[Click through for slideshow]

Plus between the last book and this one, I had run out of Plexiglas panels and paperclips and glue. So for How Did You Get This Number, I decided it was time to call in a professional.

I have been a fan of Sloane Tanen and her darkly comic world of miniature poultry for years. Both of her books published for adults – Bitter With Baggage Seeks Same and Going For The Bronze – have made me laugh time and again. Her specific combination of whimsy and dark humor is totally unique and it’s a vibe I wouldn’t mind achieving in essay form. So I approached Sloane about creating a few of her original chicken scenes based on scenes from my new book of essays, How Did You Get This Number. They are posted here for the first time. And as if she hasn’t already done enough for me creating these amazing dioramas to go with my essays, I asked her some questions about them for this website:

1) I gave you a few of the essays I felt would be the most chicken-friendly. Beyond that, how did you decide which scenes you would use?

Because I think humor usually stems from misery or discomfort, I looked for the core pathos in your essays and thought about various ways I could distill that moment into a single image. After that I had to think about what props I either had or that could be easily made. Stefan, the amazing photographer, kindly agreed to the shoot the images, so I was determined to have the images be fairly simple and not crazily labor intensive on his end.

2) Was it easier or more difficult to have the source material come from a different Sloane and in a different format?  What were some of the challenges?

It was much harder. I don’t think of myself as an illustrator per say so it was hard to take a back seat, especially to another Sloane. Then the challenge was in my trying to create something funny out of something that was already funny. As if I were trying to trump you on your own memoirs…with chickens. If that makes sense?

3) I would think one of the most challenging aspects of the dioramas would be to get the chicken facial expressions just right.  Given that you’re dealing with tiny toys, you must have to work against making the finished product childlike.  Is that difficult?

Not really. The chickens are ripe for projection. I find they really absorb whatever I throw at them. If the caption says “Giorgio was sad,” Giorgio looks sad. If it says, “Aviva was furious,” she tends to look furious. They’re very cooperative that way.

4) Are you really finished with the chickens after this?  If so, I am honored to team up with you for the coop’s final coup.  What’s next for you?

I never set out to be the chicken lady but it’s been such a fun and rewarding chapter of my life. I would never say I was “finished” with them, but I think they had their moment and it’s good to know when to pack up the poultry. I just sold my first young adult novel so we’ll see how that goes.

5) When we had breakfast (it should be noted you ordered eggs), we discovered we were each other’s first Sloane – that neither of us had met another in person.  Was it the revelatory experience you’d always hoped it would be?

It was weird. I’ve always been suspicious of other Sloanes…as if they’re somehow ripping me off or they’re impostors or something. Ridiculous, I know. So, it was weird to meet somebody named Sloane who it was all but impossible not to like.

“Fascinating…Illuminating and delightful.”—USA Today

“Charming…Original…Surprising.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Hilarious…Stunning.”—Los Angeles Times

READ MORE REVIEWS OF HOW DID YOU GET THIS NUMBER HERE.

From the author of the sensational bestseller I Was Told There’d Be Cake comes a new book of personal essays brimming with all the charm and wit that have earned Sloane Crosley widespread acclaim, award nominations, and an ever-growing cadre of loyal fans. In Cake readers were introduced to the foibles of Crosley’s life in New York City-always teetering between the glamour of Manhattan parties, the indignity of entry-level work, and the special joy of suburban nostalgia-and to a literary voice that mixed Dorothy Parker with David Sedaris and became something all its own.

Crosley still lives and works in New York City, but she’s no longer the newcomer for whom a trip beyond the Upper West Side is a big adventure. She can pack up her sensibility and takes us with her to Paris, to Portugal (having picked it by spinning a globe and putting down her finger, and finally falling in with a group of Portuguese clowns), and even to Alaska, where the “bear bells” on her fellow bridesmaids’ ponytails seemed silly until a grizzly cub dramatically intrudes. Meanwhile, back in New York, where new apartments beckon and taxi rides go awry, her sense of the city has become more layered, her relationships with friends and family more complicated.

