Penn Museum's '40 Winks With the Sphinx'

In the 2006 film Night at the Museum, a newly recruited night security guard at New York's Museum of Natural History discovers that an ancient curse causes the animals and exhibits on display to come to life and wreak havoc. It's an irresistible concept that doesn't necessarily require a trip to the movies, as some brilliant museum marketers have discovered.

As it happens, the Museum of Natural History began sponsoring its own overnight slumber parties shortly after the film came out. As it further happens, my six-year-old twin grandchildren live just two blocks from that museum; they've been running around its Whale Room and stuffed polar bears since they were about four. They'd love nothing more than to spend a night there. The only problem is: The minimum age for sleeping over is eight.

So they were faced with a choice: Either wait until 2012 to send a night at a legendary museum, or venture to a gutsier city like Philadelphia, whose museums (two of them, anyway) actually welcome overnight guests as young as six years old.

So it was that on a recent Friday night my grandson Eddie Yellin and I, sleeping bags and toothbrushes in tow, checked in to the Penn Museum for "40 Winks With the Sphinx," a once-a-month 15-hour program of games, crafts, scavenger hunts, flashlight tours, snacks and, yes, camping out beneath the world's third largest Egyptian Sphinx.

My qualms

I did so with some trepidation because, after all, Eddie's only six and a half. Would he be overwhelmed by the breadth of the place? Would he be permanently traumatized by the museum's sphinxes, mummies, Buddhas and giant ancient fierce dog sculptures? Would he get lost? Would the older kids (the top age is 12) pull a Lord of the Flies number on him?

I needn't have worried. Eddie's a precocious kid to begin with, and so were a number of other six-year-olds with whom he explored the museum that night. For small kids (not to mention adults like me) to have the run of such a huge and famous museum for such an extended period of time was a truly unique and memorable experience.

Among other things, in the course of his Night at the Museum Eddie touched a 1,500-year-old mummy whose teeth are still intact (because, we were told, ancient Egyptians didn't consume as much sugar as we do), mastered "katah," a bead game played by primitive peoples, made a mosaic tile with a lower-case letter "e," and wrote his name in Egyptian hieroglyphs.

"'Guys, guess what?'

Far from being intimidated, Eddie figured out the museum's layout almost immediately, and thereafter he and his newfound friends often roamed the empty museum by themselves, without adults. When the group reassembled for the flashlight tour at 10 p.m. in the Rainey Auditorium, Eddie leaped on the stage to regale the 60 or so participants with his own invented story about a mummy "that kills all the grownups for the whole rest of the year."

Prior to the flashlight tour, we were warned that we might encounter a mummy along the way. When the guide asked if anyone had questions, Eddie raised his hand: "Will the mummy want to play with us in the middle of the night when we're sleeping?" he asked. (He was assured that the mummy wouldn't bother kids who were asleep.) In general Eddie's most frequently repeated comments were "Awesome!" and "Guys, guys"“ guess what?"

Compared to the Four Seasons…

This priceless experience costs $50 per person ($45 for museum members)— a stiff fee for a family, but still a good deal less than you'd pay for a room at the Four Seasons. And the price includes a year's free admission to the museum as well as a surprisingly tasty hot buffet breakfast (scrambled eggs, French toast with bananas, bagels, doughnuts, yogurt, cereal, chocolate crumb cake, etc.).

"Forty Winks" is held once a month, usually on a Friday. (The Academy of Natural Sciences offers a similar "Overnight Safari.") The group is limited to 100 participants, so everyone gets pretty chummy by morning.

If you try it, one caveat: It was probably the worst night's sleep I've had in a long time— two hours, at most. That floor is hard! So bring something soft. My sleeping bag and thin rubber pad didn't suffice, although Eddie slept just fine.

Eddie is eager to return and introduce his twin sister to this museum that he now knows like the back of his hand. For at least the next year, that will require them to leave the overprotective streets of New York and head for free-wheeling Philadelphia.♦


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