Those Beguiling Mermaids: Tails of the Sea

Americans, I do believe, are going a little nutsy over museums. I have it on the authority of Michigan adman Bill Truesdell’s Directory of Unique Museums (Phoenix: Oryx Press) that there are now museums for tattoos, birds’ eggs, cookie jars, beads, firefighting equipment (“The Hall of Flame,” I love it!), ventriloquists’ dummies, booze bottles, clocks, popcorn, Coca Cola memorabilia (95 years worth holed up in Elizabethtown, Ky.), stoves, anesthesiology (this one is a real gas), handcuffs, bottles, teapots, Chincoteague oysters, postcards, barrels and old fans. There are also museums of rice, strawberries, nuts and the potato.
 
Thus there arises that peculiarly American crisis—the transition from compulsive collecting to a museum proper, so-called. My new subscription to Grit (The Williamsport, Pa., weekly slice of offbeat life in America) has provided me with such an instance.
 
Meet Sam Aguirre of San Diego who has been collecting Mickey Mousabilia since the tender age of six. There are now seven thousand Disney-derived artifacts cluttering up his living room, kitchen and bedrooms. He turned down Walt Disney World’s offer because he wants his collection to be accessible to the Southern California that nurtured his benign obsession.
 
His most cherished MM is a rubber Mickey Mouse piloting a World War II fighter plane. They sold for 15 cents in 1942 but now are worth over $100. During the war, patriotic children donated their rubber toys to Uncle Sam, thereby making the few that survived worth their weight in EPCOT shares.
 
His MM soap figurine that sold for a nickel in 1936 goes for $35 in better antique shops everywhere. The first MM recording, “Mickey and Minnie’s in Town,” varies in value from $25 for a scratched copy to $100 for one that has never been played. (Heh, some people had taste even back then.)
 
Who knows where all this Mickeyphilia will lead? David R. Smith, director of the Walt Disney Archives in Burbank, speculates: “We are now seeing a new generation of Mickey Mouse fans who want to see the old Mickey cartoons and toys. Companies are showing great interest in producing new toys and products. The Disney company is putting more control on their characters.” What a relief.
 
Up the I-5 in Long Beach, Slater Baron has been collecting lint. From her dryer, where else? Where else is also all her students’ and friends’ dryers, that’s where else. What for? She carves lint sculptures for a putative Never-Never Land. “The magic of our laundry room gave me a way to tell tales and create adventures which we all shared. There really is magic in our world.”
 
You’d better believe it: Her favorite creation is a 27-item, six foot panel entitled “The Six O’Clock News,” which depicts her parents watching television. Now there’s a museum in the making.
 
If contemporary life can be such fantasy fare full, why be surprised that the Mermaid has spun off a really beguiling swatch of tails under view (through February 28) at the Philadelphia Maritime Museum, 321 Chestnut Street. This is no Mickey Mouse Linterama deal, however. It’s a world-class museum that capitalizes shrewdly on our city’s being a world-class port.
 
It’s been here 25 years, as it proudly trumpeted in a luminous display of its catches this fall. I still wouldn’t know about it had I not read about its reconstructing the kind of racing boats popular during 19th-Century Philadelphia down on the waterfront.
 
Don’t miss the Mermaids exhibit. It’s rich in art, folklore, anthropology and fun. Listen to this old Sea Shanty to get its funky drift:
 
My father was the keeper of the Eddystone Light
And he slept with a mermaid one fine night;
The offspring of this strange union were three:
A porpoise, and a porgy, and the third was me.
 
Put yourself in a sailor’s boots: He’s drawn night watch, he’s as horny as an altar boy during Lent, and a porpoise swooshes by the bow, flashing a phosphorescent tail at his sleepily bugging eyes. Then put him ashore on liberty, get him a little grogged, and voila! Tales about tails.
 
I was surprised to learn that the Greek sirens who lured sailors onto their rocks (hello, Scylla; hello, Charybdis) were half bird, half woman.
 
I also didn’t know that mermaid was a synonym for prostitute in Shakespeare’s diction. Things were going on in Ye Olde Mermaid Taverne that were never dreamt of in my tenth grade English class.
 
Two of my favorite tail pieces involve Biblical revisionism. In the Nuremburg Bible printed by Anton Keberger in 1483, a mermaid, a merman and mermutt do dog paddles on the periphery: they were not allowed on Noah’s species-saving vessel.
 
And then there is the Philly feminist, Linda Lee Ominsky, whose marvelously 3-D wall-hangings recently graced the Philadelphia Art Alliance’s walls. She sexes up her Jonah and the Whale tale with three merladies whose bosoms are coyly bra’ed in stars. Come on. It’s the nipples that were arousing those nocturnal sailors.
 
The show reveals as well the ambivalence of male sailors’ about those midnight wenches. There are evil merpersons, whose tresses are seaweedy rather than flaxen blonde. After all, women to them were like the sea—sometimes nurturing, sometimes death-dealing; sometimes beautiful, sometimes ugly. I personally hold it against my eponym, St. Patrick, who allegedly drove the merthings (as well as the snakes) off the island. For shame, killjoy.
 
From Welcomat: After Dark, Hazard-at-Large, February 18, 1987