Wonderscope

Mo has been asking for Wonderscope lately. A lot.





She asks very sweetly, and if the joint was free, this wouldn't be a problem. We used to have a membership, but such things expire. It's $6 a head to get in, so $18 a trip. I've toyed with getting another membership, but we'd have to go five or six times to come out ahead of individual admissions, and I'm skeptical we'd really go that much. Maybe, maybe not.







Plus, Em insists she has outgrown the place. I don't know how, since I haven't outgrown it myself.



I finally caved. Not for a membership, just a single visit.





There's a cool vacuum thing called Amazing Airways. The sign on it says to only feed one thing at a time, and try as I might, I couldn't convince Mo to wait for one to exit before she fed it another fluffy toy.



It generally handles two or three okay, but you'll get a ball hovering in the valve if you push it. You can change the path of the vacuum by flipping the valve. I'm sure they've had kids try to feed thirty items in and totally choke it up.



They also had this Hmong village display from the Madison version of Wonderscope, which was cool.



The Hmong village actually reminds me of a restaurant I wrote into a long ago abandoned novel manuscript: Victor Charlie's VietnAmerican Restaurant. It was a theme restaurant in the mold of Casa Bonita, but with a Vietnam War theme. Thatch roofed huts enclosures around booths where you can get Bánh Chưng or just a burger. Bún bò Huế served in helmets, grenade pepper mills, .50 caliber cartridge salt shakers. Staff dressed in both VC and American military garb, was sculpted pot bellied pigs and I don't know what-all.




I'd eat there. I know, it's probably in horrible taste, as bad as that nut-job who wanted to open a restaurant at 18th & Vine and call it Strange Fruit. At least I only wrote my affront into an impossibly bad manuscript.



Mostly, though, we hung in the crafts room. I made a star, a ladder with Pipe Cleaner Man climbing it, and a set of antennae and a necklace out of pipe cleaners.



Mo made about a hundred tiny masterpieces and stapled them to the display board with too many staples. Em made a star (copycat), a mask, and so on.



I had a cool idea for a display (or activity or whatever you'd call it) they could do. They sell Super Balls in the gift shop there, and I was bouncing one off the walls, experimenting with ricochets. Then I thought, what if you had a bunch of plywood panels at different altitudes and angles all through a room? You might have to make people wear safety goggles, but just let them go crazy with a bunch of Super Balls. Paint targets on surfaces, try to make it illustrate the geometry, trying to predict where a ball will end up if you nail this red circle or that purple triangle.