We had all the outdoor amenities: a jungle gym, croquet sets, softball equipment, Frisbees, tennis and basketball courts nearby, a neighbor with a tire swing in her backyard, and Barbie doll stations set up on our porches that were always ready to be played with in the event of rain. However, sometime during the summer of 1979, we realized we needed something more—a challenge. We needed to build something! Yes, we needed to put our energy and craftsmanship to the test. We decided to construct our own building, a “kids-only” space where we were in charge. After scouring the neighborhood for scrap wood, we formulated a plan to build the best fort we’d ever seen in my backyard. We found the perfect spot behind my garage, a good 30 yards from the house. Once a vegetable garden, it would now serve as our sovereign property.

At nine, we lacked some of the construction and engineering skills necessary to build a level—much less solid—structure, but we did the best that we could. We used the huge pieces of plywood and particleboard of varying lengths and widths that we’d scavenged, and a few two-by-fours with the nails still attached to them from their previous project. We found an old coffee can filled with nails and other hardware in the garage and “borrowed” my father’s hammers for the project. One day, my father came home from work to discover that we were using his tools without his permission. After a brief lecture about asking first, he gave us a hand with the fort. The end result was a structure that resembled a small shanty. With three and a half sides, a flat roof, and a dirt floor, it could easily accommodate about three of us at a time.

We were proud of ourselves for creating this structure. We played in it throughout the summer months, occasionally using it as a space to escape the hot sun and sometimes to eat our lunches. That summer, our fort served as a full-time residence for our Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls. We were convinced that they were happy there.

I knew other kids who had their own play spaces. One friend had an amazing tree house where we used to climb up and read our Battlestar Galactica magazines and Archie comic books. Another friend had a pop-up tent stationed on his lawn that we used as a getaway. One of my cousins had a huge garden shed behind her family’s dairy barn that we claimed as our “house” where we stored old pots and pans that we filled with grass and dirt. Not all of the forts in my life were outdoors, however. My younger brother was always making “indoor” forts using the couch and some chairs, along with blankets draped over the top to create his dwelling. My mother would often find him napping in these impromptu structures.

I have fond memories of all the forts and tree houses that I’ve encountered. To this day, when I see a huge cardboard box my mind goes immediately into “fort-mode,” and I think about what type of structure I could potentially make out of it for my young nephews. Driving through Rochester and its suburbs, I see all types of playhouses and forts, most of them professionally manufactured. I smile whenever I pass by one of them, remembering what it was like to be a kid and have a small place of my own in this big, big world. It was my space, and I liked it that way.

When I was a toddler, my dad built a sandbox in one corner of the backyard. The sandbox became the source of hours of imaginative play—mounding, grading, building, and digging. Did I use shovels and pails? I think so, but the toys I remember best from my sandbox were cast metal toy cars. Today, the few remaining Tootsietoy vehicles in my possession bear testimony to the trials they endured in those sandbox summer days. The cars look like they’ve been sandblasted (I suppose that’s basically what happened), with remnants of their once-shiny paint remaining only in the crevices and grooves of their designs.

Once I’d outgrown the sandbox, our wooden picnic table became the focus for creative backyard play. Depending on how we configured the table and its benches, we had a fort, a houseboat, a log cabin, or even the Batcave where my friends and I could spin extended stories that filled the humid summer afternoons.

Later, when I was too big for pretend play, my sister and I adapted the game of badminton to our backyard and the flimsy badminton set that we got with Top Value trading stamps from the Kroger supermarket. The badminton net was too much trouble to put up for a quick game, so we used the clothesline as a substitute net. And since our racquet skills were limited at best, we abandoned the regulation badminton rules. Instead, our objective was to collaborate on hitting the birdie back and forth as many times as possible, counting out loud as we went. Unpredictable breezes, intruding tree branches, and the neighbor’s barking Chihuahuas all acted as hazards and distractions. It was the rare volley that made it over the count of ten before we bungled the birdie. It was a moment of joint triumph when we reached a monumental figure like fifty.

A scrap wood sandbox filled with sand from the builder’s supply company or a clothesline combined with parts of a badminton set—they hardly seem like inspiring raw materials, but they made for great summer play back then and happy memories today.

My summer-camp electives tended toward program offerings such as ceramics, wearable art, leather crafts, and jewelry making (aside from two swim periods and an hour daily of sports like kickball or Newcomb volleyball—my parents wisely mandated at least that much physical activity). As my instructors introduced each new project, I surveyed with wonder the array of raw materials spread before me on the table: bags of beads and buttons, spools of plastic lace and leather cord, piles of pliable clay. After carefully developing a design and color scheme, I engrossed myself in executing my artistic vision. I carried each treasure home with a sense of awe—had I actually made it with my own hands?

