It was the late 90s and I was a child of Lilith Fair.
It was a great time for female singer-songwriters. My CD tower toppled with titles like Little Plastic Castle, Under the Pink, Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, and This Fire that spun on constant rotation on my 3-CD changer. If it had sandals, an acoustic guitar, and a vagina, I was listening to it in 1998.
So you can imagine my reaction when I learned that the next assembly at my Tennessee high school would be an Indigo Girls concert.
In an unprecedented move, the Indigo Girls decided to kick off their summer 1998 tour with a tour of Southern high schools. I've never understood why. But I didn't care why. I just knew it was going to be the best day of school ever.
When the fateful day came, I was ready. I picked out the perfect outfit: my offwhite Lilith Fair t-shirt from summer 1997, a floor-length maroon hippie skirt, Birkenstocks, and the pièce de résistance: a crown of maroon flowers for my head that I made myself out of an embroidery hoop and fake flowers from Michaels. I submit the following photographic evidence, taken that very morning:
Lanier and I pose like this in most pictures
I sized myself up in the mirror that day. The tiny bells on my crown were tinkling optimistically. The naked Venus figure on my t-shirt offset my long tiered skirt perfectly. I just knew that the Indigo Girls would know I was a true fan.
When we filed into the auditorium, I was nearly breathless. I snapped this photo of my friends Chris and Jessica waiting for the show to start.
Imagine the scene. Franklin High School auditorium, 1:00pm. I am perched in the 2nd row on the edge of my red plastic seat, tearfully wailing How long til my soul gets it right in exuberant harmony with the Indigo Girls. Rocking. The Fuck. Out.
The rest of the student body...is not.
They are restless, bored--watching the show with approximately the same enthusiasm as had been displayed at a recent assembly featuring actor Chris Burke, best known as Corky from Life Goes On.
This is my life, y'all.
When Emily and Amy said they'd have time for a few questions at the end, a hot wave of excitement rushed through me. What would I ask them?? The resounding silence from the other 800 people in the auditorium meant that I was going to have to think of something, fast.
It was a total accident. Someone, I don't remember who, had recently returned a little stuffed sheep to me that they had had for some reason. It was in my backpack.
Chris with sheep
I called out to them that I wanted to give them a present. I handed the little sheep to Amy. She thanked me and put it on one of the amps along with a few other little doodads. A little black sheep.
It turned out to be a fitting gift. A number of high schools ended up canceling the scheduled Indigo Girls concerts, ostensibly because of profanity in their music, but actually because the Bible Belt often has problems with The Gays and especially The Gays exposing themselves and their lifestyle to Our Children.
Huge, HUGE props to Doug Crosier, our principal, for being such a cool guy. Check out this Rolling Stone clipping about the cancelations, where Doug nails it with a pitch-perfect soundbite:
And as for my sheep, well...That summer, when I saw them play at Lilith Fair, I was sure that I spotted him on top of their amp. Wishful teenage thinking or a symbol of solidarity between the Indigo Girls and their shameless superfan? I may never know.
Discussion Question:
What's the best school assembly you ever had?
I had a Samantha doll for whom I purchased Molly glasses. I didn't particularly connect with the Victorian orphan's story, but she had brown eyes and brown hair like me, so she was in.
I had a variety of little outfits for my nearsighted orphan: a beautiful pink striped party dress, a navy winter coat with a snow-white muff, a crisp white summertime sailor suit, a stiff cranberry Christmas dress, and even a delicate nightgown.
I read the little accompanying Samantha books too. They weren't particularly memorable aside from Samantha's birthday party, an elaborate affair featuring petit fours and home-churned ice cream, the latter of which is befouled with salt by evil neighbor Eddie. Not cool, Eddie. Not cool.
God knows what amount of whining I had to pitch for my parents to actually buy me some of Samantha's accessories. Anyone who is not familiar with the American Girl doll collection could not possibly believe how overpriced and useless these little trinkets are. I had a tiny doll (a doll for my doll!) and a tiny music box and a little brass lunch tin with a tiny plastic watercress sandwich and peach and a tiny embroidered handkerchief. But what really tickled my mom and me were the useless little kits.
