A trip down the rabbit hole
Overwhelming. The remark is heard often when visiting Altadena’s Bunny Museum, home to the world’s “largest collection of rabbit-related items,” according to Guinness World Records.
The 35,400 items — plush toys to matchbooks to costumes — multiply rapidly: Curators Candace Frazee and Steve Lubanski gift each other with a rabbitthemed offering each day.
The tradition began in 1993, when Lubanski gave his thengirlfriend a plush bunny for Valentine’s Day. The couple soon began exchanging daily rabbit-related gifts. They wed a year later; Lubanski showed up at the reception in a bunny suit.
“This museum is based on a love story,” said Frazee, who in 1998 launched the now nonprofit museum in the couple’s Pasadena home. The collection moved to Altadena last March.
Amid the scent of carrot cake candles, Frazee recently gave a tour of the 7,000-square-foot space. A blast of bunnies hits one upon entering the warren of 16 galleries; it’s like stumbling into an art installation designed to stupefy by shock immersion.
Displays burst with rabbitshaped and bunny-branded objects sorted into 111 categories and include cookie jars, lunch pails, slot machines, music boxes, chocolate, thimbles and characters (such as Bugs Bunny and Thumper). Rabbits that once perched on Rose Parade floats tower above the entrance.
In one room are three live rabbits that can be petted. A nearby case contains seven of the pair’s deceased pet rabbits, now stuffed, along with photos of their lives together.
“The sheer enormity of it — it’s both cute and a little unnerving,” said visitor Griffin Scanlan, 24, who lives in Koreatown. “There’s stuff that makes you think of your grandma’s house, and then you bump into something straight out of a nightmare.”
Scanlan refers to the Chamber of Hop Horrors. Slung over its door: a rabbit suit resembling flattened roadkill.
“This represents the abuse of bunnies throughout history,” Frazee said. The dim room is packed with leering rabbits. A seven-foot-tall tiki-style wooden hare (salvaged decor from a Long Beach restaurant) hangs flush with the ceiling, its gaped, teethstudded mouth ready to devour — perhaps that can nearby that’s packed with (gasp) rabbit meat.
Most curious is a tall clay rabbit holding a human foot — because, in truth, how lucky is a rabbit foot charm for the rabbit?
The couple (they’re vegetarians) often go “bunny hunting” at antique stores, festivals and yard sales. “We have about everything,” said Frazee, adjusting a rabbit-shaped earring. That includes such collectibles as White House Easter eggs.
The rabbit array may seem to tilt to kitsch, but the vast stockpile harbors insight and imparts a quirky sort of gravitas.
The space presents the perfect storm of how rabbits have been depicted throughout history: The critter’s uber-cute traits (those ears, that hop) so readily morphed into darker themes of barbarity as well as rampant sexuality (that horror chamber will soon include a door key to Chicago’s Playboy Club).
There are even a few antiquities: a rabbit-themed Egyptian amulet and a Roman brooch. Lending further insight, wall plaques detail rabbit-related topics: luck, magic, superstition, folklore, fertility and more.
All that is lent an outré edge by Frazee’s own designs, including a bunny-populated crucifixion scene and a Nativity crèche with a baby Jesus bunny.
Frazee is aware that many call her “the crazy bunny lady.” Fans counter that dig, saying that many Angelenos also called Simon Rodia crazy; they nearly destroyed his Watts Towers. Frazee and Lubanski share something valuable with the Italian immigrant: the power of a dream and the courage to carry it out.