Outside of Getty’s Burg, Some Unique Options

Getty, Getty, Getty! Blah, blah, blah!

With all the giddy hoopla, you’d think that new art palace opening in Brentwood this month was the only museum in America.

Au contraire, as the hoity-toits might say.

Even as the world’s media oooh and ahh themselves into artsy conniptions over Southern California’s newest landmark, visitors to Marvin Johnson’s Gourd Museum in Fuquay-Varina, N.C., will be enjoying the quiet satisfaction of admiring a spherical gourd painted to look like the world.

Not to mention a sculpture of a Ferris wheel with gourd gondolas.

At the Museum of Questionable Medical Devices in Minneapolis, patrons may peruse a collection that includes everything from metal-domed “psychograph” machines to the Electric Thermitis Dilator--also known as the prostate warmer. One end of this contraption plugs into a 25-watt bulb and the other, a metal prod . . . well, enough about that.

The point is that “Offbeat Museums: The Collections and Curators of America’s Most Unusual Museums” by Saul Rubin (Santa Monica Press, 237 pages, $17.95) offers an abundance of alternatives to predictable places like the Getty.

Many, unfortunately, will require travel: The Barney Smith Toilet Seat Art Museum in San Antonio, for instance, or the Kansas Barbed Wire Museum in La Crosse, Kan.; the Hamburger Hall of Fame in Seymour, Wis., and Leila’s Hair Museum in Independence, Mo.

But readers in Southern California will find many showcases conveniently close to home.

The Exotic World Burlesque Hall of Fame, in San Bernardino County’s Helendale, for example, displays “costumes from famous strippers of long ago.” The Mini Cake Museum, in Pasadena, features one cake frosted to resemble Australia’s Great Barrier Reef and another topped with an air-brushed portrait of Barbra Streisand.

Nearby in Altadena, the International Banana Club and Museum offers more than 17,000 banana artifacts. “The Banana,” Rubin reports, “is the No. 1 selling fruit in the world, so a tribute to it seems fitting.” He quotes the museum’s curator on the fruit’s appeal: “It doesn’t squirt, squeak or leak.”

Can we say the same for the Getty?