Much Ado About Easy-Bake Ovens

EXTRA! EXTRA! Stupid Children get fingers caught in Easy-Bake Ovens! "Roasted Child-Digits" only 185 calories each!

So read the papers and blared the radio a couple months ago ... Dumb kids, dumb parents, dumb recall, dumb world... However, this silliness did bring up multiple memories and tales-to-tell of my own adventures with MY Easy-Bake Oven. And being a good little queer boy I didn't burn MY fingers. I made tasty things to eat!

If I recall correctly I got my Easy-Bake Oven for Christmas when I was about six or seven. I really liked it - mainly because it worked! You could actually "bake" cakes and stuff in it. The oven used two light bulbs, one in the top and one in the bottom, surrounded by a highly-reflective aluminum shell. You mixed the cake mixes in little bowls, greased up the little pan, and slid it into the oven where it baked for a time. When it was ready you pushed the cooked cake out the other side of the oven, and a baker you were!

The packaging shown above looks much as I remember MY oven - the late 1960s "Flower Power" decals included. I also recall thinking that the little girl featured on the box wasn't too bright. Look at her little cakes. You are SUPPOSED to bake TWO layers of cake and frost them together with a layer of icing in the middle! It's boring to simply frost a single layer!

My two big memories about my Easy-Bake Oven involved my Dad. He was all for it - indeed he was the baker in the family. When I made my first cake I was distressed that when I pushed it out the far side of the oven a sharp blade (inside the oven) hacked off the top of the cake and made a very flat shaved-off cake layer. This didn't seem right and wasted some very edible cake. My Dad agreed, so out came the tools, he opened up the oven and removed the "cake-shaver." Voila! Unshaved cakes.

The Easy-Bake Oven also gave my Dad an opportunity to give me a lecture on the evils of Capitalism. The oven was a really good toy, well-made, and fairly priced. But the company really gouged you on the cake mixes and frosting packets. And I was baking a LOT of little cakes!

So Dad explained all this stuff about monopolies, and evil-marketing strategies designed to take advantage of little boys, and he took me to the grocery store where we purchased inexpensive JIFFY cake mixes, frosting mix, corn-bread mix, and such. We found a little clear plastic container and carefully measured a "real" Easy-Bake mix, and using tape and a marker, made an Easy-Bake measuring cup so I could easily use the "real" cake mixes in my oven. These real mixes were even better than the expensive "Easy-Bake" ones. There were more flavors! I could make things like corn-bread! And this made the oven seem more "legit."

We chose the JIFFY mixes because they were the only mixes that already had the eggs and stuff in them. Thus they were ADD WATER ONLY just like the Easy-Bake mixes.

Toys wear out and I have no idea what became of my Easy-Bake Oven. But when I was nine, we traveled to Bridgeport, Texas because my grandfather was very ill. My Dad took care of me and my sister in the motel room while Mom was at the hospital all day. One afternoon, while walking the main street of Bridgeport, we wandered into a "five-and-dime" store and I spotted a treasure I had to have!

A SUZY HOMEMAKER OVEN!!!

Suzy's oven also worked via light-bulb, but it was bigger and looked and functioned more like a "real" oven. You placed your food in the oven through the hinged oven-door on the front of the oven.

Well, Dad sensibly saw this as a way to keep me occupied and amused during those long days in the motel room and he got it for me. This oven came with an assortment of "cake mixes," too, but it was suggested somewhere that one could also make pie! So when we went to the grocery store for the old reliable JIFFY mixes we got some JIFFY pie-crust and a jar of jam and I became the "Boy Baker of Bridgeport" for a time.

So here I sit thirty-five years later, I love to cook and I bake pies from scratch.

But the world has changed. Think of the fun to be recalled in 2043 when some forty-something brat will be writing mini-essays on how when he/she was ten, he/she stuck their fingers in their toy-oven, burnt them to shreds, sued Easy-Bake for Billions, and they are forever doomed to a life of store-bought baked goods.

