Scattered Childhood Memories #11: Nowhere To Go

One day, when I was three years old, I was lying on our living room floor playing with a plastic Smurf toy when a sense of unease suddenly came over me. 

On the wall nearby was framed print of Jesus. It had been a gift from my paternal grandparents, and I had seen it since infancy. But recently, little 3-year-old me had had a memorable nightmare in which Jesus had moved. His face had turned even more upward-looking (counter-clockwise rotation), a movement which had summoned none other than the sinister-looking bear from the cover of the Golden ABC Rhymes book, a bear whose name (I had at some point decided) was The Big Bad Drum. 

Recalling my dream, little me decided I didn't want to be in the same room as the Jesus picture. After all, it might decide to move at any moment and call forth any or all instances of bass drum-wielding bears. 

But now what?

I couldn't play in my bedroom, because I shared it with my baby brother, and he was currently napping. I couldn't play in my parents' bedroom, as it was generally off-limits. I couldn't play in the kitchen, because I wanted to play on carpet.

Another option was the dining room, but... that's where we had our smoke detector, and the smoke detector was nearly as ominous as the Jesus picture. I knew the smoke detector had something to do with fire. I also knew that if you stared at it long enough, you'd see a red flashing dot. Was that dot made of fire? Was there fire inside, just waiting to pop out and attack? 

I remember feeling stuck. I had nowhere to play. I don't remember what I ended up doing, but I'm pretty sure I gave up playing Smurfs and went to pester my mom.

Years later, at a family Thanksgiving celebration, I remember feeling stuck again. I dreaded going to this dinner because I knew that after we ate, I'd have the option of hanging out in one of two main rooms. I didn't want to hang in Room #2, because it was kind of a kids' area, and I was afraid that one particular younger cousin would lob something at my head. It had happened the year before, and I didn't trust that that cousin had matured significantly in the past 12 months. 

Meanwhile, in the other room, there was that one particular relative, the one that everyone else general thinks is pretty great, but who you know has Creep tendencies, and who you've had to strategically avoid for years, not only because of That One Time (but really several times), but also because he's never apologized, has always given you grief because you haven't let him get near you since, and also, you're pretty sure he's still Creepin.

So. Where to go? On that Thanksgiving evening, after dinner I went out and sat in the car until it was time to go. It was freezing, but I figured it was my best option.

Today I had another one of those moments of feeling stuck with nowhere to go. I was on breakfast duty at the school where I work. I usually have some flexibility to go back and forth from the cafeteria to the hallway. The cafeteria gets loud, though, especially when one of the other IAs gets on the microphone to remind the kids to be quiet and to eat their breakfast and to clean their tables and to check the lost and found and oh yeah, 5 minutes till the bell.

Every morning. At least three times.

Usually when she gets on the mic, I escape to the hallway.

Today, though, the hallway was no oasis. It was one of our Spirit Days, and someone was taking Polaroid pictures of kids who'd worn costumes. 🌟🌟🌟🌟 Flashes galore! Flashing lights have really started to bother me lately. It's not so much the light itself as it is the suddenness of it all.

I couldn't escape to my car this time, so I sucked it up and went back into the cafeteria and braved the noise.

I know that the flashing camera will be gone tomorrow.

My mom eventually donated the Jesus picture.

I try not to stare at smoke detectors anymore.

The immature cousin is, idk... is he out of jail these days?

And the Creep relative is... well, I can only hope The Big Bad Drum accompanied him to the afterlife and is following him around, percussing an annoying beat eternal. 

The Effects Of DRUGS: A Pawtionary Tale 🐾

When I was in middle school circa 1994, my health teacher assigned us a project. I don't remember the parameters -- whether it had to be about drugs & alcohol, or if I just chose that -- but while most of my peers made posters or wrote essays, I went straight for Cat Content.

Armed with my dad's camera, a roll of slide film, the family feline and a few props -- I created a cautionary tale. Or at least what I thought was a cautionary tale based on my limited knowledge of what drugs even were.  

I was a sheltered kid. The extent of my drug knowledge was limited to that one fried egg commercial, that other commercial with the kid who yells at his dad: "I learned it by watching YOU!", and a couple of school-sponsored puppet shows that stressed that whatever the peer pressure-ers tried to get me to do, I was to say No. 

