This month I’ve been participating in the awesome Tiffany Han‘s celebration of fun program, More Shenanigans, Please. Friday’s suggestion was proposed by Guest Shenanigan-ator Erin Loechner of Design for Mankind, Design for Minikind, and Executive Editor of Clementine Daily. Erin has been one of my favorite people on the internet for a while now (and she’s awesome in real life too), so I was happy to receive a shenanigan from her. Especially when I found out that it meant doing something that had been on my list of things to do and write about here for about a year.
Read one of your favorite childhood stories.
There were two books that I remember reading over and over again that shared a similar theme. The first one was A Room for Cathy by Catherine Wooley. This book was published in 1956 and it was part of the lending library in my sixth grade classroom. I think I had it for most of the year, constantly checking it out and rereading it. This is the book that I chose to read last Friday afternoon.
Cathy was obsessed with having her own bedroom. She wanted a space that was completely hers to decorate exactly the way she wanted and use as a private retreat for playing dress up, reading, and having conversations with her friends without her younger sister and brother intruding. I remember loving the parts where Cathy was planning the design of her room – choosing yellow paint to give it a sunny feel, deciding how she wanted her furniture arranged, and finding the right place to store her prized “girly” stuff like dress up dresses and a powder compact.
When I was younger I LOVED rearranging the furniture in my bedroom. I loved decorating it exactly the way I wanted. I was lucky to have my own room and plenty of space to live out adventures with my Charlie’s Angels and Cher dolls. When I was a little older I used to plan the houses I would have. I would lug out my late uncle’s huge interior design books and look through them. I don’t think I ever read any of the text – they seemed pretty dull at the time – but I liked looking at the photos. I would take out a sheet of paper and sketch out boxes that represented the rooms of my fictional home. I used one of those plastic stencil tools with different sized circles and squares to lay out the furniture. When I was in high school I decided to add my own flair by covering my ceiling with shopping bags, hanging empty Tab cans up with string, and slapping up Esprit ads on my walls. It’s weird because I had totally forgotten about doing all of this stuff until I had been blogging about design-related topics for a year or two. The interest was there even when I was 10 years old. That was surprising to realize.
Another book that was often in my possession even though it belonged to our city library was The Rise and Fall of a Teen-age Wacko by Mary Anderson. The main character Laura lived in a NYC apartment with her writer and illustrator parents and her younger sister who was obsessed with her stuffed baboon, writing, and art. Laura loved the city, shopping at Bloomingdales, and trying out various beauty products on her sixteen-year-old skin. Like Cathy, she also craved her privacy. When her parents took her to the “boring” Catskills for the summer she convinced them to allow her to return to NY on her own for a couple of weeks. During that time she ended up buying a “dream dress” at an auction and literally stumbling into a role as an extra in a Woody Allen movie. I think this book marks the beginning of my teenage dream of city living, and I loved the idea that her parents and sister were creatives. I also wanted to go to Serendipity and eat frozen hot chocolate.
NYLON Magazine introduced me to an awesome video series called The Do Not Enter Diaries. it tells the stories of teens through their bedrooms. Check out their mission statement. Teen Melanie would have definitely wanted to participate in this project Here’s a recent Correspondent’s Corner entry by Lua F. I love it.
What books or childhood/teenagehood activities or passions shaped the person you are now? How much of the early version of you is still present in how you spend your time today?
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