Bon appetit, David

Click! Click! Click!

I watched a lot of television when I was a kid. In addition to the usual suspects like The Brady Bunch, Gilligan's Island, and Bewitched, I was especially drawn to That Girl starring Marlo Thomas.

This may have been partly due to the story-line echoing my Mom's life before she married my Dad and I was born. That Girl ran on ABC from 1966 to 1971. It was the story of Ann Marie, a young woman who has moved to New York City to be an actress. In the mid-1940s my Mom had moved to New York for the same reason. So Mom could tell me stories about living in New York, eating at the Automat, the subway, Central Park, Summer stock, dating, roommates, having pre-marital sex, all the things one does when one runs away to New York City to be in the theatre. Indeed, I did much the same stuff when I went to New York to do theatre in the late 1980s.

That Girl also shot a lot of location footage in NYC, so each episode was story-fodder for Mom. In the last couple years That Girl has finally been coming out on DVD. And since I had pretty much not seen it since the mid 1970s, I have been buying and rewatching it. It holds up quite well, the writing isn't bad, the cinematography is especially good, and the production and costume design is great! It truly is a little time capsule of fashion and fun circa late 1960s.

On rewatching the series I encountered a two part episode called "It's a Mod Mod World!" in which Ann gets a job as a fashion model after being discovered eating that old actor's treat, ketchup-and-hot-water soup, at the Automat. I had not particularly remembered this episode until I resaw it. But it immediately brought back a torrent of nostalgic glee. Because back in the summer of 1970 it set my little mind to working and got me all fired up to join the world of fashion. Mod Squad, move over! I got out my Instamatic camera, corralled my three-year-old sister, and decided that I simply MUST do a fashion shoot!

Now, of course I had much empathy with Marlo Thomas and her character Anne Marie. And perhaps deep down I wanted to be an actress, model, fashion-plate. Perhaps I still do! Yet this being 1970, me being seven years old, and my not being able to both click the camera and do drag at the same time—I enlisted my little sister.

I set up my photo-shoot in front of the sliding glass doors that led from the living room to the dining room (they looked sort of like store windows to me). I asked my sister to go put on her best dress, or as my grandmother called it, her "Sunday-go-to-meeting" clothes. And we were ready. I demonstrated the classy poses Marlo Thomas had used. A look of coy surprise! Click! Hands up and out so as not to cover the dress! Click! A big smile! Click! Sell it, sister, sell it! Click!

And then one has to take the film to the Skaggs Drugstore to be developed and wait and wait and wait. But eventually they were developed and I was the Fashionista of the Second Grade. No digital, no Polaroid, just a Kodak Instamatic, a box of blue flash-cubes, my three-year-old sister, and me.

Copyright © 2007 D. H. Maxine. All rights reserved.

Food for Thought

These days I do not make a habit of giving thanks to imaginary deities.

When I was four my grandmother came to live with us and she always said "Grace" before eating. This was something my parents did not do. My grandmother explained it as thanking God for the food we had been given.
I pondered this for a time.

When we moved to Albuquerque when I was three-and-a-half we had very little money. Mom was starting on her Masters degree at the University of New Mexico. Dad didn't have a job yet since the move, and we were dirt poor. The state did not give out Food Stamps to the hungry back in the mid-'60s. They gave people food. We went down to the "food place" and they stocked us up.

This was not a "food-bank" as one might know them today. It was all food packaged by the State or Feds. So no name-brand foods, and no processed "junk food" either.

On that Fall day in 1966 the state of New Mexico gave us something like the following:

10 pounds of flour
5 pounds of sugar
10 pounds of Pinto Beans
5 pounds of lard
4 cans of some meat-product called "Bulgar"
A large container of Peanut Butter

This was supposed to last us a month. Next month we'd get another batch of the same. One should remember that this was Albuquerque and the vast majority of the poor were Hispanic. Also, most people still cooked at home. Pinto beans were a nutritious staple. The flour and lard were meant for making tortillas.