Once the initial inventive reverie wore off, each finished project acquired new meanings and uses. I discovered that the earrings I’d painted looked better mixed and matched, which inspired me to wear socks of alternating colors as well. A hand-woven dreamcatcher moonlighted as a feathery cat-taunter. My beaded jewelry experienced the most drastic effects of secondary use—I couldn’t resist pulling the beads off their strings and employing them in new ways. Seed beads and pony beads seemed replaceable enough, but polymer clay and glass beads were precious. I regularly restrung them alongside new neighbors.

I still collect craft materials for the potential stored within them. Colorful tissue paper and a jar of Mod Podge beckon me to decoupage a wooden shelf I found a few years ago. Yards of quilting squares and grosgrain ribbon with tidy contrast stitching patiently await their turn as gift-wrap. In the stash of multicolored embroidery floss I recently donated to Strong, you can see a cluster of friendship bracelets—works in progress—in one of the compartments. My recycled beads, however, are conspicuously absent from the museum’s collection—I still might use them for something.

On the recent Memorial Day weekend, my “honey-do” list included fetching our fluffy puppy from the groomer; he’d been overdue for his seasonal trim. Walk-ins flooded the salon because Fido needed to look his best for the backyard barbecue. In the waiting room, I flipped through the day-old newspaper weekend section where I noticed that Saw VI was showing at the second run theaters. (Golly, however had I failed to catch Saw I-V?) Do movie producers, the princes of the “creative class,” really run out of ideas so easily? I went back to drumming my fingers.

It was clear I was going to be cooling my jets for some time, so I helped myself to the courtesy pen that the heartworm pill company had so thoughtfully provided and begged from the receptionist a notepad picturing a dapper Schnauzer under the motto “We cut your Mutts!” Having admired the anonymous scribblers who could pack a 97-minute experience into one sentence, I thought I’d try my hand at inventing fake movie listings.

Since we’re thinking about play and work, here I should confess that my day job sometimes has me writing labels for exhibits—short grabby sentences packed with information. In their way, exhibit labels aren’t so far from movie listings. But hang on before you start thinking what a drudge this guy must be, here’s the playful part, I made this a game by following one rule: each of these new films would be a sequel to two different movies—a hybrid.

In the time it took to present Charlie the Dog, shorn to the skin and looking both lamb-like and sheepish (haircuts embarrass this one), under the heading “Double Sequels” I’d managed to scribble out half-a-dozen titles for comedies, action flicks, science-fiction movies, and costume dramas.

• It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Max. A group of comedians seeks a buried treasure in post-apocalypse Australia.
• Around the World in Eighty Subs. Zany American and Soviet submarine commanders compete to win a prize for circumnavigating the globe underwater.
• Planet of the Abes. A laboratory chimp’s space capsule lands on a parallel earth where Abraham Lincoln and his clone are co-presidents of Israel.
• Arsenic and Old Mace. An aging detective falls in love with the sisters who euthanized his ex-partner.
• Please Don’t Eat Miss Daisy. An efficiency expert hires a driver who was raised by bears.
• The Nutty Successor. A magician brews a potion that makes him look exactly like the king’s dashing half-brother.

Could any of these be worse than Saw VII?

Of course I had some fun drawing up the list, and some more fun pretending to cast the films with my favorite actors. (Jeff Goldblum would make a great Abe Lincoln.) Since I am not an actor, I won’t be casting myself in these films sure to become American classics (ahem), but since the list now appears on the museum’s Web site as part of this blog, I will be checking with my finance office to see if I should add the hour spent on this to my timesheet. See, at the end of the day there isn’t such a difference between work and play.

For a long, long time then, these four words have led us, usually first and most often as children, into a tale about a beautiful place far, far away. Many a fable or folktale has begun with them. The phrase “once upon a time” serves as a useful storytelling convention, which connects readers to places that cannot—or can no longer—be experienced in the flesh.

“Once upon a time” can help us connect to our memories by guiding us back in our minds, in a very personal way, to a past time, period, or experience that we must not let ourselves or others forget. I’d be willing to wager that many of you have used these words in this way, not to tell a fanciful story, but rather as a familiar way to help steer your mind back to a previous time in your lives, when things seemed somehow better—more serene, comfortable, or pleasant.

Like the historical objects that we collect, cherish, preserve, and present here at Strong National Museum of Play, these few words can also help link us directly to our collective past by stimulating our memories. Usually these memories come embellished with romantic notions that alter them somewhat with emotion and imagination. This is a good thing, because it enhances them in personal and transcendental ways. They help us reach a comfortable balance between empirical fact—what really happened—and the experiences we remember.