As always, Crosley’s voice is fueled by the perfect witticism, buoyant optimism, flair for drama, and easy charm in the face of minor suffering or potential drudgery. But in How Did You Get This Number it has also become increasingly sophisticated, quicker and sharper to the point, more complex and lasting in the emotions it explores. And yet, Crosley remains the unfailingly hilarious young Everywoman, healthily equipped with intelligence and poise to fend off any potential mundanity in maturity.

Obviously…

I purchased a vintage paper doll and matching wardrobe off Ebay.  While I’m sure that particular set of words has been strung together many times before and by crazy cat ladies who know the value of a good keepsake ornament, I am not a collector. Instead, I was looking for a blueprint doll and matching grown with enough surface area to represent a whole story. Luckily, I found her.

Each of these six headless doll outfits represents a specific essay. Not all of the essays have accompanying dolls. So what does an essay have to do to garner this mildly batshit doll treatment? I guess it has to melt down easily.  Which isn’t to say I wasn’t aiming for some lofty complexity in all of these essays. But their visuals in these six stuck with me in a way I felt would reproduce humorously on a paper doll. What we have here are: “Lost In Space” (an essay about what it is to be truly lost), “An Abbreviated Catalogue of Tongues” (a story-in-eulogy about how my family changes with each murdered house pet), “Le Paris!” (a travel essay about not one, but two ill-fated trips), “Show Me On The Doll” (an essay about spinning globes and growing older in Lisbon), and “Light Pollution” (an essay about friendship and guns and bears but mostly bears). Wow, I feel like they should all be wearing mini-pageant sashes.

Anyway, if you look carefully you’ll see I haven’t laid out every meaning of every detail on every doll. Because, well, you don’t need my help. The idea is that all their secrets and symbols become obvious if you read these essays. And if they don’t, well, that’s okay too. I just really hope you enjoy them. I would say I hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoyed making them but I had the advantage of a lot of open containers of glue so….

Lost In Space

A) The Crystal Ball: This was the first image that jumped out at me from this essay.  There’s a reference to the movie Labyrinth in this essay. I also wanted to make a highly attractive David Bowie wig out of the trim on the Light Pollution doll but then I remembered none of these dolls have heads.

B) The Mushrooms: Like the small gold Cheshire Cat, these are a tribute to the Alice in Wonderland reference in this essay.  Also: they are a tribute to very tiny mushrooms made of twisted cotton and glossy paint.  They are scattered in random clumps across an old map of downtown Manhattan. Perhaps using movies from my childhood to illustrate the childlike feeling of being lost is no accident.

C) The Scantron Bodice: My general lack of functionality, though never a secret to my friends and teachers, really came to light when I began taking standardized tests.  Which they give out in New York State like they give out condoms in China. I would skip or mis-bubble dozens of answers at a time when I took these tests.

An Abbreviated Catalogue of Tongues

A) The Creepy Bugs: When I first started making these, I had the grand plan of designing them in the chronological order of the essay they represented. So either the present-tense version of myself or the start of the action would be up top and the past would be at the hem of the dress. And then I remembered I needed to live my life. But this one doll works a little like that. It operates literally from the ground-up. So the bugs and animals at the bottom are below the surface – dead and buried in dirt – and the trim on top is “grass.”

B) The Circles: These decals are pre-purchased from a stationary store.  I like how they look like pet family crests and I especially like the glow around the bird.  If the animals at the bottom are dead, these are their mini-souls ascending to the big birdcage in the sky.

C) The Hearts: A couple of times in this essay I mention that we tried to love our pets.  And on one level, the essay in general is about misplaced affection.  You know what else I tried to do? Glue a bunch of microscopic hearts on a paper doll without half of them sticking to my fingers. Everyone has a goal.

Le Paris!

A) The Metro Bow: I had the most fun making this doll out of the bunch.  Rather, I enjoyed revisiting it the most after I knew it was good enough. I liked scouring my house for random French memorabilia.  That’s when I realized I had Metro tickets not only from my most recent trip to Paris but one from my first trip there in college.  So the bow is made from both.

B) The Boat-T Bodice: Two words: Jean Seberg.  Two Letters: H&M. If I hold very still, I assume the current nautical fashion trend will go back from whence it came.

