Pageant Question 3: Describe your room to me.

Pee-wee Herman sits on dusty, hardcover theater books. He is now sporting a grey stick-on moustache, he has a deputy badge from Fantasy Island's Wild West Show, and a talking Elmo doll perches nervously in his lap.  Pee-wee on the fireplace mantel means a lot to me.  It means that I am free to be myself, and that my life now with my manfriend Andy is what it should be.  To describe my room is to describe the entirety of our apartment, and my life.


When I was kid, I would pick up everything.  I collected paperclips, buttons, notes, pennies, cool rocks.  Not only was I a magpie, I was also a pack rat.  I saved everything.  I kept what I was given, what I made, and what I found.  I taped it to my walls or into a notebook or I put it in a box and I saved it.  I like stuff, and I keep it.  If you look in our basement today, you will see the storage is full of boxes waiting for the moment we move into a house and I can unpack my life before now.  I know I have lost some on the way, from the years where I had to restrain myself.  I restrained my urges because people (specifically ex-husbands) would think I was crazy.  They didn't like my stuff, and they thought a house needed to be "decorated".  I was not myself.  My rooms back then did not reflect me--there were no knickknacks, no stuffed animals, no weird pictures, no drawers of magpie objects.  But you can't not be yourself forever, and I shed two husbands and two houses and I am now with a fellow magpie/pack rat.

My manfriend Andy shares my quirky love of weird things.  We have a jar of "found objects": items we have picked up on the street that we thought were cool.  I am so proud of this jar because it is so me.  Our mantel is another representation of our combined oddity of expression.  Andy's knickknacks mingle with mine and they both mingle with knickknacks we have found together.  I don't have to hide it all away anymore.  We sometimes stand in our living room and point out all the cool objects we have to one another.  There's the hand and foot my cousin gave me.  There is Frankenstein in his sweater.  There are our green army men waiting to invade a fairy hut.  Our apartment is not "decorated", but it is filled with our creative (and maybe a little obsessive) love.

I still have much of what was in my childhood room, and once Andy and I get our house, I look forward to unpacking the rest of who I am.  To describe my room is to revisit the relief I feel when I remember that I am as free as I was as a child.  Free to be the magpie and the pack rat, free to use a Pee-wee Herman doll as a focal point, and free to be me with someone who understands.