By T. B'Dee
T. B'Dee"It's eerie. It's arcane. It's magic," purports the Mystery Spot website.
"It's hysterical. It's remarkable. It's drug-induced," report visitors.
I'd say, it's a success.
It's The Mystery Spot!
It was a toss up. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, or the Mystery Spot? Hmmm. My sister and I are grown ups. We appreciate the wonders of human advancement. We relish the creative mind. We even can drive around the Bay Area together without getting in brawls over who's looking out whose window. I am in the Museum biz, she, an executive. "We are mature!" we announce together. "We are escapees from Small Town, Middle America!" we yell. "We have sensibilities above and beyond the ordinary! We have style! We know tacky when we see it!"
"We are going to the Mystery Spot!"
Well of course we are. Geez. Modern Art ain't my thing. I could paint a big red circle on a giant can of chickpeas. Anyone can do that, milling around telling people in black cashmere catsuits what the chickpea can art symbolizes. (The current Age of Hydroelectric Advancement, by the way.) The big secret is that those catsuit people wish they were at the Mystery Spot. Everyone does. It's part of the Mystery.
Near Santa Cruz, high on a mountain, sits one of many attractions (repulsions?) throughout the country that claim to be located atop a crashed UFO, a magnetic concentration of an alien Mineral, a swirling time vortex, or a latitude coincidentally aligned with the planet Urasucker. Any or all of these factors contribute to the unexplainable phenomena you encounter during the tour.
Our tour guide was a lively little fellow who was disconcertingly eager to get us up the mountain. After amassing the Tacky Attraction Guidelines' required 11 people, we were permitted to enter the Spot through a turnstyle sitting in the middle of a California redwood forest. Our group consisted of our overly happy tour guide, a mother with her four nasty little future convicts, an Indian family of tourists, a drunken ex-Mystery-Spot tour guide, and my sister and me. The tour basically involves two volunteers standing on either end of a board with a level on it, then switching places. Ok -- so the guy looked taller on one end and shorter on the other, but I'm thinking that that has nothing to do with the UFO beneath our feet. I suspect it has a lot to do with the fact that we are observing this standing on a 50 degree slope with a tilted house built in the background to further screw with the perspective. I could be wrong.
My sister and I, of course, were frequent volunteers. The future convicts were too busy tearing the place down with their teeth to volunteer, and the Indian family seemed to be frozen in place, rendered immobile by their awe. The father in their gullible little group would exclaim periodically, "It is remarkable. It looks as though you are taller, yet we KNOW you are actually shorter! Yet it looks as though you are taller. Remarkable!" Then the drunken-ex-tour-guide would say, "When I was giving tours here, we'd spinny the rope up down the tilty level board, then flobber the zooner." Every time the tour guide wowed us with another feat of upward rolling golf balls or counterclockwise swinging pendulums, the convicts would get in a fight and the Indian man would say it was "remarkable." The drunk would sputter something to the kids about how they should fling themselves off the roof of the cabin and fall up, with the mother clambering up and wrenching their wretched pudgy fingers off the gutters. Our little group had settled into a nice rhythm.
Throughout the tour we were told about the dozens, nee HUNDREDS, of scientists who have brought super high-tech measuring devices to the Spot (rulers and plumb bobs) and have left dumbfounded. It is unexplainable, they reportedly reported. The sober-currently-employed tour guide drops impressive names. "The bizarre scientific properties of the Mystery Spot have not ever not been refuted by the National Geographic Society, NASA, and the NAACP."
As we were leaving, my sister hurried off to the Mystery Outhouse, while I poked around the rose garden that sits in the front yard. The man tending the flowers was cutting blossoms, and gave me a pink rose the size of a Volkswagen. He claimed that the Mysterious Gravitational Pull, plus a bizarre green tea mixture causes his roses to grow to monstrous sizes. All I could think was how the kids back home at the Indiana 4-H Fair would be pea green with envy over the size of these flowers. Blue ribbon stuff, for sure.
With Mysteriously Large Rose, big sister, and postcards in hand, I left the Mystery Spot. 
T. B'DeeAs the website states, the Spot is eerie and arcane. Maybe not for the reasons they think, but well worth the six bucks anyway.
The adventurous folk at Roadside America warn that playing darts is prohibited at most M. Spots, so leave 'em at home, kids.
Ms. T. B'Dee is a noted exhibit designer and collector of salacious pewter pigs.
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