C) La Grenouille: The frog had to make a cameo on a doll about an essay about American (okay, my) misconceptions about France.  He was actually a gift from the woman on which Light Pollution – the Alaskan essay — is based. He’s a good luck frog.  Unfortunately, I didn’t bring him with me on either of my Parisian excursions. Which explains a lot.

D) The “Notice”: This made me laugh. It’s from the back of a plane ticket and says that it should be retained “as evidence of your journey.”  Yeah, well. Either that or you write an 9,000-word essay on the subject.  Keeping the ticket kind of seems like the lazy route.

E) The Euros: These feature in Show Me On The Doll (about Lisbon) as well, for obvious reasons. Aside from the vintage doll, they were my one EBay purchase for this. Once I found them, I wanted to see if you really could by a miniature version of anything on EBay. You can. I bought teeeny tiny handcuffs. For what, I don’t know. For if I saw a roach and didn’t have any bug spray or heavy magazines, I guess.

Show Me On The Doll

A) The Belém Bodice: Just go here please: http://www.pasteisdebelem.pt/.  They recently relaucnhed their website in a direct effort to taunt me (yes, I sometimes check the website of a custard tart I can’t even order even if they were 100 dollars each). These tarts were part of one of the happiest days of my life.

B) The Insane Glitter Patterns: This is an essay about finding your way and about crazy circus clowns. Both can be quite frightening. The top swath of glitter is supposed to have a harlequin clown feel.  And the bottom?  I took a map of Lisbon and followed the streets with glue from one side of the dress to the other to demonstrate just how windy the streets are there.

C) The “NO WINE” Sketch: This is from the last scene of the essay so I won’t ruin it. Really. That’s all you’re going to get here.

Light Pollution

A) The Fishing Vest: This is the first doll I made so it’s a little bit less refined than some of the others.  I considered starting over halfway through but then I realized the awkwardness of it kind of worked both with my experience in Alaska and the general manliness of the state.  Though what’s a feminine state? Maybe Louisiana.  Somewhere genteel where people slap vowels and accents on their names.  Where was I? Oh right. I went fly fishing.

B) CANADA: In the essay our “Lower 48” party often speaks of the strangeness of being “above Canada.” So when I saw these stickers I knew they would be perfect at the bottom of this particular doll.  And the flag is really there to drive the point home. Though there’s a Canadian flag featured in Le Paris! as well so that guy moved around a bit.

C) The Flowers: These are pressed wildflowers. In the first paragraph of the essay, I am watching a blur of wildflowers from the backseat a moving vehicle. As I sit down to dissect the dolls for this website, it occurs to me how obvious the imagery on this particular doll is.  You already knew these were pressed wildflowers.  Again, I think that’s an Alaskan thing.  It’s not a subtle state. Lots of in-your-face beauty.

D) The Bells: Since I was in Alaska for a wedding but the main bell in the story is a safety precaution against wild bears, I was very excited to find these: bachlorette party favors.  But the perfect proportion for a dress on a doll about an essay about….you get the idea.  Plus, this is the only interactive doll!  She chimes!

Take A Stab At It

A) The Key and The Lease: Much of this essay focuses on real-estate envy and, more specifically, apartment renting.  So the key is, well, a key.  And the trim peaking out from beneath the dress is cut from a photocopy of my lease.

B) The Cameos and Roses: I wanted to invoke an over-the-top olden-timey girlishness with this dress.  At first I was going to try to craft this doll top-to-bottom in Deadwood chic. But since none of the essays are about only one thing, I thought that might be too narrow. So I just glued these large plastic flowers to what I like to call “vintage flirt” paper.

C) The Scary Black Paint: Things were getting a little too rosy and shiny for an essay that’s founded on long-dead suicidal whores.  So I thought some black acrylic creeping in from the seams would help balance out the situation.

D) The Jewels: I had a roommate once who sometimes borrowed my accessories without permission.  The cluster of stones comes from a shirt I wore quite a bit while I was living with her and the earring backs come from – oh, yes – the backs of earrings.

And now for a beautiful interpretation of the essays from a real artist…

For a good time, call now!

