when i was five, my parents bought me a fisher-price taperecorder for my birthday. it was big and brown and indescructable (that thing fell down so many flights of stairs…). i listened to hours and hours of books on tape, my favorite being it’s a mystery, charlie brown. and a few years later, once i learned how to use it’s record function, my career as an entertainer began…

5. both my parents worked when i was a kid so there was many an evening where we’d swing by mcdonald’s on our way home from being picked up from the babysitters. somewhere during all those trips, i committed the mcdonald’s menu song to heart. i then spent an exorbinate amount of time recording myself singing different versions of the song that i made up. the hip-hop version is da bomb yo…there’s nothin’ like a seven year-old white girl trying to rap.

4. one of my favorite shows as a kid was pee-wee’s playhouse. there was something about paul reubens that fascinated me. i spent hours and hours creating my own version of the show called, creatively enough, jenni’s playhouse. i did all the voices myself, complete with my idea of the pee-wee voice, which was pretty much me if i had swallowed a frog.

3. i recently found a tape that i had recorded of myself reciting the entire movie the monster squad from start to finish. but this alone was not the lame part. the lame part is that years later i went back and re-recorded over parts with commentary on how lame it was that i was reciting the entire movie the monster squad from start to finish. now, as a “grown up”, i can actually appreciate the not-lameness of a seven year-old having the brain capacity to memeorize an entire movie.

2. i created an entire radio show called “brushing hair and teeth time” where i recorded myself getting ready for a school field trip because, as eight year-old me said, i “needed to get pretty for all the boys”. i filled an entire 60 minute tape with this show. no word on what my sister did for that entire hour while i was sequestered in the bathroom with a hairbrush, a toothbrush, and a taperecorder.

1. speaking of my sister, the number 1 lame thing i did with my fisher-price taperecorder consisted of me trying to convince my little sister to go into our closet. i was ten and she was six and even at that tender age, she knew better. she knew i was going to lock her in. she even calls me out and instead of denying that i was going to lock her in, i tell her that i’m just going to shut the door for a minute and she should just scream really loud and i’d let her right out. then you hear my dad come into the room and tell us we need to hurry up because we’re going to be late for school. i then inform my dad that i am in the middle of a show and have no intention of hurrying up. then dad tells me to get out of the way (presumably to get my sister out of the closet) and i scream, “you get out of the way, you’re ruining my show!” there is a scruffle, a thump, my sister starts crying. it all ends gloriously with me calming saying, “dad, you have to hit stop”. and then silence.

honorable mentions: my friends and i playing monopoly on my commodore 64 where i loudly yell what each person rolled, numerous of my renditions of songs off the album thriller, me throwing the taperecorder down the stairs with the record button on (told you it was indescructible), and my early attempts to make mix-tapes by recording songs off my mom’s car stereo.