Part 3 of That Nasty Post

I took a deep breath. The moment of truth had begun. One at a time, the head judge called the contestants to the stage. Each contestant was required to bring their entry to the stage, hold it up for the audience to view, then give a short speech about their work. The first person who came out was a woman who'd brought an eagle her dad's best friend's brother had killed and stuffed himself. She'd grown up dressing the eagle in baby clothes and pushing it around in a pram. She loved this eagle because she thought it was really funny that her dad's best friend's brother killed the eagle and stuffed it.

Not quite what I had expected.

The next woman works as a professional bug-pinner for the Natural History Museum. She'd brought four tiny diorama's she'd created, anthropomorphizing various South American beetles. She mentioned how she keeps the beetles in her freezer next to her roommates Skinny Cows until she's ready to use them. Based on what she said about her work, I am certain that those diorama's were beautiful and compelling, but I couldn't see them. I couldn't see them because the stage upon which the contestants work was displayed was lit for a sweaty band of boys playing bad renditions of Iggy Pop hits, not for the art I was hoping to see.

The next guy was a short, round, sweaty, fast-talking Japanese guy with an accent so thick I could hardly understand a word he was saying. He used his own taxidermied skin to create squid-baby, two-headed baby and mer-girl. He tried to explain his process - I understood that "summer is best time peal skin" but I'm still not sure if he was actually skinning himself or just using flaked sun-burnt skin. Either way, it would have been really great if I could have actually seen his sculptures. But I could not.

I also couldn't see the eight-hour old yorkie puppie that had been given to the taxidermist by a devastated breeder who'd never lost a puppy. I could kind of make out the plastic skeleton being sold off as Mickey Mouse's actual skeleton and I did not think it was funny or clever or interesting. I was also not amused by the woman who entered into the contest a skull she found on a trip to New Mexico but she wasn't sure what it was, a shellacked alligator-head she bought at a Rite-Aid in Louisiana and a "really cool rock" that she alleged might have a dinasour fossil in it, but she wasn't sure, and she'd love to know if the judges thought so. I was even less interested when the same woman proceeded to read aloud an ad she'd found on the internet for a stuffed piranha from Japan. The ad was obviously written by a person who did not speak English as a first language, yet this "really cool rock" woman seemed to feel that making vicious remarks about someone's ability to write in a language not their own had some relevancy to a rogue taxidermy contest. However, it wasn't until a woman who's contest entry was a bottle of deer's urine and her entire talk was a sales pitch for a particular brand of deer urine that her father manufactures, I decided I'd had enough. Sure, Rabmer, the soft-mounted under-sea jack rabbit was incredible, but it was after ten o'clock and we had an hour ahead of us on the train and I just couldn't take it anymore.

The evening was a crushing disappointment. I haven't been that disappointed in at least four hours, but if I learned one thing, it was this:

DON'T MAKE EYE-CONTACT WITH THE HIPSTERS.

Click here for Part 1

Click here for Part 2