“How sure footed and observant Sloane Crosley is. How perfectly, relentlessly funny. If you needed a bib while reading I Was Told There’d Be Cake, you might consider diapers for How Did You Get This Number.”
—David Sedaris

“Essayist Sloane Crosley doesn’t just tell us her life story through anecdotes, she makes us feel as if we’re part of them…tell[ing] fascinating little stories in wonderful and entertaining ways…Crosley takes life’s awkward confrontations, fondest memories from childhood and the unexpected, ironic incidents that happen each day, and turns them into wry, witty and sometimes touchingly sentimental observations.  Her gift is making even the most insignificant details illuminating and delightful.”
—USA Today

“[A] winning new collection…Hilarious…In what feels like the book’s centerpiece, ‘Light Pollution,’ Crosley visits Alaska for a friend’s wedding; her sightseeing is interrupted by an unsettlingly literal collision between man and nature. The ensuing piece is stunning, built on the delicate balance of strange and ordinary that infuses the author’s work at its best…Crosley responds to everyday absurdities with self-deprecation and an arsenal of metaphors, applying insights like a salve… As she expounds on her various mishaps and anxieties, it all manages to seem like proof that even when she’s lost, she knows what she’s doing all along.”
—Los Angeles Times

“Crosley writes with such buoyancy… In How Did You Get This Number self-deprecating humor is her weapon of choice, but Crosley’s final essay, ‘Off the Back of a Truck,’ in which she interconnects a painful breakup with the purchase of stolen furniture, shows a depth that’s every bit as enjoyable as the full-on belly laughs.”
—Entertainment Weekly

“Charming…Crosley has an original spark…[and is] capable of surprising you with… reserves of emotion and keen social observation…She tends to be right about the things that matter. In her best essay, ‘Off the Back of a Truck,’ she artfully blends a story of falling in love with another about furnishing her apartment with the help of a high-end furniture thief.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“Undeniably funny…Crosley’s work speaks volumes to her generation…[She has] proven herself to be an exciting new talent.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“Laugh-out-loud essays drip with sarcasm and silliness abound in How Did You Get This Number…[It] moved me to laughter that had my [airplane] seatmates wondering what exactly I was being served. The answer? The witty, smart, skilled workings of a wordsmith that thrust the reader into laugh-out-loud territory…Crosley captivates the reader from the very first sentence…[She is] worthy of your attention and bound to be a fixture on bookshelves for years to come.”
—San Francisco Examiner

“Nine thoughtful, unfussy essays by the author of the collection I Was Told There’d Be Cake navigate around illusions of youth in the hope that by young adulthood they’ll all add up to happiness… Crosley delivers witty, syncopated takes on visiting Alaska and Paris, and finding much consolation from a two-timing heartbreak in New York by buying stolen items from her upholstery guy, Daryl, who found them fallen “Off the Back of a Truck,” as the delightful last selection is titled. These essays are fresh, funny, and eager to be loved.”
—Publishers Weekly

“A worthy successor to Crosley’s well-received debut, I Was Told There’d Be Cake (2008). Where her first collection focused on a young professional’s life in Manhattan, this follow-up finds the author—whose day job as a book publicist is rarely mentioned—taking her show on the road. She gets lost in Lisbon (actually, she gets lost pretty much everywhere), threatened by a bear in Alaska and all but deported from France—or at least discouraged from ever again visiting Notre Dame. Most of the book is funny, some of it even laugh-out-loud, but her literary gifts go well beyond easy laughs…. Confirmation of the promise shown in the author’s bestselling debut.”
—Kirkus (starred)

I Was Told There’d Be Cake

“Quirky twentysomething essayist Crosley has a gimlet eye for everyday absurdities—especially those she encounters as she maneuvers the wilds of Manhattan. In this stellar debut, she riffs on everything from the meaning of her cache of plastic ponies to being maid of honor for a woman she hasn’t seen since high school. Crosley’s style is so conversationally intimate that you’ll feel as though you’re sitting with her at a café, breathlessly waiting to hear what she’s going to tell you next.”
—People

“Sloane Crosley is another mordant and mercurial wit from the realm of Sedaris and Vowell. What makes her so funny is that she seems to be telling the truth, helplessly.”
—Jonathan Lethem

