Laundry life sentence
Laura and I were watching the real first Star Wars the other day, the part where Luke and Han rescue Princess Leia and they all leap with abandon into the garbage chute. We’re having popcorn, just watching them roll all around in the trash (pretty disgusting, really), that monster-thingy snatches Luke under the muck, finally R2 turns off the compactors and they escape. Whew. Laura turns around to me and says, “How come Princess Leia’s dress is still all white and clean after they’ve been down in all that garbage?”
I remember my own first movie unreality realization at about the same age, asking my own mother virtually the same type of question. We watched King Kong, Faye Wray got washed overboard or something—I have this memory of her afloat on a raft?—but she still had on perfect makeup. Of course we’ve all had plenty of discussions with Will about how movies aren’t real, particularly whenever monsters show up, so we won’t have them leaping out the closets outside Monsters Inc., but Laura’s been particularly conscious of household labors lately, so I can’t tell if her realization is more about the movies or laundry. Her friend came over to play the other day, wearing a new shirt, and I said something to her, your basic “cool shirt, did you get it for Christmas?” comment. She had, and then she made this strange and sort of catty comment that Laura hadn’t noticed she had a new shirt. Discussion ensued about how sometimes things hang around in the closet, how was she supposed to know it was new, blah blah blah, and then they asked me, the referee, how could I tell it was a new shirt? It had a section covered by a lacy net-type fabric, with no picks on it at all yet. It had a satin ribbon tie around the neck, also still smooth and shiny and not picked up at all. So clearly it hadn’t been washed yet.
My arcane laundry knowledge clearly awed them both. How did I learn this stuff, Laura wanted to know. “Twenty years of doing laundry’ll do it,” I said sagely. I think she’s still trying to wrap her head around that idea—God, twenty years of laundry? I bet Princess Leia never had to wash her own clothes.
I remember my own first movie unreality realization at about the same age, asking my own mother virtually the same type of question. We watched King Kong, Faye Wray got washed overboard or something—I have this memory of her afloat on a raft?—but she still had on perfect makeup. Of course we’ve all had plenty of discussions with Will about how movies aren’t real, particularly whenever monsters show up, so we won’t have them leaping out the closets outside Monsters Inc., but Laura’s been particularly conscious of household labors lately, so I can’t tell if her realization is more about the movies or laundry. Her friend came over to play the other day, wearing a new shirt, and I said something to her, your basic “cool shirt, did you get it for Christmas?” comment. She had, and then she made this strange and sort of catty comment that Laura hadn’t noticed she had a new shirt. Discussion ensued about how sometimes things hang around in the closet, how was she supposed to know it was new, blah blah blah, and then they asked me, the referee, how could I tell it was a new shirt? It had a section covered by a lacy net-type fabric, with no picks on it at all yet. It had a satin ribbon tie around the neck, also still smooth and shiny and not picked up at all. So clearly it hadn’t been washed yet.
My arcane laundry knowledge clearly awed them both. How did I learn this stuff, Laura wanted to know. “Twenty years of doing laundry’ll do it,” I said sagely. I think she’s still trying to wrap her head around that idea—God, twenty years of laundry? I bet Princess Leia never had to wash her own clothes.
posted by Lisa at 1/04/2006 09:11:00 AM
<< Home