This week’s article is the first in a series detailing the sights and sounds and inexpensive consumer goods available in eastern San Bernardino County. I meant to start this series earlier, but as it turned out I never went anywhere, unless you count that Saturday night I walked to the Green Burrito. (For the record, I ordered the $3.99 chicken taco platter. It was OK, but it could have used more chicken, as it turned out to contain nothing but chicken, lettuce, chicken, and chicken. And also chicken. One-and-a-half chef’s hats for ambience and five hats for the bendy straw in my Pepsi-Cola.) This week, however, I accompanied a friend to Michael’s Art Supply.

Michael’s is famous, of course, for its eponymous supplies, and justly so. But the store is also ground zero for collectors of plastic bags full of miniature dollhouse furniture and/or rubber novelty insects, and if I were not saving up for mood-altering prescription drugs, I could have easily blown ten bucks on glow-in-the-dark plastic spiders alone. Please note that I will be turning 21 in mid-October, and in lieu of cash or pills will happily accept any of the following Michael’s Art Supplies:

–suction cups

–wax vegetables

–assorted doll heads

–rockets that do not work

–pastel thimbles for girly-girls

–Israeli chemistry sets manufactured in MCMLXXXVIII

–"E-Z Water." For $8.99 you can buy six pounds of tiny instant water globules, suitable for irrigating fancy dioramas and itsy-bitsy fake fountains. Just add water! Caution: E-Z Water is extremely flammable. If E-Z Water is ingested, induce vomiting and contact your local poison control center.

–feather boas (available in three modes: "luxurious," "extra-luxurious," and "Beneluxurious." For when you’re in, you know, Luxembourg. Yes.)

–wax lips

–wax foliage

–cork by the yard

–Lisa Frank® Pom Pom Fuzz Buddies™. Kits include "21-27 pom poms, beads, pipecleaner, glitter, stick on gems, rainbow cording, rainbow ribbon, and yarn."

I was tempted to buy the Chevy S-10 pickup kit, but the odds were good that I would end up smashing it against a wall or cutting my fingers on the tiny windshield wiper blades, so I opted for the Lisa Frank® Buddies.

If you are a girl, you will no doubt recall the extremely pink and alarmingly bunny-intensive school supplies Lisa Frank® was always trying to foist off on you at Wal-Mart. If you were a boy you were supposed to be interested in robots or F-16s or, I don’t know, drill bits or something. I did not keep track of these things. I carried my pencils in a grocery sack for six years.

Anyhow, what happens is, you glue these fuzzy spheroids together, stick some pre-fab cut-out cardboard breastplates to their putative torsos, and you have yourself a three-inch-high homemade stuffed animal. The kit I purchased–marked down to $1.62, get them while they are hot, hot, hot–claimed to include the components necessary to assemble a) "Princess Pearls," a purple-and-white dog carrying a beaded bracelet and, for reasons Lisa Frank® does not feel compelled to reveal, a large cardboard shoe, and b) "Hollywood Bear," who on the box appears to be sporting not only a top hat and a purple cardboard tuxedo but also a tremendously huge pair of multicolored compound eyeballs.

Alas, when art major Goni Hary ’00 and I unwrapped our prize at home, we discovered that said eyes were actually a pair of cardboard sunglasses designed to appear as if they were reflecting the sort of rainbow-hued sunset visible from the Malibu coastline, assuming that Malibu had survived the nuclear holocaust that turned its palm trees blue and the ocean blood-red. I dumped a shitload of glitter on them, though, mostly out of spite, and they turned out OK.

Goni’s task was not so easy. After hand-beading Princess Pearl’s plastic bracelet, she found herself confronted with two long pieces of yarn and an instruction sheet co-written by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Reverend Jim from Taxi. "Take one piece of yarn and cut into twelve equal pieces and glue them to the top of Princess Pearls’ head," the instructions commanded. "This will make her ears. Next take the other piece of yarn and cut three six-inch pieces. Glue these pieces to the top of Princess Pearls’ nose."

I had problems of my own by this point, most of them pertaining to the ounce of glitter I had glued to Goni’s carpet and, as I would discover later that night, the insides of my shirt sleeves. And my pockets. And my eyelashes. The rest of the night is a blur of adhesives, except for our visit to the fuzzy neon rainbow that passes for the official Lisa Frank® website.

While the site does not allow you to purchase any actual Lisa Frank® products, it does encourage you to play Concentration with a computerized turtle, provided you download Shockwave five or six times and quit your browser and restart your computer and re-install Windows 98.

That was sort of fun, I guess, but for sheer heart-stopping thrills you cannot beat playing Hollywood Bear Vs. the Smell-O-Riffic Cauldron of Rubber Cement under the privacy of your own fume hood.