“Whether she’s locking herself out of her apartment twice in one day, baking a cookie in the shape of her boss’ face to win her approval, or trying to determine which of her friends defecated on her bathroom floor, Sloane Crosley asserts herself as a new master of nonfiction situational comedy in I Was Told There’d Be Cake, her debut collection of hilariously uncomfortable personal essays.”
—Entertainment Weekly

“Charming, elegant, wise, and comedic, these essays absolutely sparkle and entertain. Sloane Crosley is a twenty-first-century Dorothy Parker, and this book is a gem and heralds a wry new voice in American letters. Gorgeous writing, outrageous humor—it’s all here!”
—Jonathan Ames

“The essays in this exquisite collection, Crosley’s first, spin around a young woman’s growing up and her first experiences in a big city, New York, as it happens. The voice feels a little like Nora Ephron’s, a little like Dorothy Parker’s and David Sedaris’, although Crosley has a spry wistfulness that’s very much her own. We envy the lucky guy who found the right words to ask her for a date while she was hanging from a strap in the subway, and applaud the arrival of a very funny writer.”
—Los Angeles Times

“Whether you’re involved in a love/hate relationship with just yourself or with the entire world, these essays will charm the pants off you—but not so as you’ll feel violated. Sloane Crosley is bright and funny and enchanting. This is a sparkling debut.”
—Meghan Daum

“Sloane Crosley channels David Sedaris—and Carrie Bradshaw—in a slightly cracked and often charming collection of essays recounting a suburban girl’s adventures in the big city.”
—Vogue

“Hilarious and affecting and only occasionally scatological, I Was Told There’d Be Cake is lively reminiscence about growing up strange. Sardonic without being cruel, tender without being sentimental, Sloane Crosley will win you over with this delightful debut.”
—Colson Whitehead

“Crosley’s book [is] a welcome departure from the increasingly tired genre of first-person prose as stand-up comedy. Unlike David Sedaris (I went to Anne Frank’s house and all I got was real-estate lust!) and other hugely successful practitioners, Crosley forces herself up against not her exquisite selfishness but some ideal she’s grasping for—female camaraderie, neighborliness, sanity. She’s also got a sharp, fizzily old-fashioned sense of the madcap that, in the best pieces, has you thinking that she’s figured how to cross Mary Tyler Moore with Kingsley Amis—as well as wondering, now that she’s updated the role of ingenue by concocting a bracing cocktail of credulity and crankiness, what she might be able to do with a novel.”
—Elle

“I Was Told There’d Be Cake begins with a hilarious first sentence, and gets funnier from there.”
—Andy Borowitz

“Hyped like she’s the next David Sedaris, Crosley is sure to inspire envy of epic proportions. The horrible catch: Her book is truly well-crafted and genuinely funny.”
—Details

“I love Sloane Crosley. In I Was Told There’d Be Cake, she navigates the social, the moral, the romantic experiences that prompt her to create her own voice and freshly define the world around her. Crosley is a postmodern Mary Tyler Moore, and this book is wry, generous, knowing—a perfect document of what it is to be young in today’s world.”
—A. M. Homes

“A vibrant voice… piquant prose… Her writerly persona is a blend of candor, wit and self-deprecation… Smart, sardonic.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“There’s a giddy coherence to the collection. This is accomplished in part by Crosley’s voice, a weird, alluring intersection of Dorothy Parker-esque, Fran Lebowitz-ish archness and loopy, almost slaphappy sensibility… its zany episodes and poignant interludes transcend the author’s particular experience to gesture at something more universal… many readers will hopelessly, helplessly, see themselves.”
—Time Out New York

“You’ll be in lurve with Sloane Crosley after you read her hilarious new memoir, I Was Told There’d Be Cake… Although the stories are set in New York, Crosley’s plights are universally relatable and described in a voice that’s supremely witty and genuine.”
—Daily Candy

“Crosley’s essays expertly juggle the hilarious and a mournful sense of the passage of time….a triumph of both the universal and the specific.”
—Bookforum