I had two of these useless little kits. The Summertime Amusements set came with a tiny sketchbook, a tiny paint set with tiny tubes of real paint and a tiny artist's palette, and a tiny pine satchet that says "I Pine for You." This photo doesn't give a sense of scale, but the sketchbook is about the size of a business card.
Early 90s retail cost: $22
You thought I was kidding, didn't you.
Even more tempting was Samantha's Gingerbread House Kit, which came with impossibly small gingerbread pieces, a few tiny pieces of candy, a miniature pastry tube, and instructions for making the icing and assembling the whole thing.
Early 90s retail cost: $15
accessory photos from this alarmingly comprehensive American Girl dolls wiki
I'd beg and beg my mom to let me get into these kits and, I don't know, paint a teeny tiny picture in the sketchbook or (let's be real here) eat all of the stale component parts of the gingerbread house when my hammy little hands inevitably proved unable to assemble the tiny thing.
My poor mother. This was her:
Samantha still holds a place of honor in my childhood bedroom, all snugged up with my favorite stuffed snow leopard and a plastic Betty Boop doll who, characteristically, can't seem to keep her dress on. I guarantee that my mother could still put her hands on the still-pristine Summertime Amusements or Gingerbread Kit in five minutes flat if given the task. Guess whether or not she'd led me get into the kits if I asked her today.
So you can imagine my despair when I learned today that Samantha has been retired. Aw hell naw. But I am feeling grateful that my mom never let me tear into Samantha's accessories--I'll sell them on eBay one day to put my kids through college. Maybe it's time for a trip to Georgia, aka Doll Mecca, to visit Babyland General Hospital and then the American Girl Boutique and Bistro. Samantha can have a plastic watercress sandwich and get her hair did.
Like every good 1980s girl, I had a Cabbage Patch Kid or two. I loved them--yarn hair, creepily vacant eyes, tattooed asses and all. But I never stopped to wonder where they came from.
There is actually an unnecessarily complex mythology surrounding the origins of the franchise. I won't attempt to summarize but suffice it to say that it involves a ten-year-old boy starting an orphanage to save the Cabbage Patch Kids from slave labor in a gold mine. However, what I'm talking about here is an even more improbable creation story. And this creation story is true.
In northern Georgia, there is a small town called Cleveland. In this town, there is a magical place.
Sort of like Tara...okay not really.
Yes, Babyland General Hospital is the birthing, nursery, and adoption center for Cabbage Patch Kids. You can go for free and see a Cabbage Patch Kid being born.
WHAT
How I went virtually my entire life without knowing this fact is beyond me.
But wait, you are no doubt saying to yourself. How exactly is a Cabbage Patch Kid born?
I'm glad you asked. I'm going to turn it over to the poorly written Wikipedia article for a moment.
Dolls are "birthed" every hour during business hours in a procedure during which one of the "LPN's" (Licensed Patch Nurse) assists the Magic Crystal Tree in producing each doll. When the intercom announces that a Mother Cabbage is in labor, a nurse hurries to get ready for delivery of a new Cabbage Patch baby. With the nurse are the pink and blue bunnybees that pollinate the kids with crystals, determining if the newborn is a boy [blue crystal] or girl [pink crystal]. The nurse comments on how much the Tree is dilated and injects with "Imagicillin," an "experimental but highly recommended" drug. If the need arises, a "C-section" or "Cabbage section" may be administered....A full-featured Intensive Care Unit is in place to handle premature births and otherwise unhealthy newborns.
The Magic Crystal Tree and Mother Cabbage, from whom all Cabbage Patch Kids flow
So some rabbit-bee creatures fertilize some cabbages and then a magic crystal tree gives birth to some human children with the help of a nurse? And the cabbages get shot up with an experimental drug? I can't believe I'm saying this but this is better than Teen Mom.
