Again with the multi-legged bovines!
This genetic disaster is from the Workingman’s Museum, a pleasantly Victorian jumble of creaky wood cases stuffed with parched animals, miniature steam engines rotting moccasins, toys, bugs, and bones in New Harmony, Indiana.
Through no fault of my own, I have family in Southern Indiana. Every once in a while I go back to visit my mom (who is mercifully oblivious) and to share the pain of my brother Eric and his wife Sarah, who remain perpetually queasy over the state’s cultural Slurpee of Wallmart, NASCAR, deep-fried onion blossoms, and bibles, bibles, bibles. Eric & Sarah are surprisingly effective in digging out things that defy the stereotype.
The museum was not the only thing interesting about New Harmony. There is also "Father" George Rapp and the Harmonist cult... err, "religious group" that gave the city its name.
Here are some reasons you want to learn about George Rapp:
1) I had to learn about George Rapp.
2) He looked like a garden gnome.
3) He was an alchemist.
4) He was a communist (in the pre-Marxist sense of the word)
5) He talked to the Angel Gabriel who left his "footprint" in a slab of limestone in the village. (Sadly it's on private property.)
6) He was insane.
7) He demanded celibacy of his followers.
8) His followers were insane.
9) He found personal loopholes in the celibacy policy. (Traditionally alchemists are said to require the assistance of young virginal woman. Rapp was no exception. In his 70s he spent long and controversial hours in his laboratory with a teenage girl named Hildegard Mutschler. When Mutschler eventually fell for another young man, that man was booted from the colony.)
10) He dug secret tunnels (like a true garden gnome) under the settlement's cabins so he could pop up from the bowels of the earth to spot-check adherence to his celibacy policy;
11) He was handy with a knife. (When his own son fell off the celibacy bandwagon repeatedly, Rapp saw to it that he was surgically deprived.)
12) He was filthy rich. In this case, we're talking about $500,000 squirreled away in a secret vault in his basement. That's $500,000 in the 1820s, people! But it's not like he was greedy since this money wasn't for him. It was set aside to help God defray expenses in rebuiling the Temple of Solomon upon his imminent return.
Also, the Harmonists planted topiary mazes, which they perambulated as a sort of spiritual exercise. The town of New Harmony replanted the original maze back in the 1930s, and since then several other mazes have sprung up. Here I am wandering one of them.
A contemporary religious group that perpetuates Father Rapp’s beard styling if not his beliefs, is the Amish. While Southern Indiana is not exactly crawling with them, there is enough of an Amish presence to justify a bit of exploitation, witness Evansville's newly opened "Black Buggy Restaurant".
While the food was naturally bland, the irony of a drive-thru at an Amish restaurant was certainly delicious.
Another local hero who wore a gnomish mustache-free beard, was, of course, Abe Lincoln. Sadly, I missed the singin', dancin' emancipatin' merriment of "Young Abe Lincoln," a seasonal musical formerly presented at Lincoln State Park. Amphitheater.. (Photo below depicts the sequentially maturing “Four Abes†from the dramatic finale.)
Just down the road from the amphitheater, is Santa Claus, Indiana, where the Honest One pals around with another slightly more mythic patriarch.
On something like a civic whim, Santa Claus, Indiana assumed its yuletide persona in the earlier part of the last century. One offshoot of this attention-seeking behavior was the establishment of a quaint little amusement park called, quite naturally, Santa Claus Land. Eventually this humble handful of fiberglass candy canes, storybook figures, and petting zoo was supplanted by a more serviceable theme park with state-of-the-art roller coasters and the like. Even the name was changed to the more ambitiously inclusive "Holiday World".
My brother and I share semi-nostalgic feelings for the earlier park,, and when we heard there was a small museum dedicated to preserving its memory, we imagined room after room of exquisitely decaying reindeer and elf mannequins. Unfortunately, all we found was a meager display of framed photos and news clippings, one of which boasted of the exciting addition of "brainwashed animals" (i.e., trained to perform for bits of food dispensed by visitors' coins).
Brainwashed animals or no, Santa Claus Land is no more, and Santa Claus, Indiana may be losing its grip.
But endings are rarely clean. There's always the ugly struggle before the end, the vain attempts to evade the inevitable through what the medical community call "heroic measures."
Yes, the third stocking stuffer on Santa's list is, in fact, "Colonscopy."
Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!
Labels: personal, travel
Oh, look at this, and just tell me it's NOT the color of orange juice squeezed in HEAVEN! 
If it weren't for the dark glasses, I wouldn't bother you about Fanny Crosby. But really -- blind people don't look like this any more. Well, actually, no one looks like this anymore. The only time we get to see someone remotely like this is in cheesy thrillers where they flash back to the murderer's childhood, and the director needs a scary disciplinarian figure to stand in as shorthand for "religious-repression-inevitably-leading-to-a-career-as-serial-killer." 
