The year is 2004. I’m 9 years old. It’s winter and I’m in my childhood bedroom trapped inside, not by the weather, but instead, by my own prerogative: I’ve decided to make a music video.
Before I dive into this story, something to keep in mind so you can paint this picture as delicately and detailed as possible: As I said, the year was 2004, so the equipment I had as a lower-middle class 9-year-old in semi-rural Ohio ready to produce a music video was not looking too hot. I had a digital camera, but it probably wasn’t the newest model and it was definitely closer to one of those attachable webcams than any DSLR we know today. In retrospect, it’s fairly clear the video I was about to make would be, A.) 60 seconds tops, due to the memory capacity of the technological moment and B.) pixelated as fuck. But I could not be stopped.
My vision was simple: A snowy north pole, visualized with a simple backdrop sprinkled with homemade paper snowflakes, a charismatic yet elegant Mrs. Claus type, effortless choreography, and it would all be set to the one and only Christmas bop of all eternity, Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You”.
The reality was only a little different.
First of all, fuck making paper snowflakes; that was only eating up valuable production time. I went straight for a blue fuzzy blanket that was a free gift from a makeup purchase my mom had made, which was a skimpy twin size to give you an idea. With blanket in hand, I promptly climbed atop my super cool pull-out futon and duct taped the blanket along the edge of the ceiling, spreading the sheet along the wall. “Hm, not as big as I thought,” I said to myself. “But oh well, we’re* doing this thing!”
*Me, myself, and my delusions.
What was next? Oh right, a charismatic yet elegant Mrs. Claus. I had simply the best person in mind to play the role—me! But where, oh where, would I find a Mrs. Claus costume? Much like the paper snowflakes holding me back, there was no time to diligently craft or purchase an authentic costume. So in the spirit of creativity, I saw a red shirt crumpled on my grimy pre-teen floor and swiftly carted it over to our production’s costume designer. Believe it or not, the costume department consisted solely of myself—my sewing kit made up of scissors and duct tape. Of course, I knew what my vision was: “Charismatic and elegant” was code for young and sexy. And so, just as you expected, I cut the hell out of my red D.A.R.E shirt. Yes, D.A.R.E, which stands for Drug Abuse Resistance Education. This is definitely what they had in mind when they passed out the free shirts to the 4th graders.
Cutting the sleeves off and shredding it to pieces making a top and a skirt, I then clumsily safety pinned the ‘garment’ over my current clothes. “It’s coming together!”, I thought.
At this point, going with the flow of production thus far, choreography was out of the picture. Improv was the way of the shoot and I wasn’t going to disrupt my process. I had the music ready, I had the camera ready (on a pile of books stacked as a very professional rig). Lights, camera, action, as they say. I clicked play on the boombox, “Dink dink dink dink, bing bing bing bing…” (you can hear it, right?) *presses record* “Iiiiiiiiiiiiiii do-” *loud crashing and ripping noises happen simultaneously*
It took 5 and a half seconds for my Saturday evening’s worth of work to collapse into a hellscape. Let me paint this picture for you. There’s a thin, free-gift-of-a-blanket, dangling from my bedroom wall above a tiny futon couch that I’m now crouched over since my foot caught in its fold-up crevice, and I have a makeshift “sexy Mrs. Claus” costume made out of scraps of a D.A.R.E t-shirt on over my clothes, and there’s now a pile of books on the floor due to my flailing 9-year-old body knocking it over on my way down during my first interpretive and improvised dance move. Meanwhile, Mariah is still blasting through my boombox.
Almost as soon as I fell, I began to pack the whole thing up. “Nothing to see here!” I ripped the blanket off the wall, I replaced the books on the shelves, and I returned the camera to my mom’s room after immediately deleting the footage (I know, I really want to see it now too). My mom was in the living room and seemed not to have heard any of what had occurred in the room next door. That, or she’s the best kind of person who doesn’t acknowledge the scent of failure. And so that was that, a failed attempt at creative genius, gone without a trace. Or so I thought.
A few years later, picture me, the girl who made a sexy Mrs. Claus outfit out of a ripped up D.A.R.E shirt as a 9 year old, as a much more mature woman, in the the 7th grade. It was the weekend and I had a friend over. So often as 7th graders do, we decided that our hangout would have to turn into a sleepover. And because our sleepover was impromptu, I would have to provide my friend with all of the necessary amenities to stay the night at someone’s house—easy peasy. I start hunting for a t-shirt in my messy closest. I knew I had a pile of old clothes to be used as pajamas at the ready. I grabbed something without inspection and quickly tossed it to my friend. Next, I’d go look to see if we had any unopened toothbrushes for guests.
“What is THIS?” I can hear my friend shouting as she snickers behind me. “What are you talking about?” I turn around. There, in all of it’s glory, is a red D.A.R.E t-shirt, barely holding itself together as it’s been shredded and manipulated to be worn as a sexy Mrs. Claus costume years earlier. “I can explain…”
I told her the whole story. I explained my vision, and the gruesome reality. I mean, she was my best friend, we could laugh about this together and keep this our little secret, right?
Wrong. Fast forward a couple of years. Now I’m in high school. It was a normal weekend night, I was a third wheel on my friend’s date. We were at Red Robin, obviously. You see, as cool as I’ve been my entire life, me and my crowd of friends haven’t exactly been dating experts from the get-go; hence my best friend inviting me on her first date. This was indeed the friend who held my secret. Certainly we had a bond. A common trust if you will. We were comrades, through and through.
But what do best friends do when they’re trying to woo a cute-almost-popular-boy-who-you-met-in-choir-class? They embarrass the shit out of their best friend to their advantage. Yes, lo-and-behold I had been ousted. One moment I’m enjoying my strawberry lemonade and the next thing I know I’m cornered, unable to talk myself out of the inescapable. I could hear the duct tape ripping all over again.
And that my friends, is a saga indicative of my entire social (and anti-social) trajectory. And there’s pleeeeeenty more where that came from.
Candice Chantalou 