Let's see the blessed event unfold for ourselves:
I...can't even
As far as I'm concerned, the greatest horror in all of this is the names. Cabbage Patch Kids have the least euphonious names ever. If you go to www.cabbagepatchkids.com you can see an ever-refreshing slideshow of birth announcements.
Wait...she was born with pigtails?
ACTUAL CABBAGE PATCH KID NAMES:
Austin Jerri
Doreen Jillaine
Zena Jordyn
Tammy Betsy
Jaylee Derek
Grady Damien
Buck Clay
Gwynyth Kimber
Glendonn Ragan (A FEMALE NAME)
Garrison Dusty
Jaidyn Celia
And finally, bleak vision of the future:
What if this is what happens to bad people when they die?
This post is missing a huge shoutout to Mary Nell, who is responsible for alerting me to the existence of Babyland General Hospital. Once my disbelief gave way, we discovered via a quick Google search that someone out there had gone and done the most brilliant thing ever:
Kudos.
Discussion Question:
Can you cobble together even one respectable name out of the names listed above?
Gay Sons of Lesbian Mothers by Kaki King
Appropos of absolutely nothing except the fact that I really dig this song
When I was home in Nashville a couple of weeks ago, my mom pulled me into the extra bedroom and gestured to a giant stack of white banker's boxes. "They're your books from growing up," she explained. "Do you think you could bear to part with some of them?"
When I was a child, my book collection was so vast that I created my own cataloging system (including my own non-Dewey, non-LOC system of alphanumeric codes) to organize them and keep track of the ones I lent out. When I pulled the lid off the first box of books in the extra bedroom, the first thing I noticed were the little white labels peeling off the spines, numerical codes scrawled in pencil in a child's handwriting. The bibliophilia I spoke of in this post was born in my childhood.
My parents must have prided themselves on some of my early literary choices. I read To Kill a Mockingbird from cover to cover when I was 6, Uncle Tom's Cabin when I was 8, and the Illiad when I was 10. From the time I was big enough to hoist the heavy tomes down off the shelf, I was reading my mother's books of transcendental German poetry in translation and her dog-eared volumes of Colette. I devoured my father's Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking hardbacks and wax-stained volumes of Robert Frost.
But for every volume of Major Literary Significance that I curled up with as a child, I read at least ten or twenty ridiculous YA novels. My bookshelves were a sherbet-colored smear of tattered pastel paperbacks. Sacred above all others were my Baby-Sitter's Club books--I had over 100 of the regular series books, plus all the Super Specials, Mysteries, and Little Sister books I could talk my mom into buying me. They were arranged in numerical order on the top shelves in my room. I deemed my collection so vast as to necessitate their own coding system--dozens of books lined up in neat rows, spines labeled with code numbers starting in with BSC.
I don't remember getting a lot out of To Kill a Mockingbird at age 6 besides being frightened of Boo Radley, whom I thought was definitely a ghost. But my, oh my, did I ever get an education from those trashy paperbacks. I learned how to apply a tourniquet and the definition of the word 'cacophony' from Jessi Ramsey, Pet-Sitter (#22). On a trip to NYC when I was 11, having just reread the New York, New York! Super Special (#6), I impressed a room full of New York natives by identifying the word 'SoHo' as a portmanteau of 'south of Houston Street' (complete with correct pronunciation of 'Houston'). Perhaps that's why Harper Lee's magnum opus ended up in the donation pile (I can always grab another copy when I want to reread it), but I was not able to part with even a single one of my Baby-Sitter's Club books.
In honor of everyone's favorite multicultural septet of overly responsible prepubescent Connecticutians, it is my pleasure to present
IMPORTANT LESSONS I LEARNED FROM YA NOVELS
#1: I HAVE DIABETES
Anyone who has ever touched a Baby-Sitter's Club book knows The Truth About Stacey--she has juvenile diabetes. She can't have even a single one of the glorious sweets depicted on the cover, but look at that plucky smile! Stacey is from New York City, dammit, and she isn't going to let something minor like the autoimmune destruction of her insulin-producing pancreatic cells stop her from enriching Charlotte Johansson's miserable life with her Abundant Teenage Awesomeness.
