300(ish) Words: A Love Letter to 2004
You’re 8 years old sifting through your closet of glitter-encrusted handbags, metallic threaded scarves, and Limited Too T-shirts printed with slogans like “Girls rule, boys drool” and “Life of the party.” Your dresser is scattered with Coca Cola and Starburst Lip Smackers, dime-size sequin earrings, and a variety of glitter sprays and lotions from Justice. Britney’s “Toxic” music video plays on your silver box TV during the commercial breaks for Unfabulous while you draw on Microsoft Paint using your clunky mouse on your Happy Bunny mousepad. Your older sister buys you Britney’s new Fantasy perfume and takes you to see all the teenage girl movies coming out in theaters, and suddenly you want to be 30, flirty, and thriving like Jenna Rink. You’re putting on Revlon hot coral lipstick in the CVS cosmetics aisle because you’re convinced it makes you look like Regina George. Mom drives you to school in her white Mountaineer as you belt Kelly Clarkson’s “Breakaway,” wishing that you too could spread your wings and fly towards your dreams. Some days that means being a dolphin trainer, others a pop star, or a fashion designer in New York City. You and your friends play Avril Lavigne’s new album Under My Skin on repeat pretending to know the woes of teenage heartbreak, circling layers of black Wet n Wild eyeliner around your eyes. It comes time to audition for this year’s talent show, and you and your friend Megan choreograph a dance and lip-synch number to the final track in Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen starring Lindsay Lohan, wearing matching Target outfits, your shoulders draped in hot-pink feather boas. It is the era of hot blondes, mean girls, and girl power, and you are a glittery, chubby, toothless hot mess ready to take on the world.
Alison Pirie is a Brooklyn-based artist working in video, performance, drawing, sculpture and installation whose work explores gender, identity, language, sexuality, personal experience and memory, with a particular interest the concept and history of female hysteria.
