Oct 23 2007
Hall of Hoaxes
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By Adam Engel
10/23/07
I took a brief but necessary vacation, or personal day — as if the rest of my days were property of Topiary Techniques — to visit the world famous City Museum Complex.
The plaque outside The Hall of Hoaxes read, “Everything The City promised you, but never delivered. Everything The Nation promised you, but never delivered.”
Hyperbole, true, but what can one expect from The Hall of Hoaxes?
The Hall featured exhibit upon exhibit of hoaxes hoaxed upon Citizens of the previous century. Lot of money during those Main Street days when Citizens gladly paid to be bamboozled.
No exhibit for promises broken by friends, lovers, teachers, innocence lost, disappointing lives…only the palpable, the obvious. Two-headed boy floating in fluid and the shin-bone of an angel. Skull of an alien from outer space and a handwritten love letter from God. Disfigured fetuses in pickle jars; dinosaur eggs; cavemen in ice.
The Fossil Giant, nine feet tall, three feet wide, arms folded across his great expanse of chest, slept peacefully on a slab, his existence carved meticulously from stone, down to the detailed pores in his bone-white skin.
