The Museum was having an identity crisis. At a meeting to discuss their most recent branding initiative, the talk quickly came around to the question of just what The Museum was trying to be, anyway.

“Are we hip and cool?” Corey Feldman asked.

“No one says 'cool' anymore,” Princepessa said. “And I don't think that's really us. I think we're for families.”

“Oh God, don't make us the 'family museum,'” Marc Gadney said. Marc, interestingly, was the Family Programs Coordinator. “That's the kiss of death.”

“Are we quiet or loud?” Carlotta asked, tapping her pencil against her temple.

“But we could be for hip families: arty parents and their in-the-know kids…” Corey said. “Have we thought about selling distressed jeans in the gift shop?”

At this point, everyone turned to look at Nickey Valentine, the manager of the gift shop, who was quietly checking messages on her cell phone.

“We have lots of things from Japan,” Nickey said. “We have Japanese baseball jerseys for infants that retail for $120.”

“Good,” Corey said. “I like that. We need expensive things that are disposable. That's the world we live in and if we don't get with the times we'll be like… like the Stodmeier.”

The Stodmeier was the natural history museum across town, which had a few embalmed specimens in jars, a table of dinosaur fossils and one diorama of raccoons and possums. All the raccoons were missing their ears for some unknown reason - mice? disintegration? - and everything in the museum was covered with a thin layer of dust. There was no gift shop and no café - all the museum offered thirsty visitors was a drinking fountain that spewed iron-tinged water.

“Are we square or round?” Carlotta asked.

“Where are you getting these questions from?” Tovi Darrell, the museum's advertising coordinator, asked.

“I took a seminar called All the Flowers in the Field. The museum is our field and we need to know our flowers. What are our flowers? Do we have quiet flowers? Loud flowers? Round or square? Colorful?”

“Did you pay money to learn that?”

“It was staff development. The museum paid.”

“Well, moving on,” Corey said. “It's really hard to sell The Museum to corporations if I don't have a clear image in mind of who we are.”

“Maybe I should say something,” Jennifer Bauer said. She was the head of the branding initiative. “Our focus groups came up with the following words to describe the museum: large, free, colorful, traditional and clean.”

“What?” Corey asked.

“I told you - colorful! Our flowers are colorful,” Carlotta said.

“When you say free, are you referring to admission or a sense of freedom?” Corey asked.

“Well, these terms are open to definition. We didn't ask the focus groups to define them. We asked them to think about The Museum and free-associate.”

“And no one said 'art?'” Princepessa asked.

“That didn't come up, no,” Jennifer said. “Which, now that you mention it, is a little curious.”

The room fell into silence as the group pondered this. The longer the silence stretched the gloomier they felt. It was terrible to be large, free, colorful, traditional and clean. Clean? Shouldn't they be imaginative? Inspiring? Creative?

“Well,” Corey said. “Clean isn't the end of the world. There's a lot to be said for a clean restroom. I could sell that concept to some corporations… no flu germs here, that sort of thing.”

“I think colorful is great,” Carlotta said.

“It sounds like we're someone's great-aunt,” Tovi said. “You can't make good ads with those themes.”

“But this is what the focus groups came up with,” Jennifer said.

“And who were these people in the focus groups?” Tovi asked.

“Males aged 18 to 65 and a lot of moms,” Jennifer said.

“But that's not our total audience!” Marc said.

“No, but that's the audience we want,” Jennifer said.

“Everyone wants males aged 18 to 65 and moms. That's where all the disposable cash is.”

“And so what did they say?” Princepessa asked. “Did they say they'd visit the museum, based on the key words?”

“No, they said they wouldn't. But they liked the idea of us being here.”

“Being here?”

“They like that we exist,” Jennifer said. “For someday. For when they might visit. And for school kids, of course. School kids need to see art.”

And so it was that museum employees started referring to The Museum as The Someday Place, the place to go and wander around when there was absolutely nothing better to do, except there was always something to do, wasn't there? There were buttons to sew on coats. Groceries to be purchased. Friends with jet skis calling. Mountains to climb. Movies to rent. But it's comforting to know the museum is there, waiting and, best of all, its clean, free, large, traditional and colorful. Don't forget colorful.

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