11/19/03’s illustrious band:

Dream House

Brought to you by your childhood friends.

When I was a young’un, my friends and I spent endless hours fantasizing about the house we’d live in when we grew up. The plan was for all of us to buy a place together and make it into our dream house. Judging from a discussion I had last week, this is a dream not yet outgrown.

The key feature of a dream house was, of course, that no parents would live there, just us friends, free to do as we pleased. We intended to stay up late, sleep in, eat ice cream for breakfast straight from the cartons in the freezer in our super-slumber-party bedroom (with bunk waterbeds) and watch cartoons all day long. While wearing our pajamas. There would be pizza or tacos for the other meals, but we weren’t very specific about how the food would get to our table. The menu was also short on variation, since we grew up untroubled by wide arrays of ethnic cuisine.

The architecture of the dream house was truly spectacular. There would be swimming pools, of course: one inside for use during the winter and one outside for tanning during the summer. The outdoor pool would have plenty of slides, and part of it would take the form of a whitewater rafting ride that circled the property (including the pastures where we kept our horses). The rafting section would follow the contours of the land, complete with rollercoastery ups and downs, and at least one scream-long plunge.

The indoor pool would be as warm as bath water, with slides and diving boards of various heights at the deep end. You could also reach the pool via slide from a few rooms of the house, particularly the super-slumber-party bedroom. We’d have a whirlpool and a sauna, too, just like at the Holiday Inn. The pool water would always contain Johnson’s No More Tears detangling solution so our long hair would never snarl when we combed it out after swimming.

In addition to stairs, escalators and glass-walled elevators, the house would contain several firemen’s poles for sliding from upstairs to down. We’d have a trampoline in the playroom, from which you could boing over the deck and into the pool. There would be a machine to twirl a jumprope for you if no one else was available, and a swingset with so many swings you’d never have to take turns. And there would be TVs everywhere so you could see the cartoons no matter what you were doing.

And did I mention the secret passages? My generation was raised on Scooby Doo, so we knew all about secret passages, and we wanted them throughout the house and grounds. Imagine being able to sneak from the house to the stables for a midnight ride!

We were also big fans of The Jetsons, so we wanted lots of pushbuttons. We figured we’d be able to do just about every chore by pushing a button, from feeding the horses to making the beds. Not that we would make the beds, because there would be no one there to tell us to. But we could if we wanted.

Anyway, that’s just a sampling. Nowadays I’m more concerned about my dream house, Sensational Acres, having ample electrical outlets and high-speed Internet access. But if I were to dream, I’d still add a pool and a playroom and a sauna and some skylights, and a couple more bathrooms. What does your dream house look like?

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