But what was our family going to do with all this flour, sugar, lard, etc that we had? My dad learned to bake!

All of a sudden the house was filled with the smell of yeast and baking bread. We now ate fresh homemade bread every day. We had Cinnamon Rolls. Dad even came up with a use for all the lard. He made doughnuts! There is nothing on earth quite so wonderful as homemade, lard-fried doughnuts!

Dad eventually got a job with the Microbiology Lab at the County Medical Center. But he baked bread and rolls and cookies for the rest of his life. Later that year we moved into a bigger house and my grandmother came to live with us. This helped with the rent, and my parents decideded to adopt a little sister for me.

So, as I mentioned above, my grandmother had explained "Grace" as thanking God for the food we had been given. Ever a smart little boy, I finally asked, "If we thank god for the food we have, do we blame him when there isn't any food?"

My dear grandmother had no answer for that.

Today I am thankful to loving parents (now gone), a wonderful boyfriend, a slightly-deaf Boston Terrier, and the 1960s government of the State of New Mexico who gave us so much flour and sugar and shortening that my dad had to learn to bake bread. Now I do the baking of bread.

My Father, who art in the kitchen ...

David

When you talk about this blog later, and you will - be kind.
Copyright 2007 D. H. Maxine.

Christmas Memories

Photo from Christmas 1964 - Arlington, Texas - Two years old

I've been thinking a lot about my childhood Christmas memories. Fearing they will one day fade I started writing down details I remember or have knowledge of, from my first when I was six days old, on up to last year's Holiday. I have some memories of Christmas 1965 when I had just turned three. And quite good memories of Christmas 1966 when I was four. The earlier Christmases are reconstructed from notes in my baby book, our home movies, and family anecdotes. Happy Holidays!

1962 - Six days old

This was probably an odd Christmas. Of course I don't remember any of it. I'm not even sure whether I was at home or in the hospital on this first Christmas. My mom had had a C-Section but I suspect we were home by Christmas. I'm sure she would have wanted out of the hospital as quickly as possible. At this time my parents lived with my grandmother in Arlington, Texas. My grandmother had a heart attack the day I was born. No doubt it was a combination of stress, subconscious jealousy, and needing attention from my mom. Sigh...

1963 - One year old

The next year I had just turned one. We were still living in Arlington with my grandmother and great grandmother. For Christmas that year I got a red wagon, a marvelous pull-toy called the Happy Hippo, a set of blocks, and a corduroy suit. I remember all these toys well. I had them for several years afterward.

1964 - Two years old

Now we are two. Same living situation as before. This year I got a Santa's Work Bench, a toy train, a toy mail box, and a little table and chairs. It is this Christmas morning featured in the photo at the top of this blog-post. We also have some great color home movies of this Christmas but alas they aren't digitized yet.

1965 - Three years old

Three years old and all is much the same. But it would be our last year in this house. My mom was about to graduate with her BA from University of Texas at Arlington and she was looking for Grad schools.

This year I got a bright red toy car that I could ride in. It had a push stick. So my Dad would push me down the sidewalk or street with something that looked like a pool cue. This little red car was made by Marx Toy Company. My parents noted with glee that I had a little RED car made by MARX. Perhaps to balance my early introduction to leftist politics I was also given a toy gas pump, and a cash register. My parents also surprised me with a Christmas puppy. When asked what I wanted to call the puppy I said, "Nuffin ..." So Nuffin became the puppy's name.

1966 - Four years old

This is the first Christmas I remember in vivid detail. In the Summer of 1966 we had moved from Arlington, Texas to Albuquerque, New Mexico so my mom could get her Masters degree at the University of New Mexico.

