I remember the roar of the crowd as I confidently gripped the ball and took aim—the way the noises faded as I focused on my target—and the broad smile on Bozo the Clown’s face during my successful run on the Grand Prize Game.

Though I am competitive, I’m not well coordinated or graceful. You probably wouldn’t have guessed that my greatest victory was even vaguely athletic. After all, I was the pitiful child who crossed the finish line dead last in my elementary school’s Turkey Trot one-mile race. I eliminated myself from field hockey tryouts because I gagged on the mouth guard. I made exactly two baskets in two seasons of intramural basketball. At least the TV cameras turned me into a winner.

My shining moment happened at a taping of The Bozo Show in Philadelphia around 1990. Bozo (played by Bob McCone) built suspense, asking audience members to raise their hands in support as I threw ping-pong balls into six buckets. The first four buckets were easy, but I overshot the fifth. Bozo asked my father to try the last two buckets to win the grand prize, a 13-inch color TV. Dad made a perfect toss into bucket number five . . . and the ball bounced back out! Game over. Even Bozo looked shocked.

Was the experience everything I’d hoped it would be? Not really. Let’s be honest here—Bozo’s bodacious hair was not real. The show wasn’t the same without the glitzy graphics added in post-production, either. I also learned that clowns make mistakes; Bozo got ahead of himself when I went for the second bucket and accidentally revealed the third-round prize. The flustered clown struggled to correct himself. Fortunately, I clinched the third bucket and won the prize after all, a children’s cookbook, along with a Bozo bendy toy, Crayola Markers, a My Little Pony, and Friendly’s Ice Cream. When Bozo filled my arms with goodies, the ice cream box was surprisingly empty. Had I actually expected him to hand me a melting container of cookies ‘n cream? Of course the box was just a prop.

These revealing details were my reward—and punishment—for peeking behind the proverbial curtain. Thanks to my experience on The Bozo Show, I stopped believing in the inherent truthfulness or infallibility of television at an early age. Today I know that television’s other sleights of hand include cooking shows, where the host prepares a pot roast and serves it before the credits roll, and reality TV, where sensationally dramatic moments consume the participants’ waking hours. But every time I run into a Bozo toy in the museum’s collections, I still get a glimmer of my moment of glory—such as it was.

One of our most exciting recent acquisitions came from the family of Ruth Rosenfeld. Ruth was an avid miniaturist and world traveler, both factors that obviously influenced her fascinating collection of dollhouses, miniature rooms, and small (and some large) souvenirs from all over the world.

Ruth Rosenfeld began collecting small things and assembling dollhouses and miniature rooms in the mid-1970s. For her first project, she created a general store furnished with floor-to-ceiling shelves stocked with merchandise. In Ruth’s 30 years of collecting, organizing, and arranging her miniatures, she put together three very large dollhouses, several smaller ones, and some 60 miniature rooms, including examples of Early American taverns,  Victorian dining rooms, and modern kitchens, living rooms, and libraries. Other miniature rooms represented a milliner’s shop, toy stores, a quilt shop, a bookstore, and even an art gallery of Southwest Native American art. She also filled five rooms with well-made Shaker furnishings. Inspired by her travels, Ruth devoted several rooms to replicating homes and scenes from the foreign countries she had visited. She made a Japanese tea house, a street scene in Peru, a gallery of African figures, the dining and sitting area of a Chinese home, and a gallery of artifacts excavated from the tomb of King Tutankhamen.

Toys to children, hobbies to adults, miniatures fascinate us all. Kids use dollhouses and similar sets of small figures and structures as props for fantasy and imagination. Children narrate the actions of the figures and settings of their play, and they create and control their world of miniatures. For adult hobbyists, miniatures represent the worlds to control, too.  Adults often recreate places they cherish and settings they wish never to forget.

When most of us look at miniatures, we stare in wonder at the craftsmanship and detail, just as a child might, and ask “how do they do that?”

Watching the Winter games in Vancouver has me thinking about that cowboy Bode Miller, America’s best and most versatile skier ever, and what his riotous style says about play and competition at the highest levels.

Miller has chalked up an unmatched list of victories in each of the different alpine events— 32 World Cup trophies at latest count and bronze, silver, and gold medals at this winter Olympics. His record is especially remarkable because the skills that slalom requires (technique) and the demands of Super-G (speed) are so very different. Yet Miller has all the while insisted that winning isn’t his “goal,” not precisely, not per se. “I didn’t love racing to beat other guys,” he said. He is after something else. That something else has earned him praise for his independence and inspiration when he wins and blame for his cussedness and self-indulgence when he loses.

