Playing Store

Today was my filming day for the Food Bank.  First I had to appear on live TV for about 30 seconds.  I did not know what I was going to be asked, but lucky for me I only had to think a moment about the answer.  My second filming was for a video for the Food Bank and it was shot at the Durham Branch.  It was much harder because I did not have a script but I had to talk much longer about how people can help the Food Bank.  It took about 15 takes to get right.

While setting of the video shot by putting cans of food on store shelves I had a major flashback to my childhood.  We lived in a fairly isolated house with no girls living nearby so my sisters and I would play together even though there was nine years difference in our ages.  One of the games we loved to play was “Store.”  I had a bedroom with lots of shelves and we would price everything already on the shelves, like little glass animals and piggy banks and then go and take canned food from the kitchen that already had price stickers on it and add that to the shelves.

We would spend hours making fake money some of which went into a box made into a cash register and the rest divided between the shoppers.  I was usually the storekeeper because first it was my room, therefore my store, and second I could add the purchases faster than Margaret and certainly than Janet who was probably only 3 years old.  The only problem with store is that the setting up was fun, but neither of my sisters ever wanted to put anything away when they got bored with shopping.

Another favorite pastime was playing restaurant.  In my same bedroom I had a board that spanned one side of my room, which we used as a counter.  I had a bunch of flatware that my Godmother had been giving me for birthdays and Christmases so restaurant seemed like the only game a kid could play with forks and spoons.  Just like playing store the set-up was the majority of the game.  We would spend hours writing menus and then we would have to find costumes to wear as the waitress or the patrons.

Store and Restaurant were the games I would choose, but Margaret liked to play beauty parlor.  This was my least favorite game to play because she always got to be the beautician and she also had a short attention span.  That meant that she would set a chair up at our bathroom sink and I would have to put my head backwards into the bowl and she would pour a handful for shampoo in my hair and run the water on cold for a minute and lather me up, get bored and walk away leaving me fully clothed with a big wet head full of bubbles and no way to get up without soaking myself.  Sometimes it was even worse than that because she also had my hands soaking in a whole cereal bowl full of Palmolive dish soap.  We had no idea what a manicure was, but we knew that Madge the manicurist told her customers “they were soaking in it” so that’s what we did.  No wonder years later when Margaret was in boarding school with 5 other Margaret’s in her class she took on the nick name Madge.   Was life simpler then?