In The Truth About Stacey, our protagonist spends much of the book puzzling over an assortment of odd symptoms--being constantly thirsty, feeling tired, etc. In what is easily the most unforgettable scene of the book, Stacey is invited to a slumber party at the home of ultra-bitch Laine, at which Stacey guzzles several dozen liters of Pepsi and proceeds to piss Laine's bed in her sleep.
During one red-wine-soaked evening with my best girls in Texas--Mary Jane, Sammy Jean, and Sam Hoekstra--it was determined that all four of us had come to genuinely believe that we had diabetes after reading this book. After all, what child has never felt sleepy or thirsty? I spent YEARS of my life inwardly convinced that my doctors had egregiously looked over my Type 1 diabetes and that I would have to take matters into my own hands and make the diagnosis myself, possibly after soiling myself in front of numerous Popular Girls.
#2: I WAS ADOPTED OR POSSIBLY ABDUCTED FROM MY BIRTH PARENTS
The Face on the Milk Carton tells the gripping tale of Janie Johnson, who is busy leading the normal life of a fifteen-year-old girl when she DUN DUN DUN recognizes her own face on her milk carton at lunch one day.
Since I'm guessing anyone who finds this premise even remotely intriguing has already read this book or at least seen the 1995 made-for-TV movie...
Look it's the girl from Life Goes On! And Kyle from My So-Called Life! Anyone? Anyone?
I'll go ahead and tell you what happens. It turns out that Janie's parents aren't really her parents--they're her grandparents. Or rather, they are the parents of the woman who kidnapped Janie from a shopping mall when she was a little girl. OH NO THEY DIDN'T. The Face on the Milk Carton ends with Janie making a tentative phone call to her birth parents, and Whatever Happened to Janie? picks up with Janie leaving the home she knows to go back to her birth family, and all the drama that ensues.*
After Janie sees herself on the milk carton, she conducts a little investigation of her own. She breaks into her father's office and rummages around in the drawers. There are no photographs of Janie from when she was a baby. She has no birth certificate. She doesn't look like either of her parents. Things start to add up for Janie. Initially she comes to believe that she was adopted.
As soon as I read these novels, it became clear to me that, like Janie, I was living with two people who were not my parents. I decided to do a little investigating. I found photographs of myself in early infancy, even of the day I was born. My birth parents had probably given those to the people who claimed to be my parents. I found my birth certificate too, but that could easily be faked. Even I had to admit that I looked like both of my parents, but they could still be my grandparents or maybe just my cousins.
I decided to confront my parents about my origins, nervous but steeled to learn the truth. I have no idea how they managed to keep a straight face as they informed me that I was definitely their biological child, no doubt about it. I think I pouted about it for a few days.
*By the way, Wikipedia informed me that two more books have been added to this series since I was a kid--The Voice on the Radio and What Janie Found. brb buying these immediately
#3: I HAVE SCOLIOSIS
Judy Blume's classic Deenie tells the story of a young woman and her struggles with scoliosis. Deenie isn't very smart or funny or athletic, but she is very beautiful. But her dreams of being a Fashion Model are threatened when she's diagnosed with scoliosis and condemned to wear a back brace every day to correct it. How will Deenie ever be cool when she's encased in a big dorky brace?
This is actually one of the most-banned books in America, for the sole reason that Judy Blume (GASP!) actually acknowledges in this book that young women masturbate. But it was not the passages about Deenie and her washcloth and her special spot that made the biggest impression on me. It was the scoliosis.
I was kind of morbidly obsessed with the idea of being fitted for a giant back brace that I would rarely be able to take off. I imagined a permanent excuse from gym class and the sympathetic, encouraging looks I'd get from my teachers. I decided that I definitely had scoliosis too.