A couple months before we moved Nuffin disappeared. My mom accused my Dad of "getting rid of Nuffin" to make it easier to move. Years later he admitted he had. I knew nothing of this at the time of course. Just before the move my great-grandmother passed away at the age of 92. My grandmother stayed in Texas, taking an apartment in Fort Worth. And we traveled back to Texas to spend the holidays with my grandmother.

We drove back to Texas in our white Corvair van: Mom, Dad, me, and our new pet basset hound, Zeb. I remember we drove straight through - which is a long drive. We put my mattress from home in the back of the van for me to play on and for me to sleep on once we got to Texas. In the middle of the night driving Zeb the Basset had a very smelly accident in the back of the van. We stopped, my dad cussed, and the van got cleaned out. We stayed at my grandmother's new apartment. I think she slept on the couch in the front room and my parents took her bed, and I slept on my little mattress we had brought with us.

I remember being very happy we were going to see my grandmother; and remember, too, that it seemed strange to see her in a new apartment. The apartment was a fairly big one-bedroom. My Grandmother was a pianist and she still taught at this time so she needed room for two pianos. She had downsized to one baby grand and one console.

There was also a neighbor lady who had a boston-terrier named Inky which I absolutely adored! I was also fascinated with my grandmother's red finger nail polish. I was thrilled when she painted mine red, too! Such a nice and obliging grandmother!

I don't remember much about the tree that year, but I'm sure we had one. I do remember my presents!

Model Tramway Car

This was a toy tramway car that I suspect my parents fot at the Sandia Mountain Tramway just out side of Albuquerque. We had gone to the Crest of the Mountain right after we moved and I had wanted to ride the Tram but it was too expensive. So I think this is why I got the toy one. I wanted to play with it and my Dad cleverly rigged it to run between two of the legs on the grand piano.

Creepy Crawlers

This was a very popular toy, probably considered too dangerous for today's kids. It came with a little heating plate and metal molds of various insects. You filled the moulds with liquid rubber which you then "baked"on the little hotplate. When the rubber became cooked and opaque you plunged the metal into cold water and peeled out the rubber insects. I really did like Creepy Crawlers a lot!

Cheerful Tearful

I had also asked for a baby doll. Well, my grandmother gave me one named Cheerful Tearful. I don't remember getting any flack from neighbor kids either. I've wondered what my grandmother thought of giving me a baby doll and of painting my little fingernails red. Maybe grandmothers always "know what's up" on some level. But this WAS 1966 and she was a straight-laced methodist lady, so who knows, but she was very supportive of my off-beat interests!

I also got $9 in pennies from my grandfather (who stored up pennies all year long in a big glass jar). I got a Remco Mouse House; and perhaps the most lasting of all the presents, my Dad built me a playhouse in the backyard of our house in Albuquerque. I was there when it was being built so I know it wasn't a surprise. But I don't remember if it was built before Christmas or right after we got home. David's Playhouse needs a blog post of it's own!

More Christmas to come ...

When you talk about this blog later, and you will, be kind.
Copyright © 2007 D. H. Maxine.

Dancing Naked with PUFNSTUF

In 1971, when I was eight years old, I was taken to see the then new PUFNSTUF movie. I already loved the psychedelic television show of the same name. But the movie appealed to me for many reasons. I wanted to escape, I thought Jack Wild was cute, it was a movie musical that resonated of many things I loved including a similarity to the plot of THE WIZARD OF OZ. I adored Jack Wild's peculiar British accent, and now as an adult, I can see other reasons that the film spoke to me.

For those of you too young, too old, or too foreign to know the film, the story goes thusly:

A boy named Jimmy is picked on by his classmates and teachers. Jimmy plays the flute and one day his flute comes to life and starts to talk. A nasty old witch named Witchiepoo wants Jimmy's talking flute for herself and she tricks Jimmy into boarding a beautiful boat which traps him and brings him to Living Island. Jimmy escapes the witch's clutches and befriends a yellow dragon named Pufnstuf who wore little white cowboy boots and a Stetson. Jimmy wants to get back home, protect his flute from Witchiepoo, and in the end finds peace and love with his friends on Living Island.

