17 / The Crazy Curtain Lady
I recently revisited a YouTube video my friend Lucyana showed to me called "Crazy Curtain Lady," comprised of footage of a woman giving testimonials for a local commercial for curtain outlet in Coventry, Rhode Island. Lucyana was right to do so: the video represents a really precise intersection of two of my keenest my interests: homemaking and "Unintentional ASMR" — arcane videos repurposed to be soothing: medical instruction videos designed for clinicians; a Kiehl's hand massage instructional video; a video of a posture workshop.
I love this video: something in the sound engineering makes it so lovely, and endlessly watchable for me (particularly in this version, reposted and edited by an UnintentionalASMR channel; I recently let it play for 25 minutes while writing). There's a beautiful soft fuzz underneath, punctuated by the crinkle of the plastic packaging every time she returns to the curtain. Her voice is incredible, low with a pleasant rasp. It's deeply emotionally expressive, but contained and quiet. She has a strong Rhode Island accent, soothing perhaps because a regional American accent on an older woman connotes the care of a maternal figure (a Charlie hypothesis). Those in the comments regard this woman as they do other icons in the "Unintentional ASMR" genre—with a respect inflected with bemusement, and a recognition that a compelling speaking voice is a remarkable thing—a talent.
This video didn't become micro-famous because of its ASMR qualities though, but because her passion for the curtains is lightly mockable. She really cares about curtains. There's an pleading urgency to her: not only is this the only place she will go for curtains; it's the only place you should go for curtains. "I had so many many many many curtains. But you can't compare them to these quality gorgeous curtains." The depth of her feeling on curtains is genuinely surprising, as she sees herself: "When I found this place and I came in, I can't tell you what I did. I had to. Do the whole house. I had to." She talks as if we, too, know what it's like to lose your mind shopping for curtains — a tone that be more widely understandable if she were talking about, say, shoes, or cars, or clothes. "The only thing is, it's a good thing I don't work here," she says, before taking a quick anxious breath. For a moment, she seems genuinely fearful. "My paycheck would be on every single curtain in this place. That's my problem." We sense that her love of curtains, or of home-improving and shopping generally, has gotten her into trouble before. She doesn't have total control here; she's a "shopaholic," straddling the border of quirky and pathological. Her insistence on this curtain store in particular — an outlet, now closed, in Coventry, Rhode Island – reveals her hyperbole and and hyperlocal outlook. I didn't even know Rhode Island had a third town. We barely even see the one curtain that she spends most of the video vaunting. We can barely tell if it's worth the hype.
In fairness to her, Crazy Curtain Lady (hereafter: Curtain Lady; we can at least do that for her) is set up to look silly. From what we can tell, she's recording a local commercial, so talking at length about curtains is actually her job here. She's giving options – she's not assuming it'll all be viewed as one unit. It's like the iconic clip of Lisa Kudrow as Valerie Cherish in The Comeback, being asked to deliver the lines, "Well, I got it," again and again. It's hard to know how much of her monologue is a product of her genuine excitement, and how much is a performance for the camera. Does it matter? Passion for interior design has always been about an audience, real or imagined, anyway.
I feel a kinship with the Curtain Lady. I know the feeling of having fully internalized home improvement as some larger duty or purpose and completely empathize with the idea of going crazy over finding a home furnishing that works, at once thrilled by and scared of your own passion, and desperate to share it. I recently moved into a new room in my apartment, which is bigger and has a second window (though the room looks out over an alley and gets less light overall so relax) and found myself once again shopping for curtains. Unlike some other household pieces of furniture, I'm not sure exactly what constitutes a good curtain. The one I have is, embarrassingly, this crushed velvet amber curtain from Urban Outfitters, a statement piece whose statement is "I want to have things that are nice and people think are nice so I bought this fake boho thing from literally Urban Outfitters." Shopping for the second one, which I will embark upon when I have the money to do so (hopefully early 2022), will likely destroy me.
Buying anything for your home is an exhausting process, especially when you've charged your home with the amount of responsibility I have since quarantine. Buying curtains necessitates aesthetic consideration, but also a few practical ones as well: their opacity (how much of the floodlight across the street from your second-floor street-facing room will they block?), their soundproofing (how effectively will they block the noise of the garbage trucks that collect garbage somehow thrice nightly from below your second floor window), their weight (will they blow everywhere if you open a window because your ancient radiator fills your room with a suffocating heat beginning in October). Most cheap curtain rods have a little lip on them where one piece slides into the other, which makes its length flexible, and unfortunately also usually makes it impossible to smoothly open the curtain without it catching on the little lip. This is one of those small flaws in everyday design small enough that it's never been fixed but big enough that it's inconvenienced millions of people across the world every single day, people waking up and must awkwardly reaching up to try to jerk their curtain over the little lip in the rod. It's like cleaning a french press or a fan, or like moving a couch in New York City — you think that certainly there should be some better system, but there isn't. Couches were designed separately from building staircases, which were built in different eras under different housing regimes. One is left with the choice: to either accept imperfect, occasionally irksome furniture and household systems (curtain gets caught on rod lip; buy a stupid couch from Wayfair that comes in a box or a couch on Craigslist short enough to fit around the corner at the top of the stairs) or go fully insane, expending ever more energy and money yielding diminishing returns on the beauty and functionality of your household. I know which one I'm choosing (the latter).
