The Anti-Pepper looks like pepper, but it isn't. It's made of shavings from a man's face. But the jackalope is a jackalope, and the human horns - agitated warts encircled by scar tissue - grew right out of a New Jersey woman's forehead, and the taxidermied crocodile cries real tears.
"It's like the Mary statues that cry blood," says museum curator Jen Hirt. "It's a very common miracle."
And if you're willing to believe in miracles, the Museum of Natural and Artificial Ephemerata delivers.
"A lot of it is about getting a grip on different concepts of reality," says curator Scott Webel. "How real is real, and how much does the feeling of 'realness' depend on cultural constructs?"
The museum is also about the collection itself and the effort to hold onto the experience of life.
"We collect things that had lives," Hirt says.
Hirt and Webel run the museum out of their living room on Cedar Street in Hyde Park. He wears black suspenders and a black bow-tie, she wears a black-and-white dotted dress, and they both wear black socks. Circus music plays for the benefit of four stuffed minks, a decaying butterfly collection and an old baby shirt (reportedly haunted). Hirt coaxes the tabby cat, Mia, to jump through a hula-hoop.
"Next, we're going to add flames," Hirt says.
Nobody is wearing a fake moustache, but if somebody were, it would seem quite natural.
Collecting flotsam
"Ephemerata," from the word ephemeral, refers to anything that has a finite lifespan. A cut rose is natural ephemerata, as it will bloom and die within days. And X-rays are artificial ephemerata, because they are a sort of plastic slice of a living thing.
Marilyn Monroe's cigarette - lipstick-stained, kept under glass and reportedly donated by the man who cleaned up Monroe's quarters after her death - is celebrity ephemerata, a special breed. The cigarette, the museum's biggest attraction, merits an announcement in the front yard: "See Marilyn Monroe's Cigarette Butt!"
The museum also has a collection called "Maker's Bits," which is a display of bottles of by-products from the process of creation: the museums's first flyer, the makings of a breakfast and wrappers from things eaten on a bike ride from Seattle, Wash., to Portland, Ore.
Webel and Hirt say the museum honors collection itself, harking back to early American collectors like P.T. Barnum, who displayed things like an embalmed mermaid and people like Charles Stratton (General Tom Thumb). A picture of Stratton, with his tiny family, is also on display.
The museum employs various styles of collection, borrowing from the traditions of dime museums, Victorian parlor displays and wunderkammern - "cabinets of wonder" popular in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Some items are grouped according to physical, not scientific, similarity. Blowfish, for example, dangle next to spiny seedpods. Other exhibits are grouped by other coincidences. The human horns are in a case with an ostrich egg because both were donated by the same person, while items on the north wall all have to do with skin and bones.
And some arrangements are humorous. There's "an entire wing dedicated to sleep" - a homemade, feathered wing that hangs on the wall over a small glass jar with eye-boogers that Hirt and Webel diligently harvested from themselves every day for a month. The jar contains about half a teaspoon of sleep.
"If you multiplied this by 18 billion," Webel says, "that'd be how much sleep the whole world produces in a year."
Such schemes of arrangement are a nod to pre-Enlightenment thought, Webel says. They suggest that modern scientific methods aren't the only valid way to think, organize and decide what's real.
The museum's Web site says the curators hope to "bring you small gaps in the assemblage of 'the everyday' through which you might wander, gathering data and feelings to construct your own collection of ephemera in the folds of constant loss."
Webel and Hirt say the museum is about mortality, too, and the things we collect in our efforts to stave off an absolute end.
"There's some secret relationship between death and collection," Webel says. "[Museums] put a halt to decay, at least for a while."
But in a sense, such efforts are futile.
"The universe," says UT physics professor Austin Gleeson, "is turning into a great, cold nothing-nothing."
Hirt and Webel collect the flotsam of that ever-ending universe.
Jackalopes and Yeti toys
Instead of asking, "Is this real?" the curators say they hope visitors will question their own concepts of what reality is.
Take the jackalope. Half jackrabbit and half antelope, it was reportedly found by a troupe of Wyoming girl scouts, along with the bodies of two dead cowboys. The cowboys presumably shot each other in a dispute over whether to cook the jackalope as a rabbit or as a deer. Now, the animal's head is mounted on the museum wall.
According to Pamela Owen, who is a senior paleontology educator at the Texas Memorial Museum, "there's no such thing as a jackalope. I think it's just some taxidermists having a good time."
But the scientific verity of the jackalope is not the issue, Webel says.
"There's a whole industry of jackalope fabrication," he says. Most people have heard of the jackalope, and many know what jackalopes are, even if we never expect to see one in the wild. So ... are jackalopes real?
"[This is] partially about imbuing things with a particular feeling of realism or surrealism," Webel says. "We want people to take a closer look at their environment."
Webel and Hirt say they stand behind the "realness" of all of their objects.
Even the Yeti toy.
Supposedly passed along via a young abominable snowman, it looks suspiciously like a Peep, one of those chick-shaped marshmallow Easter candies.
"A Peep," Hirt says. "I don't know what that is."
"I don't know what the yetis made [the toys] out of," Webel adds. "Hair or something, I guess."
Disappointing reality
And then there's the history of the museum itself. According to the museum's Web site, The Museum of Natural and Artificial Ephemerata was founded in Tucson, Ariz., on Nov. 7, 1929, "in the early afternoon, during a monsoon storm, as mating ants took to the air on momentary wings."
The museum's founders, Rolls Joyce Junior (previously named Rasputin Zaplatynska) and Madame Mercury Curie (real name unknown) died in the 1940s, leaving boxes of ephemerata to their apparently uninterested heirs.
In 1999, Webel, who is a direct descendant of Joyce, and Hirt found two of these decaying boxes in a family member's trailer in the desert. They've since added to that permanent collection with donated pieces, items on loan from artists and visitors and a purse made from a frog, which they bought on e-Bay.
Such reputable institutions as the Vatican have loaned relics to the museum, and Webel claims Graceland once lent them a lock of Elvis' hair. But Kevin Kern, a spokesman for Graceland, says it has never had a lock of Elvis' hair. At press time, the Vatican offices were closed.
Hirt and Webel say that's the story, anyway, and they're sticking to it.
Come nighttime, the curators sleep in a bedroom next to their living room museum. The haunted baby shirt slides around in its glass display, in a house that's silent except for Mia's mewing and, presumably, the whish of teardrops sliding down the crocodile's leathered face.
During the day, Webel and Hirt are a library assistant at UT's School of Law and a teacher at J.E. Pearce Middle School, respectively. They both hold master's degrees, Hirt in scientific illustration and Webel in cultural anthropology.
The pair open the museum mostly on weekends, giving tours by appointment to anyone who e-mails a request - usually about five people per week. They play in the Ephemerata Family Band and host museum events which sometimes draw up to 200 people.
So they are real. Scott Webel and Jen Hirt, amid their bottled freaks, their taxidermied miracles and captivating half-truths, are solid and stuck on the ground. It's disappointing, almost - we'd want them to blink in and out of existence, to levitate at least or sleep cocooned in emerald-colored shells. But they're just people, with a living room full of candy wrappers, bones and butterfly wings: the bits that life has left behind as it hurtles into nothing-nothing.
The Museum of Natural and Artificial Ephemerata
Location: 3405-A Cedar Street in Hyde Park Hours: Open for tours Sunday, Sept. 21, from noon until 2 p.m. After the 21st, the museum will be closed until after the holidays, as the curators prepare a new exhibit. Web site: www.mnae.org
* For more information, email mnae@mnae.org or call 533-9906
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