Wax up Hizzoner and put him in a museum

I don’t know about you, but I detest long lines, or queues as they call them overseas. God love those hardy tourists standing in Washington’s unpredictable weather waiting to file into our hometown monuments and museums.

It would have to be something absolutely unavoidable, wildly funny or spectacularly serious — like waiting solemnly to pass a dignitary’s casket — for yours truly to entertain the thought of putting my tired old dogs to the waiting test.

Yet even I would be willing to stand in line to view Marion Barry immortalized in wax at Madame Tussaud’s Museum, slated to open this fall in the old Woodward & Lothrop building on F Street Northwest.

That would be a hoot and holler worth the wait.

The possibilities for the famed museum’s interactive activities with Hizzoner are endless. But dare I go there?

Just imagine: “MB” caught on tape with the “B” who set him up. Hizzoner standing in front of the federal courthouse on Pennsylvania Avenue, for, well, fill in the blank. Or “Anwar Amal,” dressed in his kente cloth finery, parting his adoring masses as he parcels out government goodies. The People’s Prodigal Prince at a redemption rally. The Mayor for Life being released yet again from another stay at Howard University Hospital. The D.C. Council member pounding on the dais about the criminal state of the city’s school system while he, ahem, skates around the Internal Revenue Service.

“Some of the most scandal-ridden [figures] are the best-loved,” said Janine DiGioacchino, general manager for Tussaud’s New York and Washington museums, when asked whether past deeds preclude a personality’s inclusion in the lineup.

A confession from my I-can’t-believe-I-did-that-file: My daughter and I stood for hours in a line that slowly snaked through the bowels of Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in London to touch the rubbery rich and famous. Yep, I have the tacky tourist pictures with Samuel L. Jackson, Whoopi Goldberg, Oprah, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King to prove it.

When museum officials announced plans to expand to the nation’s capital, they chose 49 figures, primarily those who represent the political leadership and nature of the city. Surely they would include Marion Barry.

“We absolutely try to represent the face of the place,” Ms. DiGioacchino said.

Most of those presidential figures, however, are nationally known. Movie stars and celebrities will be included undoubtedly to carry the $20 price of admission. Only a few have really local ties or are native Washingtonians, such as composer Duke Ellington and singer Marvin Gaye.

There is only one slot left, and “MB” gets my vote.

Surely, there may be others more deserving for their humanitarian contributions such as abolitionist Frederick Douglass, educators Mary Church Terrell and Mary McLeod Bethune, poets Paul Lawrence Dunbar and Sterling Brown, politicians Walter E. Washington and Eleanor Holmes Norton.

“Marion Barry’s name has come across so many times I’m embarrassed to say that we didn’t think of him earlier,” Ms. DiGioacchino said. Mr. Barry’s name has been on a short list of potential candidates for weeks since the opening was disclosed. The original selections were determined after a two-week survey was conducted mainly at Union Station, on the Mall and in front of Woodies.

“The most requested was George Washington, which surprised me. … Very few Hollywood celebrities were mentioned,” she said.

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