But then came middle school, and we got a unit on drugs. So now I knew the names of some of them and that... um... well, I knew that they could cause you to get sick, go to jail, lose your loved ones, or even kill you. So with that information, I went for it. I created a story about a person (played by my cat) who got hooked on... well, something terrible.

Quick note: I'm not here to make light of what for many people is a serious subject. I'm here to share my 13-year-old self's school project, my cat's posing skills, and the absurdness of a naive kid presenting all this to her eighth grade class with a straight face. 

The effects of DRUGS: Marijuna (sic), Cocaine, Alcohol

(Because I had been led to believe those were all essentially the same.)

This is Darlyn... in his more innocent years. He may look grumpy, but he's had a great life. Look at all his friends!

But one day Darlyn went looking for trouble, and by gosh, he found it....

He sniffed some white powder, which as we all know can only be Drugs...

He used syringes and pills, which -- again -- Drugs.

Sometimes the Drugs would give Darlyn hangovers...

Sometimes the Drugs made him pass out cold...

He began stealing in order to get more money to buy Drugs...

Once he even ended up in jail...

He began hanging out in junkyards with his new Friends Who Liked Drugs. What did they do with each other in the junkyards? 

Drugs.

Sometimes the Drugs would make Darlyn really sick...

He sought medical help, but the doctors didn't have a cure.

Darlyn continued to self-medicate...

His lost many of his friends. They turned their backs on him.

He still had a few friends, but he'd lash out at them without warning.

What have I done with my life? he asked himself. I have ruined it with Drugs.

And then, because he drank too much alcohol and ate too much marijuna and cocaine, he, um, you know....

I told you I was a weird kid.

Scattered Childhood Memories #10: Library Story Time

 

I have a cluster of memories associated with going to the library. Since they're on my mind today I thought I might as well gather them here.

Age 4 - My absolute first memory of going to the library is only really memorable because of what I missed out on at home. My mom took me to story time one day. My 2-year-old brother stayed home with my dad, who was doing home repairs. When my mom and I returned from our outing, we found out we'd missed "the fire." There had been a kitchen fire, resulting in a couple of things surrounding the stove being charred. No one was hurt, and nothing was too damaged, but the smell. I remember being so bothered by it that I asked my parents: "Can we move?" (We had recently moved into that house... so, why not just pack up and go again?)

Age 9/10 - I'd become obsessed with The Baby-Sitters Club. I'd read about half of the 36ish books that had been released so far, all out of order. The second I entered the public library, I'd head straight for the paperback cart to grab any new (to me) books. One time my cousin and I even raced each other to the cart. 

Also on this cart were the American Girl books, but I was deeply embarrassed by the fact that one of the girls not only had my name (Molly) but also vaguely looked like me. The horror!

We learned to use the card catalog to look up which BSC books the library had. I think we could also reserve books. One day, a librarian led me away from the card catalogs and told me I could now use A COMPUTER to search for books! You'd think I'd be intrigued, but I was not. I loved those cards.

Age 9.5 - My cousins and I went to some kid event at the public library. They had book trivia and I answered a question correctly and won a prize -- BSC book #33! I later loaned it out to a girl I knew, who took ages to return it, and when she did, the book was in poor condition. You'd think I would learn not to loan out books at that point, but... you would be wrong.

Age 5-8. We had two libraries at my elementary school: a small one for the primary kids and a bigger one for the older kids. In the small one, the librarian was named Mrs. White. She had the same first name as my paternal grandmother, a coincidence the two of them discovered the time my grandma visited my school for Grandparents' day. As any good librarian ought, Mrs. White read us stories. One of the stories was about a badger or raccoon or some other animal that "washed its paws." This made me and my classmate giggle because it sounded so silly. We were admonished for giggling. But... PAWS!

Our class went to the school library weekly, but I had no interest in any books unless I had already read (or heard) them. I learned where to find the Peggy Parish (Amelia Bedelia) and Judith Viorst (Alexander) books, and usually headed straight to those sections.

Whenever we checked out books we had to fill in our name and info. on cards that we took out of pockets in the back of the library book. We then put these cards in a class folder. 

One day, the librarian read us a picture book about a hamster. I enjoyed the book and sought to check it out. The librarian tried to stop me from checking it out because she thought it'd be too hard for me to read. My teacher interjected: it's okay, I was a fair enough reader and should be fine. I got the book home and realized... it was written entirely in cursive. Well -- at least the pictures were fun!

