Pompey's Playground

Though I know very little about museum displays, I once interviewed a museum director about an upcoming show at Sioux Falls' Old Courthouse Museum. Though she was still a youngun herself, only a recent graduate and only a few displays under her belt, she explained-me the care that goes into not only preserving items in a museum but also in thinking about the best way they should be displayed much in the same way a copy editor figures how to display the stories on the frontpage of the newspaper. It's a science as much as an art. I know some thought is given to such things in Egypt, but I think the country finds itself overwhelmed in antiquities that it just doesn't know what to do with it all. You can walk and stub your toe on a granite sphinx or you can turn the corner in the Egyptian Museum of Art in Cairo and find yourself staring at a pile of dust-covered statues.

In Alexandria, as we were climbing the hill to the catacombs, we came across Pompey's Pillar, an 82-foot Roman column spiking out of the earth. We diligently paid the 5 pounds (about a dollar) to get in. Hardly anyone was there save for a few Egyptian kids running about and I soon realized these were probably the kids of one of the workers, and Pompey's Pillar to us was in fact Pompey's Playground to them.