“My mother always said the best cure for a cold is to drink whiskey and go dancing,” a friend once said to me at one of the first times we met at Interlochen. She was a bit earthy, a bit free-wheeling, but weren’t we all in college in the late 80′s? I am pretty sure she was a visual art major, for the life of me, I cannot remember her name anymore, but we spent a few summers together amongst the pines in upstate Michigan, just totally geeking out on creativity and almost zero ‘real life’. One weekend, her mother visited, she was magnificent. Think mid-fifties, single, jewelry artist living in Sedona and you pretty much have the picture. Lots of chunky necklaces, lots of scarves and flowing everything. I have crossed paths with several of this Earth Mother type and have always found great pleasure in their presence. Their as-long-as-you’re-not-hurting-anybody-I-don’t-give-a-fuck-what-you-do attitude is just so refreshing when your normal day-to-day life is clogged up withbusy-body Judgey McJudgersons. (The Earth Mother we met on the Galapagos was particularly intriguing. I think she ended up sleeping with the tour director, but I digress.) My friend’s mother talked us into breaking the beach curfew and swimming in our underwear (for those of you in the Interlochen-know, that would be from the dock in front of the boat cave under Kresge). We jumped in and swam out a bit, she then summoned us back in and produced a flask from her jacket and had us line up for a quick shot. The whiskey hit our throat and spread through our bodies like lightening bolts, warming, energizing, enlivening.

To this day, I still think about drinking whiskey and going dancing whenever I feel a cold coming on or taking a flask with me for a midnight swim. It is one of my many fond memories of Interlochen.

And then…

I am sure this will cause Christopher Lowell to drop his glue gun and suck all the air out of his craft room with one huge gay gasp, but please do not have mannequins in your house. Art installations are one thing, but staged in corners or sitting on chairs is another. It is not that I find mannequins creepy or even that interesting, I see them every day, I sometimes value my interactions with them at work more so than my actual coworkers. I find it creepy that you have one in your home, that you live with one basically. My mind races with scenarios of your evenings, I blame a lot of it on Ryan Reynolds.

I think I have been rather vocal about my dislike for book shelves in the public parts of a person’s home. They seem to cause too much weight in an area, they throw the decor off, and plus, they basically brag to your visitors about how smart you are. I look them over, find college text books or other books I know for a fact have never had their spines cracked, and just dislike the pretension that book shelves convey.

Still, all that said, I would rather have a room full of cinder block and particle board book shelves than one mannequin sitting on the sofa.

Haven’t you gone over to someone’s house for the first time and found out they collect something you could have never imagined? Dolls. Mackenzie-Childs tableware. Knives. Your whole impression of them shitfs and you secretly nickname them “The Doll Guy” or “Alice in Wonderland Guy” or “Psycho Steve.” Well you will be “Mannequin Guy.” So, you have that going for you.