I paid $21 to touch a piece of ice...and I loved it!

What I'm Listening To: Just Friends by Nine Black Alps

Yesterday Jim and I decided to try to get into the Milwaukee Public Museum's Titanic artifacts exhibit. Okay, we didn't plan very well, I'll admit it. It was super crowded, and even though we got there at noon, the first Titanic show with openings wasn't available 3:15 PM. Sigh. Since we didn't want to wait around for three hours, we just turned around, had lunch at Louise's (yum! I have a BBQ chicken salad weakness, you see.) and then drove home.

So that night, Jim got us reservations for an 11 AM walkthru of the exhibit for today, 12/31. The ticket prices were outrageous -- $21 apiece, plus service charges -- but we were super psyched!! We drove down to the museum again this morning, parked, and were ready to go for our 11 AM tour at 10:15 AM. We sat patiently in the museum cafe for a while, then we decided to try to kill some time with an attempt to find the famous Milwaukee prostitute hidden in the Streets of Old Milwaukee. Yes, it's TRUE!! We had heard about this whole thing from that John Gurda show about Milwaukee, and were excited to check it out.

Hey, I wanna see a mannequin dressed up like a old-tyme Milwaukee prostitute as much as the next person, so we started our quest. We searched and searched, all the while bitching and moaning about the lack of the old-tymey telephone that you could put a quarter in and it talked to you, and the disappearance of the movie theater. But alas, no prostitute mannequin. It was a big disappointment. But I gotta tell you, the Streets give me a totally bad vibe. Like there's ghosts in there. I am gonna do a blog on all the places that give me bad vibes some time. I just wish I'd seen a ghost!!!

Anywhoo, 11 AM rolled around, and Jim and I got in line for the Titanic exhibition. First they gave us boarding passes that showed who you were on the ship's first and only voyage. I was Mrs. Henry B. Harris, and my husband was a famous Broadway producer who owned the Follies Bergere! OMG, duh, of course I am in first class, because that's the way I roll. Jim, on the other hand, was some 23-year-old Scandanavian agricultural inspector dude in Steerage. Yuck! Oh well, TDB. On with the show.

We walk in, buy the audio tour (another $5 apiece, lovely!) and look at all the fun stuff. Bottles of booze, fine china and everyday plates, entire portholes, staterooms, steering bearings, old photographs, sheet music, menus, clothing, shoes, and lest I forget...the ice. There is a HUGE block of ice in one of the rooms so you can touch it and feel how incredibly cold it was in the waters of the North Atlantic. Yeah, it was COLD. Ice is COLD, people. And wet. Duh.

Then we got to read the listing of which passengers made it and which ones didn't. Of course, a first class hottie like myself makes it -- about 700 people out of 2200 did survive, btw. Jim, aka Nils Odahl, the Scandinavian agriculture inspector, does not. He was going to Peoria anyway -- he's probably better off. Ha. A lot of the passengers were supposed to be on other ocean liners or had personal or business situations where they had to get on the Titanic for some reason or another, but it wasn't their first choice. It was like a real-life version of that horror movie "Final Destination", where the kids who didn't die in the original movie's accident are somehow marked for death for the second time around. Wow. Do you think these passengers felt bad vibes on the boat when it took off? I wonder....

All kidding aside, the sinking of the Titanic was a horrifying tragedy that spurred some much-needed updates in ocean liner safety regulations. I mean, can you imagine that night? The movie with Leo and Kate doesn't even do the event justice. Seeing all those artifacts made the whole ship seem to come alive.

Afterwards we went to lunch in the museum cafeteria, and ate some sandwich that might have been tuna or chicken, we're still not sure. All in all, our day at the museum with tickets, parking and lunch included cost us a total of about $100 for the both of us. Well worth it, I say. (Even though they didn't have any ice bears in the gift shop. More about that in my review of The Golden Compass movie --wow!!)

I really recommend seeing this exhibit, which wraps up in Milwaukee at the end of May 2009, btw.

Oh, and before I forget, happy new year! :) See you in 2009.