Age 9-11. I was now old enough to visit the intermediate library at school. The librarian here was named Mrs. Wurm. We started every library session by her singing: Good morning, class! We were instructed to sing back, Good morning, Mrs. Wurm! To this day, I seethe when I hear teachers making their students do this type of thing (it is very rare, but still.) Mrs. Wurm introduced us to Beverly Cleary, the lovely land of New Zealand, and Tomes & Talismans, a pre-apocalyptic, library-centric PBS miniseries that I'm fairly certain we never saw the end of but that lives rent-free in my brain to this day.

It was here that I was introduced to my first non-Commodore computer, an Apple Macintosh that had a mouse (not a real mouse, kids!). I became obsessed with clicking and dragging.

Age 11. I was bussed to another school once a week for special classes. That library had the Mary Poppins books -- all of them. I was scandalized to learn that the Banks family was supposed to have more than two children! (Disney, what did you do with John, Barbara and Annabel!?) 

One day we were given an assignment to cull a book -- ie, find one on the shelves that was out-of-date, irrelevant, or whatever. I found a book about motorcycles in the reference section that read like it was written for 1-year-olds. It was so pitiful, I thought for sure I'd found a winner (loser?) But when I presented it to the librarian, she wanted me to make a case for it. Make a case for it? Certainly it spoke for itself! LOOK AT IT! I now understand what she was trying to do, but at the time I was utterly appalled by how clueless she seemed.

Age 12. Middle school. On the second day of school, during lunch, I sat down next to a girl I didn't know and we clicked. She asked if I'd been to the school library yet; I hadn't, so she led the way. (You could go there after lunch instead of going outside.) I read so many books from this library during my two years at that school -- specifically, I remember Just as Long as We're Together, Matilda, and the delightful 80s time capsule Beverly Clearly's Ramona - Behind the Scenes of a Television Show. That REM "Read" poster was on one of the walls. Eventually I started volunteering there during my non-class times, checking out and receiving books, shelving, etc.

Age 13-16. For some reason our local public library decided to stop putting "date due" cards in paperbacks, perhaps to prepare for their upcoming renovations. This induced people to check out books and never return them. I got a few BSC books this way, but also felt bad about it. The library eventually was demolished, and a newer, bigger building took its place. There were hardly any paperback books in the new library. They didn't want the BSC books back. The library had lost its appeal to me. It took me a long time to want to go back there.

Those are my childhood memories associated with The Library.

The Best Day In The Universe

 

In December of 1991, my family spent a day at Universal Studios Hollywood. The visit was part of a week-long adventure that included two days in Disneyland, one at Knott's Berry Farm, and one in Long Beach, where the Spruce Goose and Queen Mary were parked. 

Knott's was fine -- I'd been there before, at age three, and my least favorite memory of it this time around was riding a loop-de-loop roller coaster. Never again!

Disneyland was amazing, of course. Toontown was a few years away, but they did have Roger Rabbit running around the park.

The Queen Mary was... memorable. My parents booked a haunted tour (but forgot to mention that detail to me) so about halfway through, the doors slammed behind our group and the guide was like, "Oh no, we're trapped!" I'm convinced it's all real because no one tells me otherwise, so I'm silently freaking out. Then our tour guide tells us that an angry ghost child can only be placated if she gets her beloved doll back. We find the doll, and my very own brother volunteers to do the appeasing. My recollection is that he chucked the cursed doll into the ship's swimming pool, which was currently empty of water but definitely (now that I think about it) home to an overworked fog machine. 

The ghost got her doll, the fog lifted, the doors opened, and we all got out of the tour alive. 

And then there was Universal Studios...

  

My only foreknowledge of Universal Studios came straight out of Baby-Sitters Club Super Special #5: California Girls!  I loved the BSC, so if they went to Universal, I must go there also. 

Even though my family was only at the park for a day, I have so many memories of the place, it feels like they couldn't have all happened on the same visit. 

My #1 attraction? Fievel's Playland. There aren't enough photos on the internet of this place to do it justice, and my dad took zero pictures of it. It almost feels like a legendary place that possibly didn't even exist. Oh, but it did....

