I grew up in a house full of sisters, five sisters and one brother, to be exact. All of my sisters and I, at one point or another, enrolled in dance classes. I also spent a year or two of my high school career participating in local theater productions. Dance and theater are, by nature, trades that cater to the exhibitionist personality. Performers enjoy being the focus of attention, not just on stage, but off stage as well. Attend any gathering of performers, or any gathering of my family for that matter, and you will soon see that most conversations are really a simple unspoken battle for center stage. No matter the subject, everyone vies for their position as the wittiest, the most insightful, inspiring, hilarious, or shocking.
Growing up, we had a living room area that looked roughly like the diagram below:
For most of my childhood the dining room as empty. Truthfully, the idea of a dinette set in the “Dining Room” was nothing short of preposterous! My mother wouldn’t let any of her children eat over carpet until we were 18, and as such, a dinette set would have simply taken up perfectly good play space. The empty dining room, elevated about 4 inches higher than the abutting living room, provided a type of permanent stage for our family. I remember several spontaneous plays, head-stand contests, dress-up parties, and puppet shows blossoming on our in-home stage. And the dance parties, oh the dance parties that hatched unprompted there in our dining room. We danced to the likes of New Kids on the Block, The Nutcracker, Little Richard, Beach Boys, Disney, and Vivaldi. We danced with complete abandon too, because that is what you do when you are dancing in the dining room with your sisters.
One large picture window at the east end of the Living Room gave a perfect view of our shenanigans to any passersby on the street and, more interestingly, to our neighbors across the street, the Harts, who also had a large picture window into their front room. Once, the day after a particularly enthusiastic dance party, when the Harts were over at our house one of the kids said, “It looked like you guys were having a really good time over here last night. What were you doing?”
My sisters and I eyed each other, “A dance party, duh!”
That happened multiple times in our childhood. We’d have a cut-throat somersault contest and the next day the Harts would comment on how they watched a few moments of it from their front room window. We’d be making a movie with our home camera, and the Harts would ask to see it the next day. It never occurred to any of us that perhaps this arrangement had created a certain type of exhibitionist/voyeuristic relationship between us, mostly we just felt like the Harts' living room was a mere extension of our own and that we could count on them as captive and concerned audience members. And honestly, we considered ourselves fascinating people so of course the Harts would be interested in our monkeyshines; who wouldn’t?
That’s one of the things I loved about growing up in that house. There was always something going on, always someone willing to play, always some mischief waiting to happen. I remember my older sister’s friend Jake coming over to our house on multiple occasions, and because we usually had a slew of neighborhood kids running through the house, he couldn’t ever quite remember who actually belonged to the family. In a way, they all belonged. My mother had a knack for making her home an open forum for friends and fun. Our house had a strict come-on-in-the-party-is-just-getting-started policy.
And that, my friends, is why today I can feel secure in starting this blog. Sure, I’ll grant that I am a bit of an exhibitionist for doing so, but at the end of the day you’re a bit of a voyeur for reading it. So let’s just agree that we’re both a little screwy. It doesn’t matter if you’re family looking to check in on me, or if you’re a friend I’ve lost contact with, or even if you’re a complete stranger looking to bask in the glow of my literary genius—let’s everyone pile on into the nut house because, really, this party is just getting started.
*Though I am now an admitted exhibitionist, I have taken the liberty of changing a few names to protect the people who may or may not know that I’m writing about them.
