Thursday, December 07, 2006

Beigeville
Yesterday the Princess had a play date with a classmate after kindeegarten and I retrieved her at 3:00 with just enough time to say hello, how are you, was she good? before shuttling off to pick up Kiddo at 3:25. I was lured into staying with presspot coffee and ginger snaps. Not just Archway ginger snaps, but the really thin crisp kind that a friend sent my hostess from Sweden, from whence she hails. And coffee so strong that my eyesballs were vibrating. Yummmmmmm.

Called the school and got Kiddo sent home on the bus with her older kids and kicked back and talked about a broad menagerie of topics: The use of color in homes, rostra bricks for pool construction, the mixed messages that young girls are bombarded with in our society, and her experience as a foreigner in the good ole USA after 9/11.

She and her American spouse had just relocated to Kansas from Sweden and were living in Overland Park while their house was being moved (yes, picked up from Lawrence and moved to Vinland) and had gone to a party at a house that was beige, surrounded by other huge, nondescript homes that were ecru, mushroom, and taupe. No one would speak to them about their opinions, their lives, the things that define who they are as people. She felt that no one wanted to know in case she and her husband weren't beige too. When people who aren't beige step into a beigehorhood, they might bring crazy notions with them - like putting up basketball goals in the driveway, or sitting on the front stoop to wave at folks as they zoom by sealed up in their SUV's. They have a volvo wagon that looks like a fish. Really. It is covered with scales and has a metal fin on top and has words on the side with a pictogram that represents a Swedish tongue twister that is something about six fish in a fish box. They are fabulously strange!

Please don't think that I am knocking everyone who lives in one of these subdivisions that has a big stone plaque at the border announcing to all that they have reached Stoney Glen or Fox Point. These places are just not for me, nor were they for my friend from Sweden. Her bright orange dining room with a kelly green table and low slung leather chairs that look like they were swiped from the Anchor Inn in Hutch just wouldn't go with beige. Nothing about her goes with beige.
posted by Rosie @ 12/07/2006 09:33:00 AM

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