As we started the drive back home, we passed a sign on the highway for the Guinness World Records Museum, and my kids said they wanted to go. It was the first thing they had wanted the whole trip that I could conceivably let them have, so even though we were already over our budget for the trip, I said okay, let’s check it out, and pulled off the highway.
But the museum was a disaster, too. The lines were long, and nothing impressed my kids. Not the World’s Largest Watermelon, not the World’s Hairiest Woman, not the World’s Fastest Toilet. Not the fingernails guy. Nothing.
I was about to call it a day when I saw a small hand-drawn sign above a curtain in a corner:
WORLD’S BIGGEST RIP-OFF. $100 PER PERSON.
I waved my wife over.
“No, no. Absolutely not.” She said tickets to the museum had already taken us way over budget for the trip, and we weren’t paying a hundred dollars a person for something else now, especially something that the sign said right there was a ripoff. “No, no, no. No way.”
Something about it really intrigued me, though. I asked the guy in front of the door, who wasn’t wearing official museum gear—just black pants and a black T-shirt—if there was at least a children’s rate.
“One hundred dollars a person. No discounts. No refunds. Cash only.”
This only made me more intrigued. What the hell was in there? I had to know. But the more interested I got, the more skeptical my wife became. “You know what?” she said. “Fine. Just go in yourself and take a look if you need to know what’s in there so bad. We’ll wait.” But this was a family vacation, I said. Whatever I was about to experience, I wanted to experience with my family.
I told my wife to wait with the kids and I ran out to an ATM down the block. It only let me withdraw up to a $200 limit, so then I ran back and begged my wife to let me borrow her card and tell me her PIN so I could withdraw two hundred dollars more.
At this point, my wife was understandably starting to lose her cool a bit. She said I was acting like a fool and a sucker and some other harsher things that I’d rather not make the effort to remember right now. I’m not going to lie: it was a tense moment in our marriage. Finally, she told me that I was no longer the type of person she could trust with her ATM password, but that if it was this important to me, I could wait in the museum with the kids while she went across the street herself to withdraw two hundred dollars from her card, but that she needed me to know she would “never, ever forget what happened today.” I said yes, thank you, it was indeed this important to me.
Fortunately, as I said, this story has a happy ending. Inside the secret room was a mind-blowingly elaborate, incredibly well-executed interactive holographic exhibit on the Bernie Madoff hedge fund scam of 2009. It was beyond amazing—just jaw-droppingly intricate and detailed and smart and interesting and well designed. The holograms actually interacted with you, putting you in the mindset of the people who got ripped off, and very compellingly conveyed the scope of the scam he pulled—did you know the numbers involved? Staggering.
Anyway, all of us were absolutely fascinated. And it kicked off a whole bunch of questions, too. I mean, really, how often do kids ask you questions about how stocks work, how bonds work, what’s a manageable risk for an investment, what our investment values are—stuff like that? And it was actually really good for me and my wife, too, to get on the same page. (Especially after what we had gone through that day.)
So anyway: they learned, we learned, we connected, we had fun, and it was a unique experience that we all got to share together and that stayed with all of us. To this day, two years later, I still catch the kids looking over my shoulder while I check the financial news online. And whenever we talk about the trip, which is often, everyone always smiles, and someone inevitably does an imitation of the funny hologram of Bernie that greeted us on the way in, making a really funny, evil-smirky face. “Inveeessst with meeeeee!”
You thought my wife was going to be right on this one, didn’t you? Everybody always does when I start to tell them this story. That’s okay. She’s usually the one who’s right about this kind of thing. About everything, actually—I married well. But this time, luckily, I was the one who was right.
The Walk to School on the Day After Labor Day
I was sad that summer was over.
But I was happy that it was over for my enemies, too.
Kate Moss
When I was sixteen, I would come home from school every day and stare at pictures of Kate Moss for hours.
Then one day, on a school trip to New York, I saw Kate Moss. I went up to her and pulled her coat.
“Are you Kate Moss?” I said.
“Of course,” she said.
“How did you become Kate Moss?”
She moved her face close to mine and smiled and whispered.
“Every day,” she said, “when I came home from school, I would stare at pictures of Kate Moss for hours, until one day, I was Kate Moss.”
“How many hours?”
“Four.”
When I went back home, I tried staring at photos of Kate Moss for four hours a day.
Now I’m Kate Moss.
Welcome to Camp Fantastic for Gifted Teens