After an afternoon with three rambunctious children and an evening of watching teens spar and do kata (while I tweaked a novella in fits and starts) and a late night of urging one belated soul to finish homework, I suddenly remembered that I never managed to go to the Midget Museum in Montreal, despite all my pilgrimages to the city. And this seemed a great sadness.
So...
I googled it, and discovered that the no-doubt beloved institution no longer exists. Not only that, but it has left almost no trace behind. In a teeny-tiny post fooling around with that jolly topic, his family cremains, Shane Simmons mentions the museum:
If you ever get a chance to go to a burial for ashes, I highly recommend the experience. Seeing the teeny-tiny grave is worth the price of admission alone. It sort of reminded me of my childhood visit to Montreal’s now-defunct midget museum where they kept all the teeny-tiny chairs and teeny-tiny cutlery and teeny-tiny toilets. It was all so cute. And, if a grave can indeed be cute, then gosh-darn-it this one was downright precious.
And Simmons' link takes us to a letter in the Mirror, where we can learn etiquette:
First, just to make sure that next time you write about this subject, you will avoid insulting some concerned persons: "shorties" and "midgets" are nowadays considered terms not to be used anymore, having been replaced by "little people" or, with a certain reserve, "dwarfs."
However, I note that the loss of good old words like midget and gimp is a sad diminution of the language...
I assert this despite the undeniable fact that I have frequently been referred to with some opprobium or reproach as a midget, owing to the fact that I refused to drink milk when I was an infant, a baby, a toddler, a child, or, indeed, at any other time in my life. And that unfortunate deficit led to an utter--an "utter and complete"--failure to fulfill my doctor's prognosis in the matter of future height.
Even in the bosom of my kin, I have occasionally found not the proper milk of human kindness but an unkind ridicule. Yet I am of a respectable height and taller than many shorties of my acquaintance.
As reflected in the Mirror, the Museum turned out to be a bit grander than I had imagined: I simply want to point out that the Midget's [sic] Palace was no more than a family house opened to the public as a museum.
See there? The Midget Palace.
3 comments:
Your blog is better than most books being published in this country. REading it is a real joy.
I was in the Midgets Palace in the 1950s.I still have the little booklet about Philippe Nicol.
"Randall" is a lovely name... Do you know that wonderful sonnet, "Felix Randall," by Gerard Manley Hopkins? ("Felix Randall, is he dead then? etc.")
If you come back for a visit, please tell about it--a listing for the "Midget Museum" was still in AAA guides to Montreal some years ago, and I always meant to go (but usually was derailed by a rabid desire to make merry on the part of Montreal-going companions.) There's not much published about the Palace, so far as I can tell. And the little book: interesting? I find fascinating the sort of museums where people live or where they once lived--the ones where all their "things" are still in place.
Somewhere on the site is a piece I wrote about a local woman who lives in the same house her family has lived in since the eighteenth century--that also had that magical "feel" of a live museum.
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