Betsy Snow White Bibliophile

Tag: Baby Betsy

  • 18 Days of Blogging

    18 Days of Blogging

    Do you celebrate valentines day?

    Seth and I really don’t. Once I made him a one time only sappy valentine’s love mix cd, back in the days when people still burned cds. (On this cd was: Luckiest by Ben Folds, Lucky Ones by Bif Naked and I’m Gonna Always Love You from Muppets Take Manhattan, among others.) But, since my birthday is exactly a month after valentine’s day we made the decision as a couple to skip it.

    My most memorable valentine’s day was my Freshman year of high school I think. I had been “dating” a friend of mine and he broke up with me as a joke the day before, but I didn’t get that it was a joke. He would tell me that later as well as saying since I took it so seriously he just decided not to correct it. We were still friends, and are still acquaintances online. He is a writer and fairly popular in certain online channels and once he broke up with me by saying “You are on a one-way trip to dumpsville baby, population you.” You can imagine how I was feeling about romance that next day.

    So…I put on a pair of black tights, black platform boots and my favorite Gap t-shirt dress that honestly barely covered my bits and I have no idea how I was allowed to leave the house in it. Oh, and a pair of creme colored lacy butt underwear things so if the skirt rode up all you saw was my ruffly butt. I added super dramatic makeup and dark lipstick. I had my mom take me to Meijer which at the time still had a bulk candy section and I bought 3 pounds of gummy worms. I then walked around on campus at high school all day a gloomy sight in all the valentine’s chaos and I gave out gummy worms. It went over well honestly and I got the attention of even some of the popular people at school with my antics.

    Later in the day I ran into my HUGE high school crush, you know the type I am talking about. I spun for him and asked him how I looked and he said I, “Looked like sex.” Which I then and still take as a compliment.

    There have been many, many valentines in between this one and that one, but that day in 1997 was the peak of valentines greatness for me. Seeing the smiles on peoples faces when I walked toward them with my giant bag of worms wishing them a tolerable day. My whole life may have just been trying to recreate that kind of magic. Thanks to bad break up jokes and my flair for the dramatic.

  • The Craft…The Witch Movie That Changed My Life

    The Craft…The Witch Movie That Changed My Life

    In 1996 when The Craft hit theatres I went to see it with my friend Jerid, and we were afraid we were going to be id’ed because we were not 18 (We were both 15) and it was rated R. It released toward the end of the school year my Freshman year of high school, and by Fall and school starting I was wearing short tartan skirts with chunky shoes and I had bought by first “witchy” book and a copy of The Witches’ Almanac. I would begin calling myself a Wiccan that year, which I later ammended to Eclectic Cottage Witch.

    The Craft, which was the story of a group of young women finding their power through witchcraft, and inevitably finding it is not what they thought. With great power comes great responsibility and all that jazz. It also came with a great friendship for a time. I wanted to be one of those girls: beautiful, powerful and just a little fucked up, lol.

    Strange Halloween tribute to The Craft featuring my Funko Pops made to filter out a messy background, lol.

    This movie shaped little Betsy in a way that I could not begin to explain. I wish I had good pictures of me during this time, but cell phones weren’t a thing yet and we almost never carried cameras. I know I was cute as hell.

    I know a sequel to The Craft is set to come out this year, and I am going into it with trepidation and maybe a little hope. I am loving some of the obvious nods to the original film, and I am interested to see how they work Nancy Downs into it based on the trailer.

    I love this film with the passion of a 15 year old girl who snuck in to a film about other teen girls coming into their power. That is some powerful shit right there. And honestly I would still dress like that if given the option.

    Is there a movie that just hit at the right time for you? What was it?

    I drink of my sisters and take into myself…

  • Happy Halloween!

    Happy Halloween!

    As a child I was at once terrified of Halloween and in love with it. When we would walk past the racks of masks and decorations in the store I would cry, or close my eyes and hide because it all scared me. I was often scared of other trick-or-treaters in the neighborhood, their costumes being to scary for the incredibly timid, shy and easily scared me.

    Once my mom worked very hard to make me a Miss Piggy costume, but a kid in our neighborhood was dressed as a very spooky wolf with light up red eyes. I was no fool and read a lot of fairy tales, so I knew my little piggy self would not stand a chance against that wolf on the street. I made my mom take me home early, because the promise of candy was not enough for me to risk getting torn to bits by that wolf. Did I know in my head that it was just another kid in a costume, yes, but to my incredibly active imagination there was a chance, however small, that the wolf was real and I was at risk.

    I was a child with an overactive imagination and Halloween was sometimes just too much for my poor head to wrap around. I also had very little understanding of the line between fantasy and reality (my first crushes were on Disney’s Robin Hood and Kermit the Frog and I did not consider either of them to be anything less than real). It is an issue that I still occasionally have problems with, but at least now I can usually tell the difference between a monster and a mask on a wall.

