“Do you wanna play in the basement or draw and listen to records?” My older sister, Coco, said. There it was again, the Saturday afternoon question of my 1970s childhood.
While the fictional city of Winnebago (click here for last week’s blog installment about our basement adventures) often beckoned us, the floral couch in the living room—near the stereo with its turntable—called to us just as often. And we scurried for the paper and pencils.
On the regular, Dad rescued paper destined for the school’s trash bin and brought it home. Mom stowed the reams in a box on a low shelf, and it was miraculous, that stash; it never emptied. The dot matrix printer in the school office spit out an endless supply for us kids. What looked like computer coding marked one side of the pages, but Coco and I didn’t mind the already used paper with its perforated edges. What mattered were the blank sides. That’s where the magic happened.
We sharpened our pencils and readied ourselves for an afternoon of creation. We drew houses—cut in cross-sections, so we could decorate their insides—and we drew people. A gifted artist, Coco created humans with their hands behind their backs because she was mature enough to know hands were hard to master. My people had blobs at the ends of their arms.
Because we needed accompaniment for our creativity, we picked through our collection of vinyl, deciding what appealed most to us that day. A story record featuring Uncle Charlie and Aunt B maybe? Or music? If we went with music, we always reached for our favorite: the Lundstroms.
Long before I knew about groupies, Coco and I fit the definition. We owned a stack of Lundstrom albums and freaked out when a new one was released. We studied the covers for hours, sketching likenesses of the traveling family while we listened to their crooning. Coco was so good at capturing each detail with freehanded accuracy. I used tracing paper to get it just right.
“Is that a comb making her hair puff out like that?” I said, scrutinizing a picture on an album insert.
Coco squinted at the photo, pulling it close to her face. “Maybe she curled it that way. Probably ratted it too.”
Mom and Dad fed our Lundstroms obsession by taking us to a few of their concerts not far from home. Mom even let us pick out patterns and fabric and sewed us clothes like the Lundstrom girls. After one of their performances, I jumped into the photo intended for just Coco and the teenage Londa (even though LaShawn was closer to my age of about seven.) I wore side ponytails and my trademark chapped lips; Londa posed like a dream in yellow; Coco looked annoyed.
Our passion for the team who traveled in two buses throughout the United States and Canada three-hundred days a year for two decades and produced sixty albums flickered out, but I don’t recall when. Our later growing-up years brought new musical artist fascinations, and movement in leotards to Joanie Greggains aerobic records replaced our Saturday afternoon drawing sessions.
Last night, I clicked through YouTube videos of the Lundstroms, faded footage bringing the family to life once more. Flicka watched with me. We giggled more than a little, but those lyrics came right back to me so I could sing along.
Wow.
*Names in this blog have been changed to protect my family, neighbors, and friends in the neighborhood, and in a nod of appreciation to the beloved Swedish author Maj Lindman, I’ve renamed my three blondies Flicka, Ricka, and Dicka.