While I was at home during winter break, I binge-watched my home videos. The holiday season was making me feel especially nostalgic for a time when I actually, wholeheartedly, believed in Santa, so I pulled out the DVDs my family had our camcorder-captured memories put on to and watched them with my parents. They held the precious moments you’d expect—panoramic shots of my grandparents’ kitchen during a birthday celebration, an extremely zoomed in shot of me accidentally hitting a girl in the face during a dance recital, my dad telling his imaginary audience of “ladies and gentlemen” about the turkeys in our trees—but there were also a lot of moments that I had completely forgotten about, maybe because I’m in the process of blocking out my awkward phase (a.k.a. ages 7-17).
To my complete surprise, I was a fairly outgoing kid. In my mind, my younger self was shy and sensitive, prone to daydreaming, reading the selected poems of Emily Dickinson, and tending to my rock garden (which was just a pile of rocks in the woods). But I was funny! I would put on skits in parking lots, make faces for the camera and speak in a voice that was somewhere between Gollum, Yoda and an elderly British woman. I gave a house tour where I coyly pretended that I had to check my schedule to accommodate my dad’s intrusion into our newly furnished basement. I was an improv prodigy.
I was also constantly on the move, either jumping rope, doing pushups on an exercise ball, dancing to the Scooby Doo movie soundtrack in a style that I would classify as “an impressionistic homage to exorcism,” or performing the Curly Shuffle in a poodle skirt while my dad sang songs from The Three Stooges. I seem to have since morphed into a sedentary underachiever, considering that at this time in my life I could also do a somersault, sing “The 12 Days of Christmas” in its entirety and conduct important scientific experiments, such as which stack of my stuffed animals will be the tallest. I peaked when I was seven.
But what most captures my unexpected go-getter-ness is Cooking with Sarah, my short lived elementary school production that I now consider a cult classic. I covered everything from how to shuck corn on the cob to how to use an Easy Bake Oven with help from your American Girl Dolls. I would banter with my guests (who were usually family members who were there to handle hot and sharp things), transition between shots with professional ease and end each episode with my catchphrase: “go to www.cookingwithsarah.com so you can cook like me.”
Eat your heart out, Ina Garten.
Of course, there were things I already knew about my childhood that I was reminded of—my fondness for eating snow, my mom’s fondness for exclaiming “woohoo!” and my dad’s fondness for speaking in hyperbole, such as calling the day I lost my first tooth “one of the greatest days ever.” At first, I was hesitant to watch because I was afraid that the videos would look like something out of My Super Sweet Sixteen and that I’d be a giant brat, sulking around my house and ungrateful on Christmas mornings. But thankfully, I was always full of giggles and very pleased with the princess underwear I got for Christmas ’01.
Sometimes when I think of myself as a child, my memories become clouded by embarrassment, but I’m going to put forth the radical notion that this awkward phase I’m so concerned with wasn’t actually real. I just had an overactive imagination and an overbite. I was silly and energetic and bursting with charming nonsense, and I did a lot of things back then that I really should be doing now—jumping into lakes without testing the water, performing comedy in public, telling people about my fake culinary enterprise.
Speaking of which, go to www.cookingwithsarah.com. So you can cook like me.
Images via Sarah Clapp.