So I thought I'd take my mind off of all of the awful things that are happening - and, let's face it, when the worst thing happening is NOT a pandemic, things are pretty damned awful - and share with you a real estate listing.
I'm not in the market. And if I were in the market, I wouldn't be looking for a place in Potomac, MD. And if I were in the market, I wouldn't be looking for a place that's going for $4.5M. Still, it's fun to poke around.
Other than that, at 12,089 square feet, it's a pretty big-arse house, it's not bad looking. If I were looking for a big-arse estate, mock colonial style wouldn't be a deal breaker.
And when you flip through the pictures of its innards, the interior is what I might call rich-folks-using-a-boring-designer style. Yawn.
And take a look at this playroom. Does this look like an actual, flesh-and-blood kid ever played in it? Sure, I would have murdered a sib for that doll house, but mostly this looks like a grownup's conception of what a kid might like. A grownup who was never a child. I know, I know, it's staged. Still, it looks so perfectly, perfectly fake. All it's missing is a couple of those ultra-realistic baby dolls that some poor, cracked women adopt and treat as if they're real.
But the playroom is nothing compared to the basement. Or as they would point out on HG-TV, the finished basement.
What the owners decided to do is create a Disney-esque, early 20th century little town, complete with cobbled streets and cutsefy storefronts.
Early 20th century. Sorta. Kinda. Not really.
Yes, there's a Post Office with a World War I recruitment poster. But what's playing at the theater are Platoon and a double feature: Mary Poppins and The Exorcist. Well, you have to give some credit to whoever paired those two. The mind reels. Does someone exorcise Mary Poppins herself? Or Jane and Michael Banks? Frankly, I'd love to see Mary Poppins' head spinning while pea soup spewed out of her mouth.
And when you layer on Platoon... Well, Mary Poppins was quite the favorite in my house growing up. My sister Trish was the perfect age for it. I took her to see the movie, and she had the album. Which she played incessantly. I can guarantee that, if someone put the needle down on the first song, my sibs and I could automatically sing along through the album's entirety, without missing a lyric. From "Sister Suffragette" on through to "Let's Go Fly a Kite."
It's not the music that's awful. It's not. The songs are pretty good. What's insufferable is the movie, which I learned when my husband and I tried watching it with Trish's daughter Molly when she was 5 or 6. Yikes! It could definitely use an exorcism. Or have some parts taken out by the gang in Platoon.
Maybe the movie playing should have been Nightmare on Elm Street.
The little basement town also comes with a couple of working cars, so you can drive around and fully enjoy the place.
As hobbies go, setting up a little fake town isn't as bad as Jeffrey Dahmer's. But I just can't imagine what the point is. Obviously giving yourself the ability to live out a fantasy. My very own Westworld. But what do you do with it, exactly? Walk around in a middy-blouse and high-button shoes, pretending it's 1912? Could it be the setting for some weird type of porn filming?
Certainly, people are entitled to spend their money however they want. And if you've got the scratch to set up your own private Enchanted Village - a fake town that Jordan Marsh, the late and occasionally lamented Boston department store put on display every Christmas season - have at it.
That's my attitude on one hand. On the other hand, it's just plain weirdo weird.
And I'm guessing that a potential buyer might use it's existence to skinny more than a few bucks off the asking price to get rid of it. Talk about needs work.
Still, I'm delighted to have seen it. It gave me the opportunity to get my mind off of all the horror that's out there. Thank the Twitter gods - where I first saw a mention of this place - for small blessings.
I needed this today!
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