Last week, I took a trip to the Museum of Ice Cream with the nine- and 10-year-old siblings I babysit. We waited in line on the SoHo sidewalk, deciding which sneaker we’d hypothetically select from the Converse window display.
When we were finally granted entry with the rest of the afternoon group, we were held in a hallway decorated with bright pink wallpaper in a trellis pattern. Soon, the nine year old figured out that if you fixed your eyes on the far door and slowly raised them toward the ceiling, the wallpaper made the door look like it was floating above us on a distant slope. This optical illusion was nausea-inducing, and we repeated it many times.
Eventually, the floating door opened, and we were ushered into another holding chamber by a young woman named Minty, who hailed us as her “friends.”
“Friends,” said Minty. “Who’s excited to eat ice cream?”
Scattered “woohs” arose from our group of roughly thirty. About 60 percent of the tour was under four-foot-10.
“Let’s try that again,” said Minty. “Who’s excited to eat unlimited ice cream?” A dad in a University of Kentucky hat let out a resounding “Me!”
Before we could access the unlimited ice cream, Minty had to go over some rules. Most important was selecting our ice-cream names.
“Chocolate and Chestnut let you in. My name’s Minty,” said Minty. “My colleagues and I all go by ice-cream names here. I do not know their government names. Now it’s time for you to pick your ice-cream names.”
On this ominous note, Minty passed around name tags and pink pens. The 10 year old chose Scream Now!, a nod to Taylor Swift’s third studio album but also an appropriate reaction to entering the Museum of Ice Cream. (Soon we’d learn that many children in our group took “Scream Now!” to heart.)
The nine year old called himself Cookies and Cream, and I chose Hot Fudge, then worried it sounded too provocative. There wasn’t time to change identities, though –– Minty had opened another door, and the group was swiftly moving through it.
“When you pass through this door,” Minty intoned, “we can’t say no to you. You can eat as much ice cream as you want, or as much as your grown-ups allow.”
Passing by in a daze, I briefly wondered who my grown-up was, before remembering my charges.
The fact of my age was reinforced by the eerie familiarity of the museum. The tour conducts you through a series of rooms –– some cavernous, some crawl spaces –– outfitted in shades of millennial pink and pale yellow. Each fits an “aesthetic” that would have killed in 2015 –– whimsical hits of neon and color-blocking across a series of Instagram backdrops.
We moved from room to room, driven forward by the promise of more ice cream. A staircase lit in neon pink took us to a gallery of pastel pink and yellow bananas hanging from threads, then to an ice cream–themed New York City Subway car with a galactic purple star-scape outside its windows. In almost every room, alarmingly good-natured employees offered a new confection: an ice-cream bagel sandwich, an icy popsicle, a fluffy mound of cotton candy. Of course, there was plenty of normal soft serve, dispensed in thick, mesmerizing swirls.
For the most part, the “museum” element seemed to be an afterthought. The occasional wall plaque detailed some banal piece of ice cream’s origins and was duly ignored. It was much more fun to swat through the banana gallows or gallop down a corridor of neon arches.
One piece of signage did catch my eye in a front parlor, where I was relieved to find windows overlooking the street –– a brief respite from the ice-cream hedge maze. Seemingly unrelated to the display of unusual flavors and the cart of pineapple soft serve, the wall read in bold text: THE ONLY LIFE WORTH LIVING IS THE ONE YOU IMAGINED.
This sentiment stopped me in my tracks –– what a bewildering message to encounter halfway through the Museum of Ice Cream. Disguised in its palatable pink font, the philosophy seemed nonetheless controversial. Hadn’t I heard so many times that plans change, that sometimes life’s best outcomes take you far from the path you dreamed of?
I became wary of a broader wish-fulfillment fantasy playing out in the museum. From what I’d seen, the life of one’s imagination involved unlimited quantities of ice cream and eternally Instagrammable scenery –– something like the life you’d imagine as an 11 year old.
We trudged onward. The 10 year old bravely tackled an indoor slide –– Manhattan’s largest –– while the nine year old and I took the elevator. We were all relieved to be reunited in the basement. The slide was a dark metal tube; its inner walls were lined with people’s ice-cream name tags, she reported.
The basement held an indoor playground with swings, a climbing structure, and a ball pit.
This was nothing compared to the tour’s pièce de résistance, the sprinkle swimming pool, which awaited us in the next room. Children slid, rolled, and leapt into the vat of plastic pink and red sprinkles, each the size and shape of a small baton.
My eyes watered as I fought to keep track of my charges in the vivid morass.
The week prior, I’d heard a woman next to me on the Subway soberly tell her friend, “All it takes is one kid puking in the ball pit. One kid.”
I watched children wade through the sprinkles. I watched them pelt each other with sprinkles. I watched them pretend to do the breaststroke in the sprinkles.
In a smaller pool off to the side, an adult couple asked me to take a photo of them belly up in the sprinkles. It was only later that I realized the smaller sprinkle pool was labeled with another sign: ADULT ONLY.
I’d been given permission to buy my charges a final scoop of ice cream in the museum gift shop, where the rules of the real world returned –– credit cards swiped, New York City prices justified. The kids patiently waited their turn as another adult couple (they’d packed on PDA in the grown-up sprinkle pool) ordered an ice-cream cocktail.
When Chestnut finally brought out the scoops, she waved away the credit card I proffered. “No, no. It’s on me, friend.”
The nine year old was excited to eat some of his ice cream indoors, then save the rest for the short walk to the Subway. But like a child in a fable or a Mrs. Piggle Wiggle tale, he eventually made his way to the trash can. “I don’t want the rest of this,” he said. “Let’s go home.”
