It was in a museum in Berlin, Germany. I was there with my parents and a group of students we were shepherding around Europe. I was in the room without my parents (they'd moved on to other exhibits). I saw the alarm lines leading down to the picture and knew it was alarmed, and yet some little gremlin in my brain said, "It'll be freaky to say you'd done it! You're just touching it. Do it!"
So I did.
And then the alarm went off and several burly guards came running in shrieking at me in German. They were red-faced and one of them even spat at me while he was yelling. I just stood there hoping against hope that my parents wouldn't come flailing in to scream at me too. In fact, I just knew it would happen. I waited for the other shoe to drop, completely expecting to have the handcuffs clamped onto my wrists and be hauled off to a German prison as the sixteen-year-old art thief they knew me to be.
And then they all left! They sloped off into the other room, where I heard them yacking about "the little girl in the other room who couldn't keep her mitts off the Rembrandts". I was so mortified! I WAS SIXTEEN FOR CRYIN' OUT LOUD! Couldn't they see I was clearly not a toddler? Then my logic cell kicked in and I stopped worrying about whether they thought I was old enough to drive and started being thankful that they weren't locking me in the klink.
My parents, amazingly, only heard the alarm. They hardly even payed it another thought. They didn't ever knew that I was the culprit. I told my friends and we all had a laugh. I suppose they could blackmail me with it, if they weren't my dear friends. Because everybody knows touching artwork is the gateway drug to bigger, more dangerous endeavors, like College Humanities 101...shudder.