    Halloween would grow from a force of fear and fascination into a proper obsession. Many of my everyday home decor comes from the Halloween decor in stores; skulls, bats, ravens, crows, and the occult. Every year less and less of our Halloween decorations are taken down, so the house gets more and more Halloween all year round. I think it is amazing that I am still somewhere inside the little girl who would hide her face when Halloween was out in the stores. Maybe I am just the brave woman that a scared little girl becomes when she faces her fears. If you can’t beat it embrace it?

    Halloween Blessings!

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  • I Ain’t Afraid of No Ghosts…

    The paranormal has always held a fascination for me. I was always the weird girl who would check out books on hauntings, cryptozoology, witches, and anything else a curious seven year old could get her hands on. I already believed in ghosts because I had lived in a haunted house.

    At one point we, my mother and I, lived with my Grandparents in a nice 50s style ranch home in Heath, Ohio. It was a typical three bedroom one bath house with basement rec room. There were a couple of things that happened in that house. Sometimes late at night a man made of static would come out of my closet and walk toward me across the room. I would cover my face with my blanket, but then I could still feel him staring with his face inches from my covered face. That seriously creeped me out, and it should be said that I was afraid of the dark so there was always a nightlight on in my room, so all of this happened by soft light and not in the dark.

    The other thing that happened in that house was that sometimes I would hear an adult (my mother or a grandparent) calling for me, but when I went to them they would say they hadn’t called. Then I knew that my friends were calling me from the basement. The people in the basement were white and they would peek around the corner when someone was coming to see if it was me. They were smaller than the static person, but still had no real features just a basic human form in white. They would play with me in the basement. I remember that, but I cannot remember what I played with them.

    So…by the time seven year old me was checking out all the paranormal books from the school library I was pretty old hat with ghosts.

    Many years later when talking about that house my mom revealed to me that the couple who had lived in the house before us the husband had been killed in an accident at a local factory. The wife went crazy with grief and had painted nearly the entire interior of the house black. So that when grandma and grandpa moved in they had to work super hard to cover it all with white paint. I feel like some of mg experience in that house was just the remnants of the wife’s grief. I wonder if people still experience things there.

    I still believe in ghosts, and I am a witch. I feel like there are still many things in this world that have yet yo be explained and I am open to the possibilities.

    Do you believe in ghosts? Have you ever had a ghost encounter?

  • Thank You For The Musicals

    Thank You For The Musicals

    I have a confession to make; I am a theatre geek. I lettered in drama in high school. I was active in my schools drama club as well as many local community theatre programs. I had been a singer since I was a little girl, but I didn’t find acting until I was in sixth grade and they announced auditions for “Reader’s Theatre”.

    The idea of “Reader’s Theatre” was that high school drama club members would direct us in a presentation of a play that would be performed seated with a stand in front of us so all of the acting would be through voice modulation. In sixth grade I auditioned with several of my friends, and I was delighted when I realized I knew one of the directors as he was a friend of my cousin. I was accepted and found myself playing girl 1 in the first short “We Wanted a Hill” and Spring in another play who’s name I cannot remember. I was so excited and after performing I was one of our cast to be rewarded as All Star Cast.

    Damn that girl is proud of that trophy.

    I would do “Reader’s Theatre” for seventh and eighth grade as well. And I made All Star Cast both years. I played the Very Odd Mother in Cinderella Wore Combat Boots and The Evil Stepsister in another version of Cinderella. I can’t remember the title, but I know that one of my lines was to call Cinderella a “strumpety hussy.”

    I continued in drama throughout high school, and started working in community theatre. Some of my “acting credits” include Hodel in Fiddler on the Roof, Laury in Oklahoma, Ermengarde in Hello Dolly, Betsy in Godspell and countless chorus roles in The Wizard of Oz, Cabaret, Jesus Christ Superstar, The Green Heart and Once Upon a Mattress. I also did the occassional straight play, but my love was musicals.

    When I graduated from high school my original plan was to go to college for Musical Theatre, but life just didn’t work out that way. After a while I stopped doing community theatre due to one thing or another, and now it has been more than 15 years since I did a show. Sometimes I miss it so badly that my heart aches, especially when I see a particularly beautiful show. I still miss the warmth of stage lights, and the feeling when you really connect with an audience.

    Why am I telling you this? Well, I actually don’t know other than I compulsively requested 11 musical soundtracks from the library this week: Assassins, Waitress, Once on This Island, Mean Girls, Legally Blonde, Hairspray, Anastasia, Dear Evan Hansen, The Band’s Visit, Rocky Horror Show, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Maybe if I sing and dance around my house enough I can relocate the feeling I used to get. I can at least have fun trying.