I remember the sacred domain that is the imaginative play when one is young. I remember the coming together of minds and the fights that happen when two people are trying to decide on the objective of the play. I also remember the sweet, fun spontaneity of engaging fully with a dear friend and having a grand time. I seek this collaborative energy out as an artist. I feel the fiery passion of making an idea happen when I am playing and working with another person.
One of the main games I remember from my childhood was playing radio station on the phone with my friend Harriet. She lived in a town a half hour away. Her mother was my Godmother so we had known each other sense we were very young. We could not have regular play dates so our time was spent connecting via the phone. Radio show was all about Harriet being the disk jockey and me being her sidekick. She ran the radio show and I got to be all the different callers in and various characters that also helped run the station. I remember asking her once on why I couldn't run things and she said she did a better job. When we tried doing it the other way once it was true, she was much more bossy and managerial then I was at that time. Though I was in the sub role in this play I still got a lot of freedom to build up my characters and decide what they would do on the show. We had zoologists on talking about animals, various insider dramas within the folks running the station, romance and adventure. My mom would let us play for hours at a time in the creative soup of our minds.
I am watching the imagination play unfold in Sweetpea. She is now starting to act out things we do with her doll. She feeds the baby her bottle and gives it little toys to play with. She also tries to play with our cat Oli in this manner. She passes him toys and attempts to rough house with him. He is not pleased by this but puts up with a lot of fur grabbing and chasing despite his want for space. I wonder if she will have an imaginary friend like I had. My imaginary friend lived in the laundry basket and came out when I had to go to the bathroom. She kept me company during the many times a day a young person spends on the potty. Having a little made up friend helped me through the potty training process and kept me staying put for a little while.
My favorite imagination play was with my friend Jillian. We would build intricate houses of shawls and tissues for our Barbie’s to live in. The stories we came up with were tackling the hard things we heard about and saw in our diverse city. We had pregnant teenagers and formally homeless women living together. We had kids being raised by grandparents while their moms were in rehab. We also had plenty of fashion shows and classic nuclear families too. But we were always pulled to look at the hard parts of our society and act them out in our games. There was fighting and battles, sometimes fairylands and even a game where one of the characters was a Barbie turned into a horse. Jillian and I worked well as a team, coming up with the games together and enjoying our magical world. We also wrote plays together and put them on for my parents on the front porch of my house. We made big cakes from box mixes and would line them with candles full of wishes to be kissed and to have our first boyfriends. We loved each other fiercely and our collaborations set me up for a lifetime of working best in healthy, artistic collaboration.
My friend Neala and I would play a game called "Adventures in New York." The game was based off an experience we actually had where my family and each of the kids took a friend to NYC to go see the air and space museum. We drove and had a tire pop right before getting to the museum in Queens and had to find a tow truck and good shop to fix it in. This was all fun adventure for Neala and I. At one point we were picked up in a big, black, town car and driven to the garage. I had to sit on my brothers friends lap to make us all fit. This made me blush. Neala and I had each brought a doll and had them act out each part of our city adventure. In the end we had to take the train home and my dad had to come back for the car. The game was played outside her house or in the basement with variations on what happened while we were in New York. We even had a theme song we would sing and a dance we would do down her drive way when we played.
These time capsules are some of my favorite memories. Imaginative play had shaped me as an artist. At the time, it helped me process the heavy stuff that happened around me that I did not understand. It also gave me allies in the process of growing up. I am excited to watch Sweetpea's imagination blossom and play the games with her that she makes up. I can already tell we will be playing the role of dogs for a good long while.