For instance, I could have easily led off my first two blogs—each of which concerned my indebtedness to my grandparents—with the words “once upon a time.” The memories I have of my grandparents enable me to relive those happy childhood times with them in my mind whenever I wish to; they will always remain entrenched in my adult being. Even at my age, writing those thoughts down evoked heartfelt emotion. And I found myself wondering, did things really happen as I want to remember them? Somehow, it all seems like a fairy tale now. But the reality is they did indeed happen that way; those experiences helped me live happily ever after ever since.

These are the very stories that we must preserve, along with the artifacts that yesterday helped create them, and today help trigger them. For they contain not only fact, color, and drama but—most importantly—our humanity. Our memories link us to each other, to our legacy; however stimulated or embellished, they reflect the emotion of our experience. They enable us to ponder our lives in healthy ways, while helping us maintain a proper perspective on the present and our thoughts of the future.

Soon, the museum will be embarking on a very important project—collecting play histories, the firsthand recollections and stories that will help bring our collections objects to life. This new information will certainly create a deeper dimension to the meaning of play for us all.

So start preparing your favorite tale now. We want to add it to our database. Or should I say, “Play-ta-base?”

Some years ago my daughter’s soccer team traveled to a tournament in Canada’s beautiful capital, Ottawa, to make a brave stand against some of Canada’s fiercest provincial players. Go Rockets! Go Blue! Hope stirred during the first half of a match with the Ontario champs as the Rockets trailed, impossibly, by only one goal. The momentum seemed to break, though, when the referee imposed an obscure (to us) “spirit of the game” penalty. Now hang on. These demure girls gave offense? No way! Spectators who witness boys’ warlike scraps will note how polite the girls’ game is by comparison; girls who knock each other down will invariably apologize—sorreee!

But here was the problem: our players had been coached to relay strategy out loud. “Talk it up, Rockets!” But the moment the striker called out “my ball” to coordinate the attack and spread out the mid-fielders, she ran afoul of the local custom and attracted the linesman’s attention. This was a thoughtful game they played in Canada. During a time-out, the official explained to the puzzled foreigners that since no player could “own” a ball in play, therefore “one can plainly see” that any player “who should call ‘my ball” stood “clearly in violation of the spirit of the game.” I was thinking “sheesh what a moaner.” But, mindful that we were in a land that lay closer to the mother tongue, out loud I said: “Figures, we come to Canada to play and get called for a grammatical error.”

Teams from Quebec (just a few miles away) had traveled to the tournament, too. One of the Quebecois parents there to scout the game overheard the wisecrack and got a big laugh when she translated it for her friends. We soon discovered that the French-Canadians were considerably less circumspect about soccer. Whenever that ref edged nearby, they noisily bothered him with the cheeky nickname “erreur grammaticale.” I had apparently stirred the long-simmering language dispute between English-speaking and francophone Canadians. Or maybe they were just itching for a chance to revive it. (Remember that Quebec at times has had ambitions for a separate nationhood.)

Anyway, before long these natural allies became cross-border fans of the plucky American underdogs. They sent emissaries to later games to disturb the peace with their giant improvised air-horns. “Allez Roquettes! Allez les Bleus!” they shouted. And, during the elimination rounds now without our own team to cheer for, we found their red jerseys and returned the favor, “Allez! Les Rouges!”

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.

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?”

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.

Then, second, there is the practical and scientific approach. Some people say footballs are shaped the way they are because they’re more aerodynamic and can be more accurately thrown when spiraled downfield by a quarterback with a strong right arm. This might sound good to someone who hasn’t thrown a football. However, a baseball, which, of course, is round, is easier to throw. For that matter, even a softball, though bigger than a regulation baseball, is easier to throw than a football. But then again, one might argue that with those handles on either end, isn’t a football easier to catch? OK, there might be something to that, but then history invades again; American football developed as a running game before passing came along, and hence before catching was a strategic factor. Finally, nobody would dispute that footballs are harder to kick than soccer balls, and this is a funny thing for a game called football. History comes to a partial rescue here, because the origin of the name football most likely came from games that in medieval times were played on foot—rather than on horseback that is. But this doesn’t help us to answer the original question. Why are footballs shaped like—let’s give the shape a name—prolate spheroids?

I lean toward a third approach: surprises make a game less predictable and more interesting and the shape helps randomize and equalize the game. We don’t play games because they’re easy or predictable. When punted, footballs may land flat and plop. But more often than not, they bounce end over end for ten or twenty yards and wobble to the right or left. They may even bounce backward, giving the punting team a great gift and the fans a thrill. A loose ball is hard to pin down, and a fumbled football is as slippery as a, as a . . . as a greased pig bladder!