Fievel's Playland was a playground that was built to look like a junkyard. Everything was giant (8-foot tall books, 5-foot teacups, etc.) so kids could get a sense of being mouse-sized. There were tubes, tunnels, bridges, slides (including one shaped like a banana peel and a tube slide that must've had at least 3 curves... it felt endless.) There was also a volcano (maybe 6 feet high?) you could climb up and then GO DOWN INSIDE -- and from the bottom of that, you crawled through a tunnel and ended up somewhere else.

My parents eventually had to drag us away from there.

My dad took my photo with the cutouts from the Back to the Future cartoon. (I loved the movies, but thought the cartoon was eh.)

We rode the E.T. Ride. You gave them your name beforehand, and then during your ride, E.T. would refer to you by name. (Yee-haw.)

We went on the backlot tour. I saw a bunch of sets from movies and shows I hadn't yet seen at that point. 

We watched the Adventures of Conan show in a theater. It featured ripped actors covered in body oil and skimpy armor. I loved the show so much I watched it twice.

We attended a Special Effects show. They had half a Delorean on rigging and needed two kids to portray Marty and Jennifer. I about died of happiness when I got to be "Jennifer." I went on stage and got into this contraption. It rocked back and forth and the windshield wipers went back and forth and holy moly, dream come true.

And then there was Candid Camera. This revival of the classic show aired in syndication from 1991 to 1992. It was hosted by Dom DeLuise and Eva LaRue and was filmed at Universal Studios Hollywood. Even though it had probably been on the air for two or three months by that point, I had never seen it, and I had no idea who Dom DeLuise was (although if I'd been told he did one of the voices in An American Tail, I might have been mildly impressed.) 

The original Candid Camera aired throughout the 1960s and 1970s. For years it ran as a standalone show. It also garnered multiple TV specials. Candid Camera was one of, if not the first, "hidden camera" TV shows, and it no doubt paved the way for similar fare in the future. In fact, at this very same time, FOX had its own ripoff -- Totally Hidden Video -- which aired from 1989 to 1992.

 Candid Camera's gimmick (in case you are not aware) was to engineer a scenario where ordinary people were put in awkward, goofy, or improbable situations. Just when the person was about to lose their mind, someone nearby would point to the camera and say: "Smile, you're on Candid Camera!" Then, supposedly, everyone would have a good laugh, because... haha, none of this is real! 

All those segments were filmed ahead of the taping of the show we got to watch, however. Between 1991 and 1992, visitors to Universal Studios could go watch Dom DeLuise and Eva LaRue present those clips. The audience was also put there so the crew could film their reactions (laughter, the crew hoped) to the clips.

So my parents saw they were doing this taping, and since the original show had been part of their childhoods, they thought this sounded like fun, and we got in line. We were towards the front of the queue, and we had quite a while to wait. Then some people from the show came down the line and asked if my brother and I wanted to be a part of something just for kids. We'd get to sit in special seats and do... something. We weren't sure what we were in for, but sure! Sign us up!

A little while later, the people came back and got me and my brother, plus half a dozen other kids who they'd talked to, and took us inside. They had us sit in the front rows. Then they let everyone else in. My dad managed to come over and snap this photo before he and my mom took their seats in a different section....

 

Once everyone was seated, I remember Dom DeLuise coming out on stage. He might have told some jokes or something. But Eva LaRue didn't come out right away and the crew was ready to start filming. And I remember Eva yelling from backstage about how she wasn't ready, and the crew was like "ooookay...." Eventually, Eva came out, and the cameras started rolling.

They filmed Dom and Eva introducing those pre-filmed prank segments, and then we (the audience) got to watch some of said segments on the TV screens (seen in the photo below.) One of the sequences in this episode featured a young Denise Richards. She played a beautiful college student who flirts with a bunch of unsuspecting guys in a library.

Then came the moment when the kids were needed. The crew brought maybe 10-12 of us on stage and placed us around Dom DeLuise, who was sitting on a couch. Then they mulled things over and decided they needed a few more kids to come up, so they recruited another 5 or 6.

Next we were coached on what to say/do in our scene. Dom would say: "Have you ever heard the expression 'Don't cry over spilled milk?" and we were supposed to say "Yes!" Then he had another line -- after which we were supposed to all chuckle appreciatively.

They had us practice this three or four times. Then they fired up the cameras and started recording. We only did one or two takes. The crew reviewed the tape and seemed satisfied. They thanked us and sent us back to our seats.

