8 June 2009
When Bartlett Left the Bear (6-8)
The most acute disturbance to the museum concept came 3 months past the inaugural opening, and of course there had been complaints about the stuffed birds posed dramatically under single overhead 115 watt directed lighting designed to cast dramatic shadows onto the exhibit’s painted black flooring, but rather the disturbance in question had been a teenager’s succinct 4-word observation in front of the management upon looking at a stuffed puffin that had actually died in the zoo a month after the upscale museum-cum-café had opened and was well-known by his prescribed Christian name “Peter” as the oldest puffin in any zoo in North America. The idea to intern the puffin in the taxidermy corridor was seen as a “light-bulb” eureka-grade moment, a way to both honor Peter and give the taxidermy corridor some real gravitas to justify the 115 watt directed lighting which some guests had complained about on the yellow 3×5 “Your Opinion Is Valued” medium weight Berkshire bond cardboard stock as being “a little too dramatic” or “upsetting to my appetite”, but it was the addition of Peter, which was no small feat and required an inordinate amount of paperwork for such a small bird, led to management throwing its arms up in a tirade that questioned whether the zoo in fact “owned anything” and as such led the management into a more hands-on approach to the whole taxidermy corridor project, which set it on the inevitable crash course with the teenager’s 4-word outburst that cut management to the quick indeed, and put the whole project into “jeopardy,” a catch-all idiom at the zoo for floundering projects, animals and employees that had somehow filtered down from upper management to the lowest levels of the staff and as such was endemic to any of the management’s constant enjoinders to the staff that they were both keepers and guards of the zoo’s actual population.
Other movies* you might want to read about:
- When Bartlett Left the Bear
- When Bartlett Left the Bear (6-11)
- When Bartlett Left the Bear (6-9)
- When Bartlett Left the Bear (6-13)
- When Bartlett Left the Bear (6-10)