First Models

The human action of making entails two distinct phases-

making-up (mental imagining) and

making-real (endowing that mental object with a material or verbal form)

Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, 22

Around age 10 my best friend Melissa Wolter and I made dozens of these shoe box sized models. They are what they look like, which is:
cardboard, bits of people’s recycling we snatched on the walk to school and cut up and reconfigured, re-purposed beads, pipe cleaners, fabric scraps from grandparents’ clothes,
and a lot of hot glue.

But what they also are is models of safe homes with needs met and everything carefully, thoughtfully accommodating,
which we had not experienced, but which we could co-imagine,
make up and make real together,
even if in miniature.

Our aesthetic was the strive to have all needs met-

“What else do you want in the bathroom?
On the bedside table?
Here, I did something extra in the room where the bad thing happened last week-
What other snacks in the kitchen?”

Then we’d get hungry enough or enough hot glue burns or come back into our full sizes, not the diminutive sizes we were being to be able to live in our perfect houses,

We’d get up to make each other our after school snack,
Freschetta or Red Baron frozen pizza
Mission tortilla and Kraft Shredded Mexican Cheese quesadillas,
popcorn,
mac and cheese with hot dogs,
Creamy chicken ramen

-
Dinner some nights.
so grateful to that dinner some nights
when Mom didn’t come home until 10
with a bottle or two and a bag of MacDonald’s.

Then the next day Melissa came over and she and I made them,
we made the culture of caring and creating for each other also-
a gentler, more loving, more creative and fun and worth-being-in universe between girl friends.

Then we scaled them up, turning a place where I’d suffered one of my worst traumas into a secret care cave.
Here we militarily, powerfully occupied space.
it was a Harry Potter under the stairs closet behind the closet in my mother’s room, which we cleared of old suitcases
and transformed.

We laid down a Lion King comforter, and many pillows.
We wallpapered the back-knees of the staircase with torn and cut out magazine images of our choosing.
Through a dedicated practice, of gleaning from restrictive teen magazines at the time, looking for even one thing in a catalog we had any innate desire for, and only keeping that which we chose, and arranging these for ourselves, re-contextualizing and making new collaged compositions from the few choice images that we could see fit to use forward. These collages covered our pencil boxes, our notebooks, our Bible covers, our textile inventions and our architectural models.
Their meaning and method inspired the mini-societies we’d build each week or so, the upheavals we’d lead on the playground, the ephinanies and business deals we led in Challenge class on Fridays, and the neighborhood news show and film studio we maintained, at our height. All this as we wrote stories and made plots, once satisfied at scale within a shoe box. .

We scaled out, into to the neighborhood.
In a development called “Williamsburg Settlement” we turned corners of empty lots, overgrown areas outside the subdivision treeline, pool complex nooks, garage attics, and tree shrub corners into girl run clubhouses.

I was simultaneously learning and importing this to playtime with my twin-friends at my dad’s townhouse complex in the Energy Corridor, queering Country Place Townhomes.

I’d go back to Melissa and she came back to me, getting even braver in outdoor spaces
Big, open spaces like the crawdad bayou and the dirt bike trails-
places where girls don’t feel safe and “the big boys ruled.”

But, we strutted up with our cultivated space taking skills, and created, on Hi8 handheld video tape, chronicles of the area and a remake of The Blaire Witch Project, using the boy’s stomping grounds as backdrop for our movie sets.

These were my first precedents of inserting an alternative into that which it amends, and they made a world of difference to everything that came after.