i'm her mom! no...she's not.

when my brother sam and i were kids, we went on countless road trips with our grandparents, and listened to hours upon hours of stephen king books on tape and old radio broadcasts of "the shadow" (who knows, by the way). this early exposure to recorded audio inspired us to tape our own shows, stories and ridiculous news programs. we came up with my absolute favorite in the months before our younger brother clay was born: having just watched an episode of "the magic school bus" in which the bus and everyone in it shrinks to the size of a red blood cell so that they can learn about the human body, we developed a story about how we traveled deep into our pregnant, ravenous mother to find all the things she'd eaten recently (which included, as we discovered in our journey, the hind legs of our family dog). we were insane as children and i love that we have it preserved for eternity on tape.

as technology progressed, and our little brother, now born, started to grow up, we began using our parents' video camera to film our characters, the best of which was the one we created for clay. her name was mrs. marmalade, and she was an elderly british woman who walked with a cane and wore the old, handmade cardigans we inherited from our great-grandparents. after outfitting him with the cardigans and big, floppy hats, we forced our three year old brother to act out story lines like "mrs. marmalade goes to the market," in which she putz'd around for fifteen minutes to find enough coins to buy her butter, mumbling to herself (side note: there is nothing like a tiny boy trying to do an old lady english accent). again, we were insane as children.

all of this would have been perfect fodder for a youtube channel. if i may say so myself, we were hysterical, crazy little performers. we could have been contenders!

but, because we came of age a decade too soon, none of our creative genius exists for the universe to access. that's why i think i love this so much: kittens. i know i just railed against exploiting children on national stages, but i don't think this is exploitative. i would have absolutely loved posting something like this as a kid. so much attention!