“Riveting… Masterful… She’s ironic, droll and self-pillorying and, like Sedaris, she manages to balance passages that are laugh-out-loud funny with others that are both touching and resonant. Above all Crosley manages, Midas-like, to take the minutiae of her life — and all of our lives — and turn it into gold.”
—Seattle Times

“I Was Told There’d Be Cake is a collection of rip-roaring essays following Crosley’s misadventures in the Big City…. Sloane’s is a generous, sparkling hilarity, and if the show is in Technicolor, the laughs are never cheap. By the end of the book, the flirtation has worked, and you’re left desperate for more.”
—New York Newsday

“A delightful debut collection… Crosley takes her own bittersweet time in these 15 essays, carefully building momentum with telling details, deft asides, plus well-orchestrated absurdities. The new author comes across less as stand-up comic and more as an everyperson who uses her off-kilter humor to muddle through the inevitable belly flops of fledgling adulthood…. Utterly hilarious… Engaging…. Irrepressible.”
—Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“This hilarious book of 15 essays explores the challenges of being a 20-something woman. The author covers everything from hiding her childhood toys under the sink to being a bridesmaid for a less-than-good friend. Witty and honest, the book will feel like brunch with your girlfriends, but funnier.”
—Shape

“This debut essay collection is full of sardonic wit and charm, and Crosley effortlessly transforms what could have been stereotypical tales of mid-20s life into a breezy series of vignettes with uproariously unpredictable outcomes….Fans of Sarah Vowell’s razor-sharp tongue will love this original new voice.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

MONDAY, MAY 2 – MINNEAPOLIS
7 PM
Barnes and Noble
3225 W 69th St
Edina, MN 55435

WEDNESDAY, MAY 4 – NYC
7 PM
McNally Jackson Books
*in conversation with Ed Park
52 Prince Street
New York, NY 10012

THURSDAY, MAY 5 – MIAMI
8 PM
Books & Books
265 Aragon Ave
Coral Gables, FL 33154

FRIDAY, MAY 6 – AUSTIN
7 PM
Book People
603 North Lamar Blvd.
Austin, TX 78703

SATURDAY, MAY 7 – LOS ANGELES
5 PM
Book Soup
8818 Sunset Blvd.
West Hollywood, CA 90069

MONDAY, MAY 9 – SAN FRANCISCO
7:30 PM
Booksmith
1644 Haight Street
San Francisco, CA 94117

TUESDAY, MAY 10 – OAKLAND
7 PM
Diesel
5433 College Ave.
Oakland, CA 94618

WEDNESDAY, MAY 11 – SEATTLE
7 PM
Elliott Bay
1521 10th Ave.
Seattle, WA 98122

THURSDAY, MAY 12 – BROOKLYN
7 PM
Book Court
163 Court St.
Brooklyn, NY 11201

Visit the original I Was Told There’d Be Cake website

“Quirky twentysomething essayist Crosley has a gimlet eye for everyday absurdities—especially those she encounters as she maneuvers the wilds of Manhattan. In this stellar debut, she riffs on everything from the meaning of her cache of plastic ponies to being maid of honor for a woman she hasn’t seen since high school. Crosley’s style is so conversationally intimate that you’ll feel as though you’re sitting with her at a café, breathlessly waiting to hear what she’s going to tell you next.”
—People

“Whether she’s locking herself out of her apartment twice in one day, baking a cookie in the shape of her boss’ face to win her approval, or trying to determine which of her friends defecated on her bathroom floor, Sloane Crosley asserts herself as a new master of nonfiction situational comedy in I Was Told There’d Be Cake, her debut collection of hilariously uncomfortable personal essays.”
—Entertainment Weekly

“The essays in this exquisite collection, Crosley’s first, spin around a young woman’s growing up and her first experiences in a big city, New York, as it happens. The voice feels a little like Nora Ephron’s, a little like Dorothy Parker’s and David Sedaris’, although Crosley has a spry wistfulness that’s very much her own. We envy the lucky guy who found the right words to ask her for a date while she was hanging from a strap in the subway, and applaud the arrival of a very funny writer.”
—Los Angeles Times

“Sloane Crosley channels David Sedaris—and Carrie Bradshaw—in a slightly cracked and often charming collection of essays recounting a suburban girl’s adventures in the big city.”
—Vogue

