2 + 3 = 5

From Madame Tussaud's wax figure museum in London.

(The amazing thing about Madame Tussaud’s is not how realistic the wax figures look (you can tell they’re not alive all right), but how unrealistic the people that stand next to them are. That figure over there, next to Michael Jackson, posing for a photograph – what an unnatural smile, what waxy skin, what improbable proportions! One wax figure unfreezes and walks away, the other stays on, smiling interminably. Aren’t humans the most unnatural animals?)

I never believed in following the crowd. In fact, I seem to have a mild case of crowdophobia, with a gathering of more than thirty people causing discomfort, headaches, and suicidal thoughts. The first few rooms of Madame Tussaud’s – a teeming mass of bodies, all swarming to take pictures with figures of people I’ve never even heard of – are therefore something of a nightmare. I want to scream for help, to run away to a medieval castle or abbey that no one visits. Instead, I try to join the idiots surrounding me, to take a picture next to one of those celebrities I don’t give a damn about. Oh why oh why don’t they have civilized lines you could stand in, why does it have to be push your way through and the fittest survives? I take a step toward the figure, already five people jump in to have their pictures taken first. In the process I stand between someone’s camera and the scene they’re trying to take a picture of. “Sorry”, I mumble almost inaudibly, too stressed out to be truly polite.

(As I look at the fifth or so figure of a supermodel that I’ve obviously never seen before, I realize that they all look like Barbie dolls. Yeah, I know, Barbie dolls were based on supermodels, not the other way around, but what of it? In my life, the appearance of the doll came chronologically before the model. And why anyone would want to look like a Barbie doll is beyond me. Humans are the strangest animals, aren’t they?)

But Madame Tussaud’s is not just for the crowd. In the room which exhibits historic personae, the clumps of human mass gathered around wax figures thin out noticeably. I happily dive toward each and every “unpopular” wax model. I can’t resist the urge to look through the prism Newton is holding, to stand on tiptoe in order to reach Oscar Wilde’s eye level, and, most of all, to ruffle Einstein’s hair. Vincent Van Gogh makes a particularly strong impression on me, with a face just like the one in his self-portraits, only realistic. With bittersweet amusement I notice that they placed King Charles I next to Oliver Cromwell. You couldn’t have two more different men – the short, curly-moustached dandy on the left, and on his right the ungainly Puritan, seemingly hacked out of a large and gnarled piece of wood, with two warty knobs on his face. To think that it was not the tree-like one that was eventually cut down!

When I come to the room dedicated to musicians, I rush past the Britney Spearses that everyone’s lining up to see, and head instead toward the Beatles, upon seeing whom I feel a queer desire to shriek my head off. I do wonder what I would have thought of them if they had been popular in my time. “I never believed in following the crowd, do I believe in running away from it at all costs?” I ask the figure of the young Mozart as I look him in the eye. He looks back down to his violin, clearly thinking “don’t be silly, you came here, didn’t you?” And so I did, my dear Mozart, so I did.