I need a kid to hit.

Yesterday was College Day, which kindly let me avoid the $15 entry fee for the Franklin Istitute, the 180-year science educational facility near Logan Square. I hadn’t been there since I was a little tyke, ten or twelve, just about the age you really should be to go there.

Good God do I wish TFI was more Institute, even if it had its popular interactive portions, but I was all for seeing Identity, its newest exhibit. It was publicized as an exploration and explanation of the correlation between genetics, environment and our personal development, both physical and emotional. Pretty rad, man.

For its interactive end, TFI has a handful of computers with programs meant to find biases and tendancies in users. Heavy shit for a museum that offers free face-painting. Trouble is, I couldn’t so much as get my hands on a keyboard. For whatever reason, TFI has always drawn school groups full of post-adolescent, I’m-too-cool-for-everything-but-can’t-grow-more-than-a-fuzzy-moustache teenage boys and families featuring liberal, I-live-in-a-loft mothers who won’t discipline their children. Of course none of these museum-goers have interest in where they are but, rather, are just fulfilling responsibilities they don’t yet understand.

I’d find some portion of the exhibit I wanted to see more clearly, but I haven’t been cut in line by so many fifteen-year-old girls since I was a 5’4″ sixth grader going to my first school dance. I won’t mention the incessant buzz that swarms of young children inherently give off for fear of sounding older and grumpier still.

I did get to climb in TFI’s iconic giant heart but was forced to sound like somebody’s grandfather when I scolded an unattended eight-year-old who tried to peel off a sign marking the right ventricle.

All this from what the Institute that is meant to be an institution in Philadelphia. Couple it with its record breaking Tutankhamun exhibit, which a similarly overblown, over-crowded dismal showing, complete with a racially-charged demonstration led by Temple’s own Molefi Asante, and TFI is sure seemingly to lose all relevance in my mind. The Philadelphia Museum of Art is one of the premiere institutions in the world but is an after-thought behind a fictional boxer running up its steps. While Philly’s art and culture is supposed to be blowing up, to me, it looks like it remains largely amatuerish, in at least partial thanks to the goofy guy in the colorful suit in the photo below (Not Fast Eddie, but the ass clown white guy in the Tutankham garb). TFI: get it together and get control over your younger guests.