African Couple at the Wax Museum

From Senegal, Africa,

they

were in front of the

Wax Museum on

Hollywood Boulevard, and

looked a little lost

and forlorn, and we fell into

a conversation - and they said

they felt America to be a strange

and unreal place in some ways,

and I explained that they

were in Hollywood, and

that not all of America is like

Hollywood, which is

the capital of the surreal

in many ways - the intersection of

dream and reality -

and here at the wax museum

of all places this is even more so

here in this arcane

temple to movie-stars

mostly of the past

here represented

in life-size wax statues

not unlike Lenin lying in

his tomb still, enshrined,

honored, sanctified.

Instead of Lenin though

we have Marilyn and Chaplin

and Bogie and Darth Vader.

And here, where they are

standing, in the

courtyard,

- there's a life-size

panoply from "The Wizard of

Oz" with the four main characters

plus Toto in wax,

and there is a

Stallone-look-alike who stands

there always

in Rambo-guise,

clutching a faux-machine

gun, and smiling at

and posing with

the ever-flowing stream of

tourists.

Done