[Click through for slideshow]

I was trying to figure out what to do for this website [for I Was Told There’d Be Cake] to make it a little more fun. I knew it had to be tied to the book, but the book is lacking in references to music videos or pyrotechnics or home shopping network references…or other such website-friendly content. I tried to think simple. I flipped through the pages with the website in mind. How could I cram the book back into the computer, short of feeding the pages in through the cd drive? Then I spotted this, from the essay “Christmas in July”:

“In third grade I had to make a diorama about the Inuit. I showed up to school with a Plexiglas case that housed an igloo made from nail-filed sugar cubes and a battery-powered fan that created dry ice. It was difficult to claim I had created a functioning arctic biosphere on my own, given that long division was a struggle.”

Plexiglas! Yes! It was like The Graduate redux. I could turn my essays into three-dimensional dioramas and at least attempt to make them as detailed as the ones I used to make with my dad. So I picked three essays—“Sign Language for Infields,” “Smell This,” and “The Pony Problem.” I figured they were the most visual and that they would lend themselves the best toward diorama production.

The Plexiglas, divided into compartments, would replicate the experience of reading the essays. Since the essay paragraphs (hopefully) flow into each other, the dioramas are set up so that you can see the next scene while looking at the previous one. And when you’re done examining each compartment, you can look at the whole thing at one time.

This also would enable me to put photos in the background of each scene, behind the glass. This way, if the dioramas turned out horribly, the photo on the back walls could still hint at what the dioramas were meant to be.

• Watch the diorama movie.
• Read more about the making of the dioramas, and see more pictures and video, at the I Was Told There’d Be Cake website.
• See so many photos of the dioramas here on flickr.

I had little red circles stuck to my chin, cheeks, and forehead when Zooey Ellis warned us that Rachel Hermann was going to be joining our slumber party… The sticker, meant to double as a “zit,” was part of a board game called Girl Talk, an early-’90s version of truth-or-dare, designed to sanction prepubescent cruelty via laminated cardboard. Accompanying the board itself were zits peeled from an adhesive sheet and doled out to those who refused to participate in dares. Imagine the karmic opposite of candy dots. Girl Talk was the main reason I wound up enrolling in a college without a Greek system.

The game began by spinning a plastic arrow so cheap and lopsided that you didn’t “spin” it so much as flick it very fast. The arrow touched down in one of four pie-shaped categories of clairvoyance:

• Marriage
• Children
• Career
• Special Moments

The whole concept of forecasting and fortune telling was very en vogue at the time, often taking the form of origami finger puppets that told you when you’d lose your virginity and where you’d live when you grew up. Soda-can tabs told you the first letter of your future husband’s name, candles melted to reveal secret scrolls, moods were exposed depending on the temperature of your ring finger. The future was everywhere, and it was all very illuminating. Girl Talk simply did the grunt work for you, its predictions preprinted on triangular cards that fit into the board like the courses in TV dinner entrées.

To its credit, Girl Talk was downright empowering compared to Mall Madness, a game of fiscal responsibility that encouraged girls to buy everything in sight until they found a boy to do it for them. It was also strangely complicated, a layered enterprise with rules complex enough to make the ancient Chinese game of Go look like Candy Land. Before you put your fate in the hands of a plastic wheel, you had a choice. You could either tell the truth or pick from a series of dares. These ranged from the coy (“Call a boy and ask him who he likes”) to the suspect (“Act like Pee-wee Herman for one minute”) to the dehumanizing (“Lap up a bowl of water like a dog”).

Imagine, if you will, the legal repercussions of a game manufactured today in which underage girls are encouraged to call strangers’ homes in the middle of the night. Or to leave the house sporting a “silly outfit.” It’s all fun and games until someone winds up in the back of a cop car, clutching a Cabbage Patch Kid. In hindsight, I am proud that I declined to imitate a convicted child molester or assume a doggie position in order to win a board game. As if all this wasn’t enough, you needed “household” items to play, including shoelaces, a short-wave radio, and a blindfold. Were we preparing for our future fiancés or the apocalypse? Or both?

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