When I was young, maybe 12 , my best friend and I were in Dillards. If you’re not from the Midwest you might now know, Dillards is a department store that in my humble opinion, a step down from Nordstrom and a step up from Macy’s. Don’t ask me how to quantify that, it’s just my gut feeling. 

Anyway, we were in Dillards and we were in a fancy dress section. From time to time our moms would let us try some fancy dresses on. By “fancy dresses” I mean something probably someone would wear to prom in the year 2000. I remember putting one on that was definitely too big for me and saying “I’m going to wear something like this to the Oscars one day.” No idea where that came from but the memory sticks with me.

At the time, my best friend and I made home movies, watched TLC (Trading Spaces a top pick), and memorized the dance from Molly Shannon’s “Superstar.” These home movies included “Scarfy Death” a murder that closely resembled the murder from the movie “The Private Eyes” with Don Knotts and Tim Conway, you know, the normal films 12 year old girls watch. My favorite that I don’t think has a title was about a plane crash. Let me paint you a picture. We set up rows of chairs in her playroom and put life size Winnie the Pooh Characters in them along with other stuffed animals. Her sister came in with a voice over of “we are going to have a little turbulence” cut to Lauren and I shaking the chairs of Eeyore, Piglet, and Pooh and a shot of one of us shaking a magazine. Then, and I believe this to be one of our finest filmmaking moments, a paper airplane that we flew into the pool in her backyard.

Lauren and I obviously survived (Sorry Christopher Robin) and were floating on a raft at sea. That is until we found a deserted island…or so we thought. Lauren’s sister was living on this deserted island and she  taught us how to cook aka putting a goldfish beanie baby over a lamp that had a fire drawing taped to it. Lauren had only one keepsake that survived the crash, a photo of Brad Pitt aka her husband. Meanwhile, I was yelling in some weird accent about how we should all have worn our safety belts which obviously makes no sense since we survived.

I should have known that I was a sucker for the arts and making movies then. It’s no surprise that I am creating sketches now and it’s making me laugh as much as it did then.

Don’t worry, there are about a million more home movies and stories I’ll be referencing here but I thought it was a good jumping point for us and the intro to this blog.

A lot has happened between the days when I was making those home movies to the sketches I make today and I like to think that as life got more complicated, I always knew I would make my way back here. That my heart would guide me back to that kind of deep seeded joy I knew as a girl making home movies with her best friend.

So, I am grateful that you’re here, hanging out with me and my blog. Let’s not take things too seriously and let’s always find our way back to joy. Sound good?

With a lot of love & a little humor,

Mary