There's an interesting Freudian interpretation of the film that I've heard about. Our boy hero Jimmy is about to enter puberty and his "flute" which had been inanimate suddenly comes to life. Witchiepoo (the mother figure) wants to take away Jimmy's "magic flute." For protection, Jimmy seeks out an even bigger phallic symbol, Pufnstuf himself. I wonder what PUFNSTUF creators Sid and Marty Krofft think of this interpretation. Pufnstuf himself does look pretty phallic. Look at his "head" in the photo at the top of this blog.

Okay, back to being eight years old... Well, I loved the movie and I loved my copy of the soundtrack album. I played it to pieces, played it for my friends, and being a little gay boy I had as big a fascination with Witchiepoo as I did with Jimmy.


Soundtrack album cover for PUFNSTUF (1970)

In the movie Witchiepoo hosts the Annual Witch's Convention in her castle. Witches are quite "political" it seems; and there is a power struggle to obtain the title of "Boss Witch." The current Boss Witch was played by Martha Raye; and other contenders for the title included Witchiepoo, and another witch named Witch Hazel who was played by Mama Cass Elliot. Witch Hazel sang a song called "Different."

"When I was smaller and people were taller
I realized that I was different.

It's kind of an ode to being gay (from a little gay kid's point of view anyway). It's not unlike Cass Elliot's big hit "Make your own kind of music." On the soundtrack album, this song is followed by a spectacular production number called "Zap the World!" which is what the witches want to do. I lapped it all up!

My best friend at the time lived next door. One summer afternoon while we were playing my PUFNSTUF album we decided to make "magic wands." In the movie the magic wands look kind of like striped pencils. And indeed that's what we made. We took some unsharpened pencils and carefully wound them with colored tape making spirals about the pencils. We also made them "magic" by putting spells on them and saying magic words and stuff. At some point my best friend said, "You know if we want to make them really magic, we're supposed to be naked."

"What are we supposed to do then?" I asked in my best naïvely coy eight-year-old manner.

My friend said, "We have to dance with them."

It sounded like a good idea to me! So we locked my bedroom door. We put on the PUFNSTUF album, and played "Different" as an invocation while we got undressed. When we were both naked we stood on my twin bed and waited for "Zap the World!" to begin. At which point the eight-year-old, wand-waving, naked, wannabe-witches began dancing excitedly, jumping up and down on the bed!

So what do you do when the music stops?

Well, you put on your clothes, you put the magic away, and you grow-up. You try to make friends with other people, hoping for a friendship like Jimmy's and Pufntuf's. And you long to find a Living Island where you attempt to avoid the witches, where you can play your magic-flute, and when the planet gets too obnoxious, you can …
Zap! Zap the World!

David

Blog copyright © 2007 D. H. Maxine.

Below, you can enjoy "Zap the World!" from PUFNSTUF the movie!

That Seventies School

I hated sixth grade. And I hated my teacher, Mr. Reinecke, at Aztec Elementary School in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

He was a crappy teacher but sixth grade was expecially bad becasue I was tormented to two bullies in my class. No one but me seemed to object. The dreaded twosome of Shane and Mike did all of the usual things bullies do: they punched me in the arm, gave me noogies, gave me "Indian burns." They called me the usual epithets like pussy, and freak, and fag; the latter altered into a nickname riffing on my last name: "Fagzine." Now this was all in the first half of the year; it got much worse.

The terror twins eventually started bringing pen-knives to school. These knives were little more than toys. But it hurt if you got jabbed and they were kind of threatening to twelve-year-old me. The last couple months of school were abysmal. Shane and Mike thought up a new game. Lots of kids were wearing "waffle-stomper" boots, which had thick rubber souls. Well, Shane and Mike (their initials are S & M; I never thought of that before!) started sticking broken razor blades in the tips of their boots and kicking me, which tore up both my jeans and my legs.

