9 1111, Offbeat Fun Saul Rubin's new book about museums promises interesting travel fun. JILL DAVIDSON SKLAR Special to The Jewish News . II adignimmmummompe te THE GALLERY RESTAURANT Enjoy gracious dining amid a beautiful atmosphere of casual elegance BREAKFAST LUNCH DINNER OPEN 7 DAYS: MON.- SAT. 7 a.m.- 9:30 p.m. SUN. 8 aim- 9 p.m. 6638 Telegraph Road and Maple • Bloomfield Plaza • 248-851-0313 GREAT 1,11ZNI1 GREAT FOOD! GREAT LOW PRICES! gtlEfiD 311 5g1 1 0 (1/2 Orders Available) r With This Ad L • Liusit iCoivoti Per Couple • Expires W31/q8 0 • Dining Room • Carry-Out • Trays Enjoy GOURMET DINING By Former Chefs at - Giorgio's & Peter's K -":W Wes gt Side 61 7/24 1998 OPEN 7 DAYS 8 p.m.-9 p.m. 6393 Farmington Road, Just N. of Maple (Next to the Sports Club) • West Bloomfield (248) 626-3722 86 Detroit Jewish News Lincoln Shopping Center v) 10-1/2 Mile Road & Greenfield Oak Park • (248) 968-0022 0 Breakfast ■ Lunch ■ Dinner After-Theater ■ Kiddie Menu arry Finley has what polite folks would call an interest and others might label a bizarre obsession. In the basement of this 54-year-old Maryland bachelor — who by day is a graphic designer for the U.S. Defense Department — is a museum he has built with his own hands, a shrine to his infatuation. He has devoted his spare hours to pro- ducing a newsletter and Web site to the same topic. His interest? Finley is the cura- tor of the nation's only Museum of Menstruation. "I shouldn't be interested in this, really," Finley said. "But I'm 54 years old.. In 20 years I'll be dead, and my feeling was, what the hell. Just go ahead and do it." The museum is one of 50 odd and interesting public and private collections listed in Offbeat Museums: The Collections and Curators of America's Most Unusual Museums (Santa Monica Press; $17.95) by Saul Rubin. Rubin, a former newspaper reporter living in California, began researching the book by contacting the tourist information bureaus of every state in the United States. He added to his database by pumping friends, relatives and col- leagues for their ideas and contacting museum associations for tips on odd- ball sites. He was surprised at what he found. Almost 600 museums made the list — though none are in Michigan — while hundreds of other collections were cut because they were deemed tourist sites and not museums. Consider the Shrine of the Pine in Baldwin, Mich. A place dedicated to the white pine tree, it is seen more as a tourist destination and therefore was cut from the final take. "It was just a bunch of stuff about the tree, not a museum per se," Rubin said. But even whittling the list of those that made the definition down to the required 50 was no small task, explains Rubin. "We found there was really no defi- nition as to what was offbeat. There were lots of medical museums, fruit and vegetable museums, animal muse- urns. So it was hard to choose which was more exotic," he said, offering a potato museum and one dedicated to the banana as an example. "We would sit there and weigh which was more interesting, the banana museum or the potato museum. "We went with the banana." Rubin then began writing short informational stories about each muse- urn on the final list. Some he visited. For others, he contacted the curators and interviewed them at length. "We didn't have the travel budget to visit each one," he said. The result is a hilarious collection in itself, a compilation of bizarre char- acters and their strange collections woven together.with well written tales of interest ranainc, from the mild to obsession. It is also a guidebook for those who like to pair traveling to a different city with offbeat fun. "These are sort of underreported places," Rubin said. "It seems to strike a chord with a lot of people who are looking for unusual places to go and