The joke was on me with this one--turns out I do have slight scoliosis, as determined by my pediatrician. It is entirely possible that I requested the test personally. Sadly, my pediatrician did not prescribe me a back brace or even attention-garnering back surgery. He said it was minor enough to ignore. Charlatan.
#4: MY HOUSE IS HAUNTED
Even though mysteries have never really been my thing, I read my fair share of ghost stories when I was a kid. California Casual Dawn lived in a Really Haunted Old House that was once part of the Underground Railroad, as we learned in The Ghost at Dawn's House (#9). I also really enjoyed all of those goofy Betty Ren Wright ghost books, none of which were even remotely scary. My favorite was The Dollhouse Murders, wherein the dolls in a forgotten attic dollhouse start moving by themselves and acting out a bunch of creepy stuff.
Inspired by Dawn's fearlessness, I decided that it was high time someone did a little investigation into the paranormal activity that was happening at my house. Despite my parents' protestations that we were the first and only family to have ever lived in our house, I was pretty sure the house was probably haunted. One night, my bff Katie June and I set a number of ghost traps in the house--a blanket spread out perfectly flat in the hallway, a sink full of bubble-bath bubbles, a glass of water on the nightstand. The ghosts, we reasoned, would disturb these objects and give us evidence of their existence. We went to sleep.
We were right. The next morning, the flat blanket had indentations like it had been trod upon. The sink, once filled with bubbles, held only a few inches of cloudy water. The glass of water on the nightstand had vanished entirely. Katie and I were not prepared for our findings and were significantly rattled. My parents' house was definitely haunted--haunted by my parents, who stepped on blankets and cleared dishes, and by the laws of physics, which reduced the bubbles in my sink to a soapy film in the water.
#5: I HAVE CYSTIC FIBROSIS OR SOMETHING ELSE SURE TO KILL ME BEFORE PROM NIGHT
Even in elementary school, I considered Lurlene McDaniel novels to be a guilty pleasure. Darling Lurlene has written over 60 young adult books about disease and dying, and I have read a substantial percentage of them. They all have names like Letting Go Of Lisa and Telling Christina Goodbye, and most of them feature a budding friendship or romantic relationship that is threatened by the terminal illness of one or both parties. I could not get enough of these books growing up.
The book I remember as being my favorite McDaniel tear-jerker isn't by Lurlene at all--it's by Cherie Bennett, a Nashville native. I must have read Good-bye, Best Friend fifty times when I was a kid. This egregiously sad book tells the story of Star and Christina, who make friends at a hospice, Hope House. Christina gets better and moves out, and Star has to deal with the loss of her friend and her declining health due to cystic fibrosis.
I had never heard of cystic fibrosis, even in my extensive reading of my parents' Home Medical Guide, until I read this book. Good-bye, Best Friend taught me about the excruciating treatments for cf that involve basically being beaten on the back to loosen the mucus in your lungs. I also learned that you get to live in a big house with other sick kids, and it's basically like summer camp.
I used to lie face down on my bed and imagine blows raining down on my back, my handsome boyfriend Tad wincing at the sound from the other side of the drawn curtain. A milkshake or a backrub any time I whispered a feeble request for it. An asthmatic child, every time I had a coughing fit, I eagerly checked my palms for blood. I'm pretty sure I drew up a will for myself, specifying which of my schoolmates were to inherit each of my most beloved books. But not Good-bye, Best Friend--if I died of cystic fibrosis, I was definitely going to be buried with it.
But, as Mick Jagger reminds us, you can't always get what you want. I lived straight through prom night and beyond--no diabetes or scoliosis or cystic fibrosis or ghosts of escaped slaves or long-lost birth parents for this drama queen.
Now, hilariously, I work for a children's book publisher, and my lifelong penchant for reading silly YA novels has become part of my job description. I'm afraid my editorial opinion isn't always the most developed when it comes to YA--I will invariably prefer a fluffy, predictable novel with a likable female protagonist over anything educational. But you've got to go easy on me--my diabetes is making my scoliosis act up again.
Discussion Question:
Which YA novels had the biggest impact on you as a kid?
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