Of course, this is all about sublimation, which is obvious, though no offense if you didn't get that at first. The world is chaotic, and we have lost many of the ways we could engage and impact it. The future is uncertain and broader concepts of home—our politically cruel and failing "country"? our world, soon to be aflame/drowning? – are unstable. Of course I'm going to focus my energy on the little sliver of turf I control. What else is there for me to do as I spend all my time there, taking stock of the ways it could be made to serve me better? Not that you need looming geopolitical disaster/environmental catastrophe/mass death event to sublimate your anxiety into homemaking; the desire to build a home for yourself in the world is ever-churning, and when you inject a desire for a project or a job and a proclivity for mania, you become crazy about it. "My kids—well, they're in their 30's," she says — perhaps a clue as to what may be leading Curtain Lady to invest so much in finding beautiful curtains.
I find her urgency completely understandable. "Believe me, you can't go anywhere else except this place," she tells us. When you've been treading water, desperate for a couch/curtain set/carpet you can trust, evangelizing it is your duty. It's hard to understand that other people don't share your frantic desire. "You can actually find REALLY beautiful hardwood mirrors on Craigslist if you just look for, like, just an hour a day" I tell anyone who will listen, not quite getting that someone may not care enough to find a good deal for a mirror to spend an hour of their free time scrolling through amateur photographs of mostly uninspired home goods.
It's as much about having bought it as it is about having it at all. I think the Curtain Lady makes it really clear how a huge part of the thrill of having these curtains is knowing their price, and knowing they were a bargain.That's why evangelizing the purchase is so important: that something was a bargain isn't always self-evident. That evangelizing can be genuine, like the Curtain Lady, who genuinely seems like she desperately wants everyone to know about this crazy curtain opportunity, or it can be something a bit closer to bragging. Whenever I get a compliment on a piece of furniture, my response is usually where and how I bought it, and its price, if its price was a good deal. I love my $2000 ABC Carpet & Home couch, but I would love it far less if I'd paid full price for it, rather than finding it for $250 on Facebook Marketplace. There's so much more of a pleasure in finding, my Craigslist finds little trophies, testaments to my determination and savvy and taste. Entire markets are designed to replicate this feeling—heavily curated "vintage" stores that allow buyers to say they bought things at a "thrift" store, implying the labor of searching through useless stuff to find beautiful gems at a bargain, when really that labor's been done before you, reflected in the markup. I don't feel as much pride or satisfaction in the big chair I bought from one of those vintage stores in Greenpoint, though it's beautiful and comfortable – it doesn't have the same thrill of finding, or the sense that I tricked the world by getting it. Anyone could have it – that store (Dream Fishing Tackle) appears on tourism websites of places to shop. Everything looks good there.
This is another thing I've spoken about with my friend Lucyana—a tendency to create arbitrary rules for yourself as a consumer, that only end up making your life harder, though maybe that's the point. If it's too easy, it doesn't count. It's about ethics, but also not really: not shopping on Amazon is obviously a small protest against an oppressive capitalistic force, but it's also an aesthetic choice. Consumption is performative and in a capitalist system builds your identity. I wouldn't shop at Zara, but have shopped at Rainbow, perhaps because Rainbow isn't quite so directly marketed to me, and therefore clothes I buy from their reinforce a sense of my being deliberate and self-aware. Having these rules certainly works better as sublimation — if you're only allowing yourself to acquire a side table if it's second hand, cheap, charming, and with a singular personality, it'll certainly take up more of your energy.
This is as much about how other people see you as it is about the space you inhabit. In a home, your own appreciation for the comfort and beauty you've made can be secondary to the way your house signals your values to others. I want my house to show that I'm charming, resourceful, artistic, tasteful, whimsical, funny, resourceful. I like things with colors, and pieces that are worth a lot that I got for very little, things I made, things my peers made, or cheap children's toys that I find on the street that I give central roles.
In my rapacious quest for evermore places to shop for affordable, beautiful, quality home goods, I've recently taken to perusing estate auctions (on auctionninja.com; I recently bought two lamps for $20 that I was supposed to drive to New Haven to pick up but didn't so I lost the lamps and the $20; epic). There can be a real sadness to this kind of purchasing, especially now; it can feel like your taking advantage of someone's loss. These days you see Craigslist posts from people trying to sell their nice home goods to help pay their rent. I recently bought a beautiful, century old hardwood mirror on Craigslist recently for $20, one of my biggest Craigslist coup's to date. When I picked it up from an apartment in Windsor Terrace, the old man who gave it to me told me sadly that it was from a Bed and Breakfast business he had run for several years. "That business is over now, though" he told me, sadly, alluding to the novel coronavirus (Google it if you haven't heard about it). I thanked him for the mirror, told him how much I would love it in a vain attempt to make him feel better, and left.
I love my home, and have loved working on it, even though it makes me fully crazy. Homemaking is asymptotic, at least for me – I will never have the perfect house that does everything I want. There's always a better way to hang the paintings, or a cooler chair to find, or sweeping that needs to be done. You succumb to panic in a second if you start to take stock of all the things you need to change and the infinite work that would go into changing them. It is – sorry – literally about the process rather than the result. Sorry again.
The Curtain Lady died recently. Here's her obituary: her name was Blanche L. Morrison. She owned a salon and loved traveling, dancing, and music —a woman in pursuit of beauty. It makes me wonder what happened to those beautiful curtains and the other beautiful things she'd collected in her lifetime. Some, surely, would find new homes via estate sales, priced at discounts that would make the Curtain Lady proud.