And so I will begin again. At the beginning.
THE BEGINNING was really the end. More precisely, the end of my father's life. The summer I became an orphan, we had to decide what to do with his earthly goods, and aside from the obvious Goodwill, homeless shelter, and food pantry donations, we were unsure what to do with the rest. I really needed some dining room furniture so we hauled his set 900 miles home and put it in a storage unit since my then-home was too small to accommodate it. My brain now wants to go off onto a Storage Wars tangent, but I'm cutting it off at the knees. Coincidentally, the year my dad died was the same year that Mad Men premiered-2007.
MAD MEN. I am seriously in love with this show. The whole era of the early to mid 60's is so unfathomable to me. Why did the women have those impossibly styled hair-dos, and how did they maintain them? Why did they torture themselves with girdles? What was with those patterns? What happened to the fedoras and cigarette cases? Did people really drink like that at work? Could they smoke anywhere they damned well pleased-the train, the plane, the doctor's office for crissakes? I watch this show primarily for entertainment, but also with the scrutiny of some historical anthropologist looking for clues to a lost civilization. Those people were not us...but yet they were.
THE CONNECTION between the two is that I became addicted to nostalgia-60's nostalgia. Mostly in terms of décor, but in other ways too-I can rock a jello salad like nobody's business. When we moved into our newer and bigger home, which could accommodate my 60's era Drexel dining room set, I began searching Craigslist for a matching china cabinet and found one (!!!). I helped my husband replace the dining room light fixture with a retro-looking pendant chandelier-the installation of which almost divorced us and lives on as our top one worst DIY project ever. Oxymoronically, if you search for this light on the Lowe's website, it shows up under the category of "Modern Lighting". Everything old is new again sometime.
THERE WAS SOMETHING MISSING. Liquor. And lots of it. Don Draper, while fictional, must have had the liver of a bull moose to carry on the way he did back in the day. That man could drank! I decided that what I needed in my little haven was a bar. But not just any bar, you know. A 60's bar. A bar like the one D.D. keeps behind his desk for noontime nippage. A very credenza-like bar which by day looked like furniture, but by night transformed into and adult beverage oasis. I needed more furniture. Something crazy different and something I could make happen as cheaply as possible. I'm a thrifty girl after all.
THE SEARCH. This part is painfully boring, so I'm not even going to write about it. Suffice to say, it involved lots of thrift stores which aggravated my allergies, and trips to various local websites. In the end, it cost more than I wanted it to, but it was truly beautiful.
THE REVEAL is going to be breathtaking because it mixes form with function. This thing I had searched for had been a staple in all long ago living rooms. It was now extinct from humanity except for the few which had survived, collecting dust and cobwebs in barns, sheds, and musty wet basements. If you have reached your fortieth birthday, you may still remember...the stereo console. It looked like this:
All you had to do was lift up its wooden lid, and inside lived a record player, an AM/FM stereo, and maybe if you were really, really lucky, an 8 track tape player. But I don't think those arrived until the '70s. If you don't know what a record is, Google it. If you know what this is, then you remember that records came in different sizes. I found this one in with my console today. I'm going to figure out how to incorporate it into my finished design.
Below is my treasure. I have to clean the crud out of its insides, remove the dry rotted wires, record player and stereo parts, add some shelves here and there, and slap on about 3 coats of trusty Old English furniture polish, but in the end, will be perfect for my needs. By the way, the absolute best store in the area for this kind of stuff is the Habitat For Humanity ReStore in Williamsburg and Newport News:
Tomorrow: DAY 2-The teardown