Now just for the record, no one skis like Miller. He surely has a nose for the “fall line,” the shortest, steepest, fastest streak between gates. The arms flailing, the backward lean that courts disaster, often bellowing in full voice, a style the press often calls reckless. And, built more like a linebacker than a downhill racer, he has proved that he is unafraid of 60-mile-an-hour crashes onto rock-hard slopes. (Once when he lost a ski, he playfully finished the race on one foot and caught the devil from his coaches.)

Raised in rough country New Hampshire, homeschooled in a household without electricity or indoor plumbing, he’s at home in the woods alone with his rambling, original thoughts. But when it comes to the national media, he is careless with his image. After an unfortunate showing at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino, where he was odds-on favorite to medal in five events but instead racked up several DNF (did not finish) notations and one DQ for missing a gate, he fended off disappointed reporters by saying that, even though he came up without a medal, at least he had partied like an Olympian. Most already regarded him as diffident and bratty, but with this comeback he managed to make expectant fans think that he was a bad example, too. Poor Bode, he had a problem.

But, to hear the skier’s side of the story, his thinking was entirely consistent. It was press, public, and sponsors who didn’t get it. Miller’s goal, the personal objective that superseded all others, was to pursue speed and fun. Let the medals fall where they may; winning or losing were merely by-products of this unruly pursuit. Usually the strategy worked for him, but wipeouts, too, are quite beside the point for Miller. (“I was having the greatest time making mistakes, crashing,” he once said.) He has instead set out to explore human capability, gravity, and his equipment’s tolerances at the limits of performance—“to ski as fast as the natural universe will allow.” Skiing on the brink this way, trading control for fun, he plunges downhill “right on the edge of what my skis and the snow will hold up to.” A brilliant French thinker, the play-theorist Roger Caillois, once looked for a name for this special joy, the dizzying pleasure of swings and roller-coasters and stunt-flying and steeplechase and skiing. “Vertigo” came close. But in the end he borrowed a Greek word that fit better: ilinx, “the whirlpool.”

Most serious-minded alpine competitors avoid dizzying pleasure, especially when they’re heading downhill at 90 miles per hour. In fact, the demands of Olympic level downhill competition (the precision technique it ordinarily requires, the tough training, the studied authority of coaches, the team protocol, the high expectations of sponsors, the certainty of injury, the intrusions of the press, the hope of nations riding on a single ski run) all stack up against wildness. Ilinx, the scholar reasonably declared, is “incompatible” with the organized codified competition; this is a “forbidden relationship.” The competitor must behave. Commentators are already framing Bode’s triumphs as redemption. He got another shot; he has redeemed himself by winning. But they miss the point. Here instead is the point: with an inspired approach that bucks the odds and conventional wisdom, Bode Miller has managed to excel while at play in the whirlpool.

Is there a box of chocolates in your Valentine’s Day plans? If you’re going to give (or are expecting to receive) candy as a token of love, you’re part of a romantic tradition that began more than a century ago. In the 1890s, candy makers finally glommed onto Valentine’s Day as an occasion to promote their products, even though they’d already managed to integrate confectionery into other holidays, such as Christmas and Easter. Since that time, we’ve definitely taken their marketing message to heart. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Americans’ average candy consumption totals almost 25 pounds per year, and a significant portion of those goodies are enjoyed around Valentine’s Day.

Initially, though, candy makers had their work cut out for them. Valentine cards were the established tradition, so candy needed to be positioned as a suitably romantic gift. One way was to play up candy in valentine shapes, especially hearts. The New England Confectionery Company (better known today as NECCO) had been producing printed messages on sugar lozenges for years and even turned out candy sayings on goodies shaped like baseballs, horseshoes, and watches. But it took them until 1902 to introduce Sweetheart Conversation Hearts. Through the years, the cardiac-inspired concept has been adopted (stolen?) by other manufacturers, as can be seen in this Brach’s ad from Strong National Museum of Play’s collection.

Candy for Valentine’s Day often came in a box that conveyed a clear message of love, and might even have eliminated the need for a valentine card. Conversation hearts themselves became such a part of Valentine’s Day that they even turned up on the lid of this 1970s heart-shaped chocolate box with its central request, “Be My Valentine.” And though this box is sweet, undoubtedly the most impressive valentine candy box the museum owns is an enormous heart, covered with red satin, ruffles, ribbon, and lace. If you’ve ever worn your heart on your sleeve, you’ll notice that this box goes further and could almost serve as full-body armor (if you have any doubts about how the object of your affections will respond to the gift.) If bigger is better, then this chocolate box has to be just about the best. It was the grand prize in a sweepstakes at a Rochester pharmacy in the 1960s. The winner donated the box to the museum in 1998. Sadly, the candy was long gone by that time. Still, just holding the box made my heart beat faster. Was it love or just a craving for chocolate? You be the judge.