PrettyFakes

So this past weekend, we threw a party at our house.

It wasn’t the first party we’ve had here—we had a birthday get-together for some friends back in the spring—but it was the first time we’ve gotten to put the party-having capabilities of our house into full effect.

From the street, it doesn’t look much like a party house. It actually looks like an apricot bomb shelter. If you were walking down our street and an apocalyptic cosmic storm began to rain radioactive ash down on the soon-to-be-barren Earth, you would totally pick our house to shelter in over one of the more, how shall we say, not-ugly houses. The front of the house is mostly a flat brick wall, adorned with high, long, narrow windows that aren’t much good for letting in light or warmth, but that would come in real handy if you should ever need to defend your home from dim-witted marauding zombies or, perhaps, a serial killer who does not have the full range of motion in either of his arms. Maybe a deranged former White Sox pitcher with torn rotator cuffs. The back of the house, though, is almost entirely made up of giant windows—perfect for letting in natural light, although terrible for cosmic-storm shelter, so you’d actually be out of luck. Five minutes in our house during an apocalpyse and your skin would be popping and bubbling right along with the rich folks in the New England saltbox down the street.

But I digress. The inside and backyard of the house were the real selling points for us. The way I’ve been describing it is, it looks like a third-tier 1960s adult film producer scraped together enough money to buy a modest version of his dream house—a combo home/studio perfect for filming a pornographic spoof of the Brady Bunch (a spoof for which you are more than welcome to create your own names.) The ceilings are vaulted, and virtually every inch of floor is tile, and almost the entire backyard is taken up with pink tile and a swimming pool (which, finally, we had a few guests gung-ho enough to use at this party—huzzah!).

So, it’s a classic 60s-modern type house. And there’s really nothing else you can do with a house like this besides just run with it, right? So we’ve been trying to furnish and decorate it with period-appropriate stuff. The previous owners, however, refused to give in to the house’s quirky charms. Indeed, if the pictures we took when we came to view the house prior to making an offer on it are any indication, they were actually locked in an epic struggle of wills with the house. I don’t know if it’s possible to brainwash a house, exactly, but you got the very distinct feeling that the house had been struggling with its sexuality and had wandered into a fundamentalist straightening-out camp, where it received a thorough but inadequate shame-makeover.

What do I mean, you ask? Well, let’s compare. And lemme just say, I’m not trying to say that we’re awesome decorators or anything—we’re just trying to let the house be itself. Well, Contessa is, actually, an awesome decorator. So I take that back.

So, for instance:

That’s not me, by the way. So, you know, when you’ve got a cool 60s-modern house, the very first thing you want to do is hang an ornate crystal chandelier in the dining room. All the better to illuminate your woefully inappropriate “antiques”! Also, we don’t have a good picture of it, but nearly every fillable space in the house was filled with beanie babies—I guess that’s how they broke its spirit. I know it nearly broke mine just seeing them.

So here’s what it looks like now:

Better, I think. And here’s one wall of the living room, before:

So obviously, the couch kind of clashes with that horse they won at the dart-throwing booth at the fair and—holy hell, what is that thing in the corner? Can we get a closer view of that?

Oh, phew! It’s just a tiny anthropomorphic reindeer-moose thing dressed in a Santa hat and Mardi Gras beads! In October! Whew. For a second there I thought it might be something weird and creepy, you know? Whenever anything goes wrong in the house—like, when I end up having to replace a whole toilet instead of just replacing the flush valve, and it takes me two days instead of thirty minutes—I blame the moose.

Anyway, here’s the same wall area now.

So anyways. A work in progress. But as I say, a good place for a party—we had a delightful 30th Birthday Bash for me on Saturday, which included, but was not limited to, swimming, grilling, and drinking a very great deal of tequila. New friends were made, old romances rekindled, and the groundwork was laid for the formation of an Asian drug trafficking conglomerate that will rival even the Yakuza. And Gorjus brought his own unique brand of rock, which made it the first official in-person Pretty Fakes summit!

And people gave me things! I got a book, a CD, a complete run of one of my favorite magazines—stolen, no less!—an embarrassing, enlarged picture of myself dressed as 1970s-era Bruce Springsteen from a Halloween a few years ago (actually, it was Easter, but it sounds less embarrassing if I say it was Halloween), some very cool postage, and! Contessa, heaven adore her, saw my anti-digital music pronouncements as a tattered veil for an abiding iPod lust, and so I’ve spent the last two days loading up my sleek little music machine.

And lo, the party spilled on into Sunday, as friends Gorjus and Bob spent the night and then the day with us, eating, sight-seeing, and realizing periodically that we were still actually pretty drunk.

Gorjus Fun Fact: at two of the three stores we visited on Sunday, he purchased recordings by Stevie Nix.

All told it was, mayhap, the best birthday ever. Period, I mean—better than most of your birthdays, too.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 2nd, 2005 at 10:27 am and is filed under In the South, Professor Fury, Red Stick, The Rock and The Roll. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.