When we got home from our trip, my parents told everyone they knew about the show. And of course they wanted to get it on tape when it aired, except they had no idea when it might do so. We started taping the show every night. It used to air around dinnertime, and since we were an eat-around-the-table kind of family, we almost never watched the show. We'd hit record, check once or twice to see if it was our episode, and then, if it wasn't, stop recording.

This went on for weeks and weeks until finally, one day, we forgot to hit record. The show had been on for about five or ten minutes when our cousins called us and said: "We think we just saw you on Candid Camera!" Sure enough, it was our episode! We hit record. We missed the beginning of that episode, but thankfully we didn't miss our "spilled milk" segment...

Rewatching this, I'm amused by the reactions of some of the other kids, like the boy on the bottom right. Smile, you're on Candid Camera indeed.

Less than two years after this, I spent the summer of 1993 becoming fixated on All My Children. One of the actresses on there then? Eva LaRue! So what if she'd been a bit of a diva on set that one day in 1991? She was Maria, of Maria-and-Edmund! Be still my heart!

So that was my incredible, memorable day at Universal Studios in 1991. 

#BringBackFievelsPlayland

Mrs. M.

Mrs. M. was obsessed with space.

It was all over her classroom. Huge posters of the nine planets. Massive charts depicting the solar system. Moons and stars and comets and meteors and all manner of celestial objects. 

Rumor had it Mrs. M. had even applied for the Teacher In Space Project a few years prior. Suffice it to say, she didn't make the finals. Maybe it was her advanced age. I'd like to think that if the program had chosen people based on their enthusiasm for space, Mrs. M. would have been sent up in the first rocket available and left to orbit the globe indefinitely.

Back on earth, though, she was a fourth grade teacher. She ran our school's Young Astronauts program. She took kids on field trips to air shows. 

But I did not want her as my fourth grade teacher.

I didn't mind that she was the oldest teacher in our school -- just one year away from retirement, in fact. She looked like a cute little old granny, the kind that bakes gingerbread men and then watches in dismay as they leap out of the oven and make a bid for freedom. She also could have passed for Mrs. Claus if the situation demanded it. She seemed very, very old. 

Actually, she was sixty-four.

What I did mind was all that SPACE. I didn't care one iota about Neptune or Andromeda or what the heck was on the other side of the moon. If Mrs. M had been obsessed with cats, maybe we could've bonded. But space? Blah.

But there it was, right there on her class roster in September, 1989 -- my name. There was no helping it. I was doomed to spend fourth grade with Mrs. M.

"I'm sure she'll be a fine teacher," my parents tried to assure me.

"But she's obsessed with space," I replied. I was convinced that all of curriculum in Mrs M.'s classroom would be coming straight from the archives at NASA.

On the first day of school, as Mrs. M. explained the classroom procedures, I was actually excited to learn that she had something in the back of her classroom she called "The Laboratory." WELL! Flasks, beakers, test tubes, chemicals?!? Now that was some science I could get behind!

It took me about half a day to realize that there wasn't a laboratory at the back of the classroom. No, actually, that's where she kept the passes... to the lavatory. 

The freaking bathroom.

Mrs. M. didn't like to be corrected. You may be asking, who does? But my previous teacher -- the warm, kind, sweet Mrs. R. -- had always been open to feedback. If she was writing on the chalkboard and left off a comma, she didn't mind if one of her students raised a hand to tell her so. She'd smile and correct her "mistake," happy that we were keen enough to notice a need for punctuation.

When we tried that with Mrs. M., she thought we were being insolent, and barked at us to stop raising our hands and trying to correct her.

I remember one day in particular, Mrs. M. was being so mean -- I don't even remember what she did, but she was mean, dangit -- and some us kids gathered in solidarity at recess. One of my classmates -- all 4 ft. 3 inches of her -- announced that she was going to tell her mom to tell the school board to get Mrs. M. fired. For a few days, we had hope that this would happen. That we would come to school one morning and find a sweet, kindly teacher (maybe Miss Nelson?) sitting at Mrs. M's desk. But nothing ever came of it.

Sometimes Mrs. M could be quite pleasant. I ended up joining the Young Astronauts program that she coordinated. It met Wednesdays after school. That year, Mrs. M. had this grandiose plan to construct a living-room-sized bubble out plastic. It was to be constantly inflated by a box fan. I helped construct it. And it worked! In our classroom, we ended up taking turns, in groups of 4 or 5, spending all day inside the bubble, doing our schoolwork in there and pretending it was a space station. (We were allowed trips outside to the bathr -- uh lavatory, if need be.) We ate that freeze-dried Astronaut Ice Cream stuff, which felt like a treat.

