when he was throwing up his cabin. He didn’t worry about building codes. He worried about keeping heat in the rooms every winter. Joe Blow the Colonist might’ve bumped his head every time he walked into his house, but at least he saved on the firewood. And that was really all that mattered to Joe. My advice: stop obsessing over the doorways and look at the 14-foot ceilings for a change. In truth, of course “they” were smaller “back then.” They had sh*tty health care and nutrition compared to modern Americans, for one thing. But the average American man today is only about five-foot-seven. Collectively, we’ve grown two or three inches in the last 200 years. Inches. Inches.

Little Susie Homeschool
Unlike Quilt Lady, Little Susie Homeschool really does know more than you about pretty much everything. That’s because, while you’re at your second job delivering pizza because you work at a living history museum, Susie is reading. Everything. She blew through Howard Zinn and James Loewen at an age when you were still rushing to finish your homework in time for “You Can’t do That on Television.” The demo interpretation you’ve worked so hard to dumb down for Floorboard Guy won’t cut it with Susie, because she’s already mastered whatever it is you’re demonstrating. You really hope that Susie and her parents visit on a slow day, because she’ll either be A) someone cool you want to talk to all day, or B) a floor-hog who’ll expect to get to talk to you all day. She tends to either touch nothing or want to touch everything.

Captain Ritalin & Family
Remember those myths you’ve heard about kids whose parents died horribly on the frontier, and so they were raised by wolves? Captain Ritalin’s parents didn’t get dysentery on Oregon Trail or anything; they’re just deeply engrossed reading every word of the displays in the front room of the museum…which would be awesome, if their energetic offspring weren’t climbing the priceless 18^th Century furniture three rooms over. Instead of wolves, Captain Ritalin’s caregivers rely on modern pharmaceuticals to do the dirty work for them. And you, of course. (Not that you will be permitted to discipline, or even directly address, the Captain.) If you don’t want Captain Ritalin to crawl into that restricted room, then you should’ve just used barbed wire and armed guards instead of that too-subtle chain across the door, shouldn’t you have? Another variant of this type sees Captain Ritalin’s keepers not ignoring him, but rather chasing him at full speed through the entire house. While this can be hazardous to other visitors and/or priceless 18^th Century artifacts, the plus side is that they usually breeze through in 2.7 seconds, and then they’re out of your hair.

The Toucher
Clearly a tactile learner, The Toucher is incapable of gleaning anything from the museum experience without being able to handle everything in his or her path, including you. Fragile glasswear, ancient books, actual food, real live interpretive staff and their personal belongings – nothing is off-limits. If it’s in the physical space of the museum, The Toucher will feel it. I once had a guy cross the barrier and climb into a fireplace – which, by the way, contained an actual roaring fire at the time – in order to ascertain for himself that the chimney was real. Seriously.

City Kid
At the museum where I worked, our daily schedule showed not only how many school children were visiting that day, but where they were from. One thing I learned very quickly – while public school kids from major metro areas may have an advantage over their rural counterparts in many areas, when it comes to the museum experience, they’re dumber than buttered toast. Don’t bother asking City Kid where in her kitchen he thinks Mrs. Tavern Keeper cooked dinner. City Kid has never even seen a fireplace in person. Don’t expect City Kid to know where Mrs. Tavern Keeper would’ve gotten the chicken she’s cooking. City Kid knows that chicken only comes from KFC, or the poultry section at Food Lion, if it’s a special occasion. City Kid is so completely, utterly, unfathomably ignorant of anything outside the sphere of “TRL” and “CSI” that it’s not even funny. Don’t even bring up the spinning wheel. You will frakking blow City Kid’s jaded little mind. (For awhile we had a live chicken at our museum. One of my favorite memories is watching 8^th graders from Paisley Middle – the city school to end all city schools – giggling while this rooster ate feed out of their hands. They’d never seen a live animal other than cats or dogs.) On the plus side, City Kid is apt to think that fetching firewood for you is insanely cool. Whereas Country Kid knows you’re just using him for free labor.

Country Kid
Generally more polite than his city counterpart, Country Kid is also likely to be a little less impressed with whatever it is you're doing. That's mainly because Country Kid's life and culture are a little closer to the life you're interpreting. Country Kid has livestock, chops wood on a regular basis and has actually personally witnessed the sewing of clothing. Unfortunately, Country Kid also got up at 4 a.m. to start the 50 m.p.h. bus ride to your museum, so he's getting a mite crabby. Also, his chaperones are trying to squeeze in enough time to hit the mall this afternoon, since they're here in the city and all, so they may not be as attentive as you would like.

The Guy You Really Really Wish You Could Hang Out With All Day
He may be an expert in the production of 18^th Century backwoods floorboards, cooking, shoemaking, etc. She might be a descendant of the family whose house you’re interpreting. Or maybe an exchange student from Germany who’s overjoyed to have stumbled onto a cache of German-ness in North Carolina, of all places. This person always seems to visit on the Saturday before Christmas, or five minutes before closing or something, and as such you don’t have nearly as much time as you’d like to pick his/her brain. My favorite variant of this type is the little kid who listens raptly to every word you say about knitting/profile drawing/basket weaving/pottery or whatever it is you’re talking about, and when his or her parents finally drag him/her away, you hear this excited little voice outside the door, saying, “I totally want to try that when we get home!” All the big talk about how much you love history aside, this visitor is the reason you take that extra job delivering pizza, and you know it.