The teachers and principal were no help at all. They suggested boxing lessons! Or maybe a "playdate" so we'd all become friends (otherwise know as drown David in the pool day!) I was getting a little psychologically messed up. I was scared to go to school. I started getting a little obsessive/compulsive, too. I suspect I was trying to gain control of a world I felt was totally out of control.

Oh, you may have wondered where my parents were through all of the above. My Dad was a pacifist who felt victimized all his life and I think he just kind of withdrew from it all. Mom would yell at the teacher and Principal; the teachers would go look for the knives or blades; S&M would look innocent and show their empty pockets. Major dysfunction.

What to do! If Elementary School was this bad; I could just imagine Junior High! Well, Mom started looking for a new school. My Mom at this time had recently completed her doctorate and had accepted a political appointment as the "Executive Director of the Governor's Commission on the Status of Women" for the state of New Mexico. But she remembered that while she had been a TA one of her students was helping to start an "Alternative Education" school. Mom looked them up.

That next fall I was enrolled for seventh grade at The Twelve Gates Free School. What was this private academy for alternative youth like, you ask? Have you even seen AUNTIE MAME? It truly was the spitting image of the school that Mame enrolled little Patrick Dennis in. It was GREAT!

Twelve Gates was modeled on A. S. Neill's Summerhill School in England, and Orson Bean's Fifteenth Street School in New York City. The guiding principle of the school was "freedom and equality" between teachers and students. The school was run democratically by both students and faculty (two Lesbians and a straight woman.) You could take classes or not. You could sign out and go on a self-field trip. It may sound like anarchy; but to me it was heaven! I was even on the school's Board of Directors! After a year of stifling abuse in sixth grade - I was at last in heaven!

I took a year of Japanese. We had extra-curricular tea ceremonies, and cooked Japanese dinners at a teacher's home. Instead of a boring "civics" course we older students got together and assembled a petition to stop this thing called "Senate Bill One" and another to try and stop production of the B-1 Bomber. We then went out to Malls and the University campus and collected signatures and mailed in the petitions. I learned to use a camera and darkroom. We took a field trip to meet singer Alberta Hunter.

We sat around and read what we liked. There were tens of thousands of books at the school. One of our teachers read us certain parts of RUBYFRUIT JUNGLE aloud. Now THAT'S an education.

I learned to play the guitar (sort of). One kid who was about my age was a bit of a capitalist and he decided to start a school store. He bought food at the supermarket and sold it to hungry students with a big mark-up in price. I felt ripped off. So I formed the Twelve Gates Student Food Co-op. And brought back my own supply of groceries which students could buy at approximate cost after paying a nominal "membership" fee. This twelve-year-old's trade war only lasted for a few weeks --but what a way to learn economics, improve one's math skills, and deal with internal school politics!

In the spring we went on a school trip to Mexico. We drove several hundred miles into Mexico to a place called Bahia de Kino (Kino Bay). The bay was gorgeous. Out in the water a Bali-Hai-like island called Tiburon, rose from the blue horizon. But lack of organization on a school trip can be a big and dangerous mess (see my previously posted story Stingray.)

Sadly, the school and my life would soon implode. The adults in the school began to squabble; and so did my parents. That Mother's Day my Dad had a nervous breakdown--and this would lead to my parents divorce later that year.

Why do we feel such an intense desire to grow up when we are children and such an intense desire to return to childhood when we are grown? Life froze in the late spring of 1976 when I was thirteen and my father was fifty-seven. Just as I was reaching out to become a man my father decided he wanted to be a boy. And THAT will be another chapter entirely.

David

When you talk about this blog later, and you will - be kind.

Copyright 2006 D. H. Maxine.

Dr. Zaius in Oz or; Leggo my MEGO!

I've been thinking a lot about play - or more specifically, how I played as a kid. I am trying to remember how it worked, how I did it, what it felt like.

