I love love LOVED nails that were all hanging down so you could push your hand through the bottom and see an exact outline of it. AND the nails didn’t poke you. As a child and actually to this day it is still an amazing thing and great memory. Also the house where your shadow froze on the wall ~ that was AWESOME!!  Best field trips ever. 

I fell in love with the exploratorium at the bubble festival in 1986.  I think the  polyhedral bubbles, shaped by the pressure of the surrounding cluster of bubbles, were my favorites.  

I was a lucky Explainer in the early 80’s. I idolized Darlene Librero and spent a great deal of my adult life emulating her mane of hair via braid in extensions. I don’t know what I would have done or where I would have ended up working if it had not been for this wonderful place. I had exposure to different people every day as well as all that science!!! My geekness had a place to call home and I was not alone anymore! I was in love with the process of learning and fortunate to have those Sunday morning learning sessions with Frank Oppenheimer who was a dear man. I was able to get my baby brother an honorary explainer badge and was the best sister ever because of it. The experience will be with me forever.  

23 years after my first visit to the Exploratorium, I still think of the “Bridge Lights” exhibit Every. Single. Time. I drive on the lower deck at night. And I will never forget the delicious weirdness of touching a cow eyeball. Thank you Exploratorium, for all the years of making science accessible and fun, and can’t wait to visit the new location.

Having left the Explo the previous day - well before the Loma Prieta went loco on us - I had spent the night at my mostly-unsullied apartment in the Castro thanking my lucky stars, but then wondering of my place of employment and my colleagues. Without any indication to do otherwise, I took my regular commute the next morning on the 24-Divisidero bus north to the Marina District. I don’t remember noticing much difference along the bus route, but my heart was heavy - and heaviest up until I could make out the Rotunda of the Palace of Fine Arts still standing! I honestly remember few of the details from that point until I got back inside the building: had the cordoning of the neighborhood started yet? I don’t think so, but I couldn’t swear to it.

I think staff living outside the City [or at least across a bridge] had been asked not to come in, so there was some sort of skeleton crew to deal with cleaning up the place for our eventual reopening. (I don’t remember there being much of a delay - people were hungry for an explanation of what happened….) I was drafted into communications relay: keeping contact between the outside world - via the single-line phone still working - and the few other staff [primarily Operations & Exhibits folks?] in/near the building on radio.

Life within the museum seemed quick to return to normal as far as its daily mission went, even if the neighborhood had taken it on the chin, and the folks in Watsonville weren’t a news blip just yet….