Last night was Members Night Behind the Scenes at the museum. I think I’ve said this before but I’ll say it again. This is the best event we do all year. It’s the one time when all the collections and laboratories are open for guests to wander through, explore and see what really goes on at the museum.

I’ve been here for ten years… amazingly enough… and even I see something new every year. Our museum staff is a wonderful group of people, all of whom are passionately committed to the mission of the museum. They are also a fascinating mix.

Our building manager, Marlin, fixes leaking pipes, performs seek-and-destroy missions on fire ant nests and climbs the top of a 40-foot lift to change light bulbs in the museum’s Plaza by day. But by night he’s part of the popular band “Harvey and the Wallbangers,” and plays gigs all over the state.

Chris, the jovial head of the museum’s custodial staff, doubles each year as Santa Claus at the museum’s annual Holiday Happening event – patiently listening to the holiday wishes of dozens of kids and having his photo taken hundreds of times.

Our associate director is an amateur falconer who captured and trained his own hunting red-tailed hawk.

Our head of exhibits, Tom, has a passion for prehistoric technology and can show you how to build and throw your own boomerang or atl-atl.

Each year at the Members Night event I’m reminded of what an amazing group of people we have here, and how much each of them enjoys showing off the cool, amazing, fascinating and sometimes just plain bizarre things go on behind the scenes here.

This year I was tickled by the whiz-bang machine one of our building managers, Wes, concocted, using random pieces of equipment in his shop. With the help of various gears, a compressor, some lights and other bits, Wes created an invention that, when pumped up the correct pressure, spins both a wheel of fortune and a mop, (with a great WHOOSH and WHIRRRR), and the visitor wins a prize. How can you beat that?

It’s interesting to see our guests’ reactions to what they find, as well. There are people I’ve seen returning to this event year after year who nevertheless still spend a good three hours going from area to area, taking it all in. There are little girls who can’t get enough of the rows and rows of lizards and frogs in jars in the herpetology collection. There are seniors who will stand for half an hour and watch a curator painstakingly skin a rat and prepare the carcass for the Bug Room. And folks who come in from rural areas to pore over the trays of pot sherds and stone tool fragments in the archaeology collection, talking shop with Don Wyckoff, the archaeology curator, about paleolithics.

And, while I’m at it… lets hear it for the unpaid volunteers who sit patiently and show grade-schoolers how they chip dinosaur bones out of their rocky matrix, and the grad students who come in to teach guests how to name the four seasons in Cherokee.

One thing working at a natural history museum will do for you is to remind you on an almost daily basis to Stay Curious. The world is a big and utterly astounding place. Come on in… we’ll show you!