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| - Do you like mustard?
Think, before you answer.
IF you like it, riddle me this. How MUCH do you like mustard?
Do you like it, or do you love it?
If you love it, answer this one.
Do you love it so much that you would quit your job as Wisconsin Assistant Attorney General to start a mustard museum, in the middle of Mount Horeb, Wisconsin...population......6,168? If you're Barry Levenson, you do. And frankly, judging from the expression on his face as he rings people up and works the mustard circuit, it was the best decision he ever made. One glance at the catalogue and you can feel the love for this place and fun this guy is having with his life. Lucky man.
I have to say, as mustard museums go, this is the best one I have ever been to. Lest you think I am joking, this place has been featured on television many times. It's located, I kid you not, along the Trollway. Why it's called the Trollway we forgot to ask although we wondered aloud several times as we went in and out of town. However, Trollway it is, and down the Trollway is where the mustard lovers come, day after day, 365 days a year, from 10 to 5, to taste mustard, buy mustard, watch mustard videos in Mustardpiece Theatre, view a mustard collection of over 4700 mustards from around the world, mustard tins, mustard castors, mustard pots, medicinal mustard ephemera, and other related weirdness that you can't even believe exists. But it does.
A sense of humor prevails throughout. Words to the Wisconsin fight song have been amended to include mustard wisdom. Mayonnaise and ketchup-loathing propaganda abounds. T-shirts and bumper stickers celebrate the superiority of mustard, the walls are painted mustard yellow and the sheer spectacle of it all--and there is indeed spectacle--astounds. I dropped over $60 on mustards from around the world before I realized it, and when I came BACK so Peter could see it before our plane left on our last day in Madison, he dropped $20 more. You just can't stop. The fun and enthusiasm and, uh, zeal, get into you and before you know it, you're buying the molasses ginger mustard that placed third in 2007 at the Napa Valley Mustard Competition. Seriously.
I will be posting photos soon, as soon as they can be downloaded from the camera. Mustard rules.
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