Freaks and Snow

Big ol' snowstorm Saturday. I walked around all day long, stopping breifly into the Freakatorium, a mini-museum on Clinton St. featuring wierdness of sideshows, two-headed turtles, elephant men, and the skeleton of the Mermaid of Fiji. Normally, this kind of this really gives me the creeps - a sense that something sinister and perverse is taking place. Well, it was perverse, but it wasn't sinister. This time, it was really just a fascination with realms of greyed and dusty otherness that took hold as I looked at the pictures of the Lobster boy, bearded lady, and the legs of parasitic twins poking forth from the stomach of a dapperly dressed Victorian.Today's the last day that the Feakatorium will be open. LESers, they've lost their lease. Same old gentrification story. Too bad. I can't say that I would ever go in there again anyway, but I'm glad that I saw it before it closed. So, after the Freakatorium I continued through the Lower East Side and Soho. I was surprised how few people there were out. It was such a different way to experience the city: quiet, few cars, uncrowded even in Soho. Like Thanksgiving holiday on a deserted campus. Blanketing everything and creating a spectral blue-white glare, the snow made a whole different city, one in which I was disoriented. A good Saturday. I ended it Dostoyevsky, two burbons, and a bath.