Well, last week I swore that I'd write a post every day, but yesterday and the day before I was afflicted with that horrible condition known as writer's block, and I was worried that if I posted something, it would seem dumb. But I'm back again now, and it's all thanks to my mom's friend Lissa, who cued this post with a simple message on her Facebook: "Am having a Veruca Salt moment."
The message I commented to her was so giddy, and so useless to convey my true feelings on the subject, that I decided just to make the whole thing into a post.
When I was about eleven, I was a big fan of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I loved little Charlie Bucket and his Grandpa Joe, and I was convinced that Willy Wonka was real, somehow, somewhere. There HAD to be someone out there who made "marshmallows that taste of violets, and rich caramels that change color every ten seconds as you suck them, and little feathery sweets that melt away deliciously the moment you put them between your lips." I was as greedy for his fictional candy as any of those kids who toured the factory. And actually, that book completely sold me on Wonka bars. Every Sunday in Lent that year, I'd have to pick myself out a Wonka bar. I'm the type of girl that advertisers probably dream of. But the truth is, I was quietly hoping for a golden ticket.
It didn't stop there. Charlie Bucket's bratty fellow ticket winners took my fancy as well. After all, if not for them there would be no Oompa-Loompa songs, no horrible punishments to giggle over. Violet Beauregard was my favorite, simply because, compared to the rest of them, she didn't seem like a bad girl. Her habit of saving her chewed-up gum didn't disgust me, the way it was supposed to. It fascinated me. It had never occurred to me that you could do that before. Being turned purple must have seemed more like a reward than a punishment to me. After all, purple was my favorite color. And she still got to have a truckload of candy every month.
So I dutifully saved my gum and chewed it for days upon days, even though the taste of it made my stomach turn when there was no sugar left in it. But the day came when I had to eat dinner, and naturally I did what Violet always did under the circumstances. I stuck the gum behind my ear.
That was the first and the last time that my mother ever had to cut gum out of my hair. But I am willing to bet that if I ever end up with gum in my hair again, I'll have my current favorite book to blame for it.
You see, ever since I became interested in stories, I always wanted to copy every single one of the fantastic things that my favorite characters ever did. It seemed like the next best thing to actually being them, and I thought that this would give me a richness of experience that I would never have by simply reading about them. That's probably why I'm so obsessed with acting, because I love any excuse to dress up as a character and pretend to be her. Any excuse at all.
It was, and is, something very like a disease. A month or two ago, my mother and I sat laughing when we realized that, every time I ever got into trouble, it was because I was trying to copy someone from a book.
Example number one. My Aunt, who was in the ballet, used to come over to my house every week to teach the homeschoolers how to dance. By "the homeschoolers", I mean the group of starry-eyed seven-or-eight-year-olds that we were. We were all in love with ballet, the frilly pink tutus and the silk slippers, but while they were all cat-stepping across the floor, I was leaning up against the bookshelf, daydreaming happily about Narnia. Unfortunately for me, we'd just read The Silver Chair, and a few lines of it were running through my head:
Circling round and round the dancers was a ring of Dwarfs, all dressed in their finest clothes; mostly scarlet with fur-lined hoods and golden tassles and big furry top-boots. As they circled round they were all diligently throwing snowballs...They weren't throwing them at the dancers as silly boys might have been doing in England. They were throwing them through the dance in such perfect time with the music and with such perfect aim that if all the dancers were in exactly the right places at exactly the right moments, no one would be hit. This is called the Great Snow Dance and it is done every year in Narnia on the first moonlit night when there is snow on the ground.
Having felt in the back of every closet and drawer in the house already, I knew that there was no quick route from Garden City to Narnia, but I also knew that it was in my power to bring something of Narnia to Garden City. There were no snowballs, so I had to improvise. And I improvised with the first thing that came to my hand, which was a small piece of wood with the blunt end of a nail sticking out of it that we'd brought back from the workshop at the Long Island Children's Museum the day before. (It was part of a birdhouse kit)
Well, how do you explain to your aunt and your mother that you were just trying to be a dwarf? When you're eight years old, and your mother's mad at you, you think they won't understand. So you file it away in your memory and you don't tell your mom what was really going on in your head until you're at least thirteen, at which point she apologizes to you in a tone of voice somewhere directly between a laugh and a cry. Anyway, that's what happened to me.
Example number two. The time I read a picture book about a girl and her artist grandmother. The grandmother taught her how to make a "glorious blue sky" by dropping paint on the paper and then dumping water on the whole thing. My art teacher never liked me again after that.
Example number three. The gum.
When the spring came I stood talking happily to the flowers, never picking them, because that's what Irene did in The Princess and the Goblin. When the new snow fell I tried to walk across it like Legolas and grew frustrated when it fell away under my feet. It all came of not being an elf. When autumn came I used to deliberately bruise up my apples like Emily from Emily's Runaway Imagination, because she thought they tasted better that way. And I never could sweep a floor without imagining myself as that woman fighting the flood in Stormy, Misty's Foal--"The sea kept coming in under our door and kept pushing up my little rug, and I took my broom and tried to whisk it away, and then I got my dustpan and tried to sweep the water into it! A broom and a pan against the sea!"
When the mist fell around the house I'd go walking out in it, pretending to be Coraline. It was a good thing for me that Coraline never stood out in traffic. If I'd been able to reach the ridgepole of the roof or dye my hair Green-Gables Green, I can tell you with all honesty that I would probably have done both of those things.
I used to regularly order things off the menus at restaurants that I didn't like, such as celery soda (close enough to the parsley soda in A Series of Unfortunate Events, right?) and lamb (which Martha Morse loved, but which didn't suit my American tastes, I guess--anyway, that lamb cost almost forty dollars and I hardly ate a penny's worth.) To this day, I have a funny-looking way of waving that my sisters mock mercilessly. It's because years ago I tried to copy a description I found in Bridge To Terabithia--"her fingers rippled in a wave"--too many times, and it became a habit. People like me are the reason why they warn little kids not to jump off the roof with a Superman cape on.
Well, there's not much of a point to this post, and the only moral that I can think of is "Don't ever try to imitate Allie, or you'll end up looking really, really stupid." But I can't honestly tell you never to pretend to be a character from a book. It might get you into a lot of trouble that you'll regret, but it might also provide you with some of your happiest memories. I know that it did for me.
Three or four winters ago, when my sisters and I were feeling sick, my mother sent us, one by one, out of the house to get some fresh air. I was the last to go, and I wasn't too happy to be doing it, either. I've always been known for hating the cold.
"Mom, do I have to?"
"Just once around the house, and then you can come back in and I'll make you some tea."
Well, my guess is that my mind probably went, Alice in Wonderland! (That's another good thing for me, that she always checked bottles to see if they were marked "poison" before she drank out of them.) So, with the promise of tea on my mind, I reluctantly bundled up and walked down the steps, blowing clouds of cold air as I went.
As I stepped on the snow I stopped. And looked down. And took another step. And then I cheered out loud.
During the three days that I'd been sick, the snow had frozen over completely, and now, without even meaning to, I was walking across the top of it at last.
Take that, Legolas.
Allie, this is hilarious! < Hannah
Posted by: Hannah | April 22, 2010 at 11:34 AM
Thanks! :)
Posted by: Allie | April 22, 2010 at 03:08 PM
Just saw this post now, and it is so sweet!
Posted by: Mary Grace | June 07, 2010 at 07:07 PM