In my mother’s house in Northeast Tennessee, at the top of a staircase that is far too narrow, steep and rickety for her to climb with any regularity, sits the last of my childhood bedrooms. Predictably, given its former tenant, it’s kind of a mess even today, a dusty three-dimensional collage disguised as something habitable and seemingly hammered together out of antique furniture, stacks of obsolete videotapes, B-movie and album posters and pictures of musicians decades old, or in a few cases (Freddie Mercury, Kurt Cobain, Joey Ramone), decades deceased. Every time I visit my mother’s farm it’s like sleeping in a time capsule, which honestly isn’t all that bad a deal. I can see empty, vaguely rectangular blue spaces on the wall, indicative of the choicest few posters, which migrated with me when I moved to Ohio. My old room is a valuable link, mentally and emotionally, to the teenager I used to be, and I think that’s just as much for the few items that are missing as for the many more that are preserved. Continue reading “Mad Magazine and editor Al Feldstein: An Appreciation”
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