Outside the bubble, the busywork she gave us was a bit much. Each week, she'd assign huge packets of homework. There was always at least one worksheet that demanded I put words into alphabetical order. I hated it. I was terrible at it. I slowly plodded my way through the packet each week, sometimes finishing it, sometimes not.

And then there were the times she made me cry. 

The first time, we were doing some kind of paper-folding activity with a group of kids from the grade below. Mrs. M. was demonstrating what to do. I couldn't keep up. I've never been great at following "movement" directions. I had a heck of a time in dance classes later on in life. It wasn't that I couldn't learn the steps -- I was just slower to catch on than most.

So there I was, trying my best to follow Mrs. M.'s paper-folding directions, and I was falling behind. And then she spoke directly to me. I don't remember her exact words, but it was essentially this: "Molly, I expected you to be able to do this activity and set an example for the younger students."

Yeouch. And she said this in front of those younger students. 

And so I cried. And she didn't care.

A few months later, we were supposed to be making beavers out of clay. The beaver is Oregon's state animal, and we were in the throes of our Oregon History unit. In fact, that very night we were having an event at school where we all had to dress as pioneers. My parents had helped me construct a covered wagon model, which was being pulled by Playmobil oxen (or possibly cows.)

But that clay beaver was a challenge. I'd never been good with clay. Perhaps that was because we weren't given too many opportunities to use it. And now we were given a lump of it and expected to make a beaver.

And Mrs. M. kept coming around and berating me because my beaver's tail wasn't flat enough.

And no matter how hard I tried to make the tail perfect, it wasn't good enough, and she let me know it.

And I began to cry. She didn't care.

And when I went home that afternoon, I told my parents I did NOT want to go to the pioneer event at school that evening. But they made me go anyway. And I had to walk into my classroom, now wearing a bonnet, and pretend like I didn't have the keen desire to chuck 28 clay beavers at my teacher's face.

Actual photo of me channeling my inner Nellie Oleson and contemplating the throwing of 28 clay beavers.

For years afterward, I resented Mrs. M. for these moments. I partly blamed her for the fact that I was hesitant to pursue art classes in high school. I loved art, but Mrs. M. had made it clear that art wasn't supposed to be fun. It was supposed to be perfect. And if it wasn't up to her standards, you were going to hear about it. 

It wasn't until I became a teacher's assistant as an adult that I finally came to realize Mrs. M. was only human. She'd been unkind, yes, but I don't think she was deliberately malicious. She was in her sixties, just one year away from retirement. I've found that a lot of teachers in that stage of teaching tend to be unyielding. If their methods have worked for 30 years, why bother to change? Who cares if the kids are not all right?

Looking at our class photo, I know it couldn't have been an easy year for Mrs. M. I see several faces that I recall as being troublemakers. Maybe she was just over it.

Still, out of all the teachers I had in elementary school, Mrs. M. was the only one who made me feel so terrible.

It's hard to let that go.

All I can do now is try to be less like her, and more like my beloved Mrs. R, Mr. S., or Mr. M.

Thank goodness for them.

My First (And Last) Sticker Album

my first

(and last) 

sticker album

When I was 3 my mom handed me a dark blue photo album and some stickers and said, "You should start a sticker album! Your cousins do this for fun, and you should too!"

Um, okay. Putting things into an album where they can't easily be moved around & played with? Talk about the antithesis of Things I Liked To Do At Age 3.

Still... stickers = shiny....

And so I began my collection. I seem to have regularly added to the album from ages 3-7, then taken a break until some years later.

Today I'm revisiting that album. I'll go in page order, which incidentally is not chronological order. Some of the stickers I do remember receiving, others may have just materialized on the pages for all I know. 

PAGE 1

Well, clearly by the looks of Dale (?), Scrooge, Minnie, the frog and the ice cream cone, I at least attempted to move these stickers around before realizing that was a poor choice.

The "dinosaur in tar" one is a bit morbid.

And in case there's any confusion about who this album's owner is?

It's MOLLY.

That's me.

PAGE 2

Puffy stickers.

