I grew up in a land of make-believe, of bedtime stories, dress-up, artwork and never-ending playtime. My mother was a preschool teacher and believed that play time was learning time. My younger sister, Briana, and I were constantly learning. My dress-up bin held a universe of possibilities, filled with gowns, and shoes, skirts and tank tops, costume jewelry and plastic swords. On a daily basis we would dawn an alter personality; I was usually a princess, my sister, a pirate. We would run around in the dry southern California heat, our skin growing darker by the moment, but never burning. We would run in and out of our playhouse in the backyard, collecting kittens, piling them into our wagon and take them on a parade of unexplored territory. In the area where the apple tree is now, we would leave the hose running and create a prehistoric world with dinosaurs and build mud structures, sitting in what we called a mud pie, covered head to toe with wet brown earth.
Pictures decorate my parent’s home of my sister dressed as Batty from the movie Fern Gully, standing in the hallway, her long, awkward body, all legs, dressed in black with an antenna. Like wise, I am often depicted in a red silk dress with a cat in my lap, all smiles. Those were the days, when reality was too hot and too dull to live in, when shaving cream art and monster goop were supreme. Nothing could touch us here. Not our parents fighting, our racist teachers, nor our neighbors whom we could not understand. This world was ours, we created it.
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