The College Years Live On

As we all know, some little kids get attached to a particular blanket or stuffed animal and will drag it around for years till it's filthy and ragged. My cousin Kristen (now eighteen years old) had a cheap baby blanket with a polyester-satin edge on it that she loved to twist, suck and rub. First the blanket was blue, then over the years it became dingy gray. One holiday when we all gathered at my grandparents' house, I noticed she had a new blanket! When I looked closer, I saw that her parents had hand-sewn part of the old blanket (about an 8 inch square, including part of the silky edge) onto the new blanket. (And clearly neither of them knew how to sew, but that's irrelevant.) Kristen was happy and yippee! she had a fresh new blanket.

Similarly, some adults become attached to memorabilia from their younger days - college dorm days, etcetera. They will move from roommate to roommate, lover to lover, apartment to apartment and sometimes even city to city carrying around boxes and folders of their old crap.

I'm horribly unsentimental, but I've always collected souvenir programs from musicals my mom has taken me to. Hairspray, Rent, Chicago, Flower Drum Song and any number of lesser-known ones - I have all the shiny, glossy programs. My partner, who was a theater major in college, had a lot of posters from shows he saw, worked on and performed in. He also moved in with some vintage posters and comic books. Plus, he also has a particular fondness for Madonna, and me for Mariah Carey.
Posters and magazine covers abound!

These things could not just be thumbtacked to the walls in our shared apartment like so many Budweiser posters.
We decided to display them in our hallway in these inexpensive "frameless" clip frames. (Yes, yes, they're from the dreaded IKEA!) The frames literally clip together with four springy metal clips each, so they are easily opened. We can always take one down, change the artwork/crap inside and hang it back up. This way we get to hang on to a corner of our security blankets and yet our place still looks clean and grown up, the way we want it to.