Arizona stickers. We did visit that state in 1984 so that's likely where I acquired them.

Happy St. Pat-Rick's Day! from Woodstock.

Those leaping leprechauns do seem happy.

PAGE 3

Springtime has come to the sticker album! 

Bunnies! Bluebirds! Flowers! Rainbow Jesus! And good old St. Pat-Rick making off with a load of gold.

PAGE 4

Did I have a something against Chip & Dale? Oh well. More birds. Fall stickers. Indianapolis Colts sticker. I seem to recall sports stickers being given away in cereal boxes at the time. 

PAGE 5 & 6

More birds, sentient tree, unsettling Santa... but the guy in the pink sweatpants is really the creepiest... also, why is he there twice? And who's the lady singing? What does it all mean?

PAGE 7

Some award I got in elementary school, maybe, and a random tiger gazing lovingly at it. 

I'M SUPER!

PAGE 8

The stickers on this page were added by me around age 13-14. It must have been a blank page that I thought needed to be filled.

The yellow & blue bear stickers came with a Barbie or Skipper doll, I think.

The red dinosaur was from Highlights magazine sticker set.

The school photo is of me. Dork alert.

The Stacie heart was also a Barbie thing.

Suzanne was a friend of mine.

The bubblegum machine may have been a Lisa Frank sticker.

The giant cat sticker, I believe, came out of a toy machine at a grocery store or SkateWorld or somewhere.

The green circle is one of those garage sale price stickers, and I love that my 13-year-old self thought that was important enough to include on this page.

PAGE 9

The WOW Sticker was of something called a Happy Moodie, from 1984. (I had to Google it.)

Ah, look, Woodstock & his friends are up to no good.

Upside-down rainbow bird.

Pioneer Clubs sticker.

Christmas tree.

PAGE 10

The full-bodied people stickers came out of my creative writing notebook from 3rd grade. My teacher used to comment on our stories with not only words but stickers that related to our stories. It was a great method for keeping us (well, me at least) writing. I wish I'd left these IN that notebook though. 

PAGE 11

Now it's called the Oregon Zoo. I have no memory of which animal I explored in order to receive this sticker.

PAGE 12

More puffy stickers, one of those Color Kids from Rainbow Brite flying a kite, and then this...

Okay then.

PAGE 13

Hey it's those stickers that look like they're moving! Motion stickers? 

Fun fact: Bugs Bunny turned 50 in 1990.

Other fun fact: You are old and so am I.

PAGE 14

Fuzzy stickers! And a random elephant throwing (or catching?) an apple!

PAGE 15

I know it's hard to read, but that sticker on the bottom says ALOHA HAWAII, which I probably got when we visited there in 1985. 

The rollerskating gingerbread man was a scented sticker. My kindergarten teacher would give out a sticker after carpet time to someone who had been particularly good that day. I always tried to be on my best behavior, but no stickers came my way for several months, until finally, one day, I was handed that sticker, and the pride I felt could not be contained. 

PAGE 16

Stamps! Captain Power stamps, to be precise. And a purple Color Kid skateboarding, wheee!

PAGE 17

More stamps. Birds and a random POWER ON! stamp.

PAGE 18

Those monsters were made up of multiple stickers which you assembled to make a beast of your choosing. I remember getting these circa 1985 from my mom, who had some kind of "Be Good" chart going for me at the time. The prize was these stickers.

She would organize several of these incentive programs over the years. 

I admire her optimism.

PAGE 19

Another set of monster stickers, two more scented stickers (the mouse and the horse), three more Color Kids having fun, and...

Wait, is that Marvin? He's been around that long?!? 

And yet these jokes are so clean, so pure... Does not compute.

PAGE 20

No stickers on the second-to-last page of the album, just postcards plucked from inside Highlights For Children, where I'd written my parents' first names, and signed MY name, possibly hoping to send away for these amazing things...

and then I just stuck the postcards in this album instead.

Legit 7-year-old signature, there. Take my money.

Or not.

PAGE 21

So uhhh apparently this was supposed to be the first page in the album, with directions on how to go about inserting photos. But three-year-old me said nope, I'm starting this sticker album from the other direction! BECAUSE I CAN.

Still, I did eventually use this page to keep track of... something....

1, 00, 600, 67

1, 00, 60, 66

Molly Patton

Stan - 1

Stickers

Clearly this is a code I must crack.

Until then...