Last night, Joe and I attempted to go out for a fun, educational evening at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry’s (OMSI) monthly “OMSI After Dark” event—the one Wednesday out of the month where the museum opens up after hours, and the 21-and-uppers, as my colleague put it—can roam the exhibits and ‘not have to push kids out of the way to do stuff.’
We arrived fashionably late at about 7:30 p.m., as we often do (namely owing to our polar opposite schedules), expecting to walk in the door, buy our tickets, and peruse the themed exhibits with an $8 16-ounce cup of draft, and maybe catch a $3 screening of “Laser Hendrix” at the planetarium when things started to wrap up. What we encountered when we walked through the main entrance, greeted by red-vested volunteers eagerly shoving a tri-folded pamphlet at every person who passed by, was more reminiscent of the Lincoln Park Zoo on a sunny Saturday in May. Hundreds of people aimlessly clustered in pseudo-lines wrapped loosely and randomly around the lobby. It was $10 to get in and banded, and while the line was long, we thought 20 minutes tops and slid in where we saw a natural break.
As we rounded the corner toward the elusive velvet rope, we were met with what appeared to be a renegade line—a bunch of morons easily sliding in front of us—who obviously had no idea that the real line started back by the IMAX ticket counter. No, they insisted, the line actually continued on, another half of a football field’s length to the entrance of the Planetarium, curving along the wall past the gift shop entrance, where it dumped into the velvet-rope line. In the ten minutes it took to advance eleven steps, we were looking at another hour, at least. 90 minutes max, if we were lucky.
I confess, that I’m not particularly fond of crowds. A younger, more patient version of myself, might have waited in that line, but being as it is that I’m now a business-minded, quasi-elitist adult, I ran a quick cost-benefit calculation, and determined that our $20-plus would be better spent on beers at Blitz over a quiet game of darts. Our fellow line-mates didn’t help the case. It was a mixed bag—a common fear of mine, when I determine myself to venture out into any popular Portland venue—resembling the fallout you might see if you dumped the Cheerful Tortoise (a popular Portland State hangout) on some bar in Old Town, and then picked all of that up, and dumped it on any place that advertises a condom LED display called “The Big Blow” for a mere ten bucks a head.
Yes, I said condom LED display. The thing about this whole adventure is, that the theme of the evening was “Sex, Love and OMSI After Dark.” Sex, being the operative word, and beer being the icing on the proverbial sex-cake. Some of the other educational exhibits and demonstrations included: “The Fragrant Hermaphrodite: Flower Dissection,” a tech lab entitled “Slippery when Wet: Chemistry of Safer Sex,” and an acrobatic performance called “Get it up: Balancing with Keith Sherin.”
I’ve never been the kind of person who can walk away without giving someone my two-cents, especially when I witness something as chaotic and poorly-organized as the line to this ticket counter (maybe not my boyfriend’s favorite quality about me), but I felt like I owed it to the museum, to let somebody know that with slightly better planning–and if anything–a backup plan, they might have prevented me from walking out with my twenty dollars and the fifty I would have probably spent on Coors Light.
I grabbed the first guy in a red-vest I saw, and told him just how unnavigable the line was, and how if they were expecting this kind of crowd, they should have been better prepared. He looked bewildered, but he was also looking at someone else, who was approaching the entrance. He told me he would “check on it.” I was prepared to launch into a pointed lesson on event management (something I actually know nothing about), when a man who eerily recalled Napoleon Dynamite, came bursting through the door, looking high on life. So I grabbed him. This line is unnavigable, I explained. He was panting, and grinning, when he told me, “This is our biggest turnout ever. I’m pretty sure we broke every record.” His exhilaration, so palpable, his excitement, so genuine. I kindly told him congratulations, and added that they may want to consider adding a volunteer, or nine, dedicated entirely to crowd control, the next time they wanted to host an event with “sex” in the title. Then we left, to go drink beer and play darts at Blitz.
Sex sells, as anyone whose ever been responsible for pushing cigarettes, clothing, booze, perfume, movies, mascara, Barbie dolls, universities or museum tickets, knows. That I went to this event (an overstatement, maybe), on a day during which the word sex came up at least a dozen times at the office was apropos, if it was anything.
That afternoon, after an exhaustive conversation with my boss over the pros of bringing on a sex-therapist-slash-relationship-expert to host a regular blog on the website I manage, I was met with a laundry list of cons, which all inevitably came back to the conservatism of the industry I work in (ahem, health insurance), and the risks inherit in championing the provocative. Thus, while I worry about things like traffic and usage and engagement, and the shimmering golden light at the end of the tunnel is blinding me with bright, glittery letters spelling S-E-X, I’m challenged to add value, without the full monty. And seeing as how I’m every bit as resourceful and adaptable as I profess to be (this being the exception maybe, among things I profess about myself, rather than the rule), I agreed to do just that, knowing that in time, I would get my sex therapist, and that once I did, that the visitors would come in flocks, over and over and over.
But sex and love, are at the center of almost everything we do. Research conducted last year around the sharing behaviors of Facebook users, indicated that sex links are 90% more likely to be shared than other types of content. To be fair, the study conducted by “self-proclaimed social media scientist” Dan Zarrella, also shows that links that are “positive in nature” or related to “learning” rank second and third in shares. This is interesting, but it proves little. What it tells me, however, is that sex matters. Run a little Google search on sex and social media, and you’ll find no paucity of content, theories, and anecdotes.
I guess, when it comes down it, there’s no getting around sex. Can I honestly say, that I would have been as interested in OMSI After Dark, if they hadn’t promised BLTAs (avocado included, for the ancients who once thought that the growing fruit resembled a pair of testicles) and Slippery Nipples at the Cafe? I can say this: next month’s After Dark event is called “Science Like an Egyptian.” It’s my dream, that if I’m ever well-behaved enough to get a man to put a diamond (or a ring, of any shape or form) on my hand, that I’ll honeymoon amongst the Pyramids. So I’ll go, and hope, that the absence of sex, might make it something of a failure.
