An astonished wax yokel stumbles upon a chunk of gold among the dusty plastic Ficus Benjamina leaves in a seldom traveled corner of the wax museum. Listen close and you might hear him yelp "garsh, it's gold!" Thousands of tenderfoots followed, though most of the profits went to merchants and brothels. (Early colloquial expressions for capitalists and whore houses, the latter of which I assume still thrive despite California's economic problems.) Leaving the effect this massive land rush had on Native Americans aside, one thing the gold rush gave us was the song " Oh My Darling, Clementine." Clementine was "the daughter of a miner" who dies in a drowning accident, but not to worry. The heart-broken prospector finds consolation with his beloved Clementine's LITTLE SISTER...a verse usually left out of songs books for children as it is of questionable morality. The oft censored eleventh verse follows:
How I missed her, how I missed her,
How I missed my Clementine,
Til I kissed her little sister,
And forgot my Clementine.
Clementine is also the name of a data-mining tool....so the search for lucrative nuggets continues.
(This is number 11 in the series "Horrors in Wax" which you can find spread among earlier posts like nuggets of gold)
Wax Museum Post Card c. 1965 Collection Jim Linderman
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