Reading The Tea

What is sucess? How do you know when you have (or haven’t) achieved it? What’s the measure?

When I was little, we had a game called “Careers” that I loved to play. At the start of the game, you wrote down a secret goal, a combination of money, happiness and fame that added up to 60, that you had to collect throughout the game, by entering various side career paths, like “Business” or “Hollywood” or “Moon Exploration.” (Yes, we were playing a very old version of the game.) After each career path you picked up “Experience” cards that could be used in place of a roll of the die, so you had control over which square you ended up on. Whoever got to her or his personal goal first won. I usually balanced it fairly evenly, with a weight toward more money, since that was generally reliably more easy to pick up (Go to college, leave w/ the “science” degree, go to “Sea” a few times (really cheap experience), then head over to “Moon Exploration,” use your experience cards to avoid landing in the hospital and get that $10,000. (Soooooo much more money when you’re eight.) My Dad would often exasperate us by making his goal 60 happiness. Now I understand why. And sometimes he won.

It’s so strange to see the wave of nostalgia toys that are hitting the kids’ stores recently. Strolling through the toy section in Target is a journey to childhood. Transformers, Lite-Brites, Care Bears, who would’ve thought that they’d come back? Now the kids who first played with them are having little ones of their own, and what could be better to play with than the stuff that we loved? I had a huge collection of My Little Ponies. They were an aqua-friendly herd — I remember playing with them most in the bathtub and the kiddie pool in the back yard. The fake terf that we had spread over the deck (Ooh, remember that?) was the perfect field for frolicking. My favorites were, of course, the babies. My favorite, that is, until they came out with a teenager-size (bigger than the babies, smaller than the moms) pony who had delicate, iridescant wings. She was truly beautiful. I must not be the only one hit with such a poignant strain of nostalgia — even some of todays most talented artists aren’t immune, including Annie Leibovitz. Opening October 21st, Milk Gallery will be featuring a set of oversized My Little Ponies (How’s that for irony?)decorated by what they bill as “some of today’s leading female artists.” The project seems a little too similar to the cows, and the set of rather bad copycat projects it spawned for my liking. However, will I be there? Oh yes. Who can resist My Little Ponies? My six-year-old self would never forgive me.