All of my favorite toys were puppets, stuffed animals, and the like. I also loved movies and had a strong passion for PLANET OF THE APES. I devoured the movies, watched the prime-time TV series, and the animated Saturday morning cartoon. I even tracked down the Pierre Boulle novel - which I also loved. I found it especially sexy somehow that Boulle's astronaut was completely naked as Zira took him for walks around the city.

I also loved L. Frank Baum's Oz books. My Second Grade teacher, Mrs. Strong, at Monte Vista Elementary School, in Albuquerque, read them to us a chapter to two a day after lunch. I also discovered the MGM movie, which I came to love as well. So one can hardly overestimate my childhood joy at discovering MEGO (a toy company) was producing 8-inch action-figures of PLANET OF THE APES characters, followed a bit later by WIZARD OF OZ characters, among many others including another childhood obsession, STAR TREK.

But back to play. I would ask my sister something like, "Do you wanna play Oz? or Apes?" And she pretty much always did. We would then go to my room and prepare the universe. We had a couple dark furniture throws and these would be tossed over carefully arranged pillows, cushions, piles of clothes to create mountain ranges and valleys as wide as the bedroom - a terrain for the play to occur within. We would then set up the Emerald City or Ape City in our room-scape and the play would begin.

But I dont remember how we did it! We devised such elaborate plots and story lines! They often continued from day to day, too. But there was no discussion that I recall about how to do it, no set rules for who "operated" which characters. It was a seamless flow of interaction between the two of us: handing off characters, improvising dialogue, manipulating plot, creating back-story with no effort whatsoever. But I don't remember how we did it! We were just so in synch - everything worked. And we both fell into a hypnotic state where the room would fall away, our hands hopping the characters across the bedspread would vanish, and we did little more than channel Zira, Cornelius, and Dorothy Gale! Yes we mixed the worlds up quite often.

It worked REALLY well, too! Sometime apes would go to Oz; and sometimes Oz characters would go to the Planet of the Apes. If you think Dr. Zaius (the ornery orangutan) freaked out when he saw a talking human you should have seen how apoplectic he got over talking lions, Tin Men, and little girls with dogs!

Sometimes Zaius went to Oz! At least once the Wicked Witch captured him and thought he was her runaway flying monkey. She could NOT understand what happened to his wings. "Curses! It's that Dorothy Gale's doing!" But then again sometimes Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock would beam in at just the right moment and then all hell would break loose! The Wicked Witch would over hear Kirk talk about dancing Orion slave girls (who are green!) and the Witch would decide she could trap Kirk and Spock by stripping and dancing for them! You may recall that the Wicked Witch is green, too.

I do not know if other MEGO-loving kids did this cross-pollination thing. Sometimes I would buy duplicate characters to make them into additional characters. I "aged" a Cornelius with white paint and miniature glasses to make someone I names Dr. Barlow. We turned an extra Glinda the Good into Laverne DeFazio to play with my sisters Fonzie figure. A few characters I just made from scratch - a Patchwork Girl and a Sawhorse come to mind. Some ideas we never quite pulled off probably due to lack of money. Grandma and Grampa Walton would have made a wonderful Aunt Em and Uncle Henry but I guess i just didn't feel like spending $15 to get two sort of boring characters.

But is was so magical, so addicting! This hypnotic-state of play occurred whenever my sister and I played with our anthropomorphic toys: puppets, stuffed animals, etc. Once on a car trip I told her that there was a miniature universe in my pants-pocket. I pulled out bits of lint and stuff from my pocket and introduced them as animals, live stock, etc. I made a tiny little woman out of a scrap of Kleenex, too. But I swear we could see "pocket-world!"

And that's what I miss! I miss my imagination being that powerful. I think I still have a strong ability for fantasy and imagination and daydreaming - but I can't quite make the real world disappear anymore - at least not with pocket lint!

David

When you talk about this blog later, and you will - be kind.

Copyright 2006 D. H. Maxine.