Mae's Real Stories

When we moved to our new house, we had to make new friends. Our friends Judy, Marsha, JerriAnn, and some other kids all left our apartment building at about the same time as we did. The apartments were all very small, so we all moved to new, bigger houses. But we couldn't play together any more because we all moved to different neighborhoods, and Marsha and JerriAnn moved to a different city.

In my new neighborhood I made friends with a girl named Dorothy. She lived about half way from our house to school. I often stopped at her house in the morning and then walked the rest of the way to school with her.

Sometimes Dorothy invited me into her house after school. First I called my mother to make sure she would not be worried. She would say "Come home by five o'clock."

At Dorothy's house, we played games and read comic books. Her older brothers had comic books about really scary things. My mother didn't really like this sort of comic books so I usually didn't tell her too much about them. We also liked to draw houses and furniture for our paper dolls. Sometimes we played with other girls, especially with Fay. She lived across the street from Dorothy. When we went out in Dorothy's back yard we enjoyed her mother's large beds of very beautiful roses. Her mother spent a lot of time taking care of the roses.

One day Dorothy got a new puppy, as you can see in the photo of Dorothy and me (above). I think she always got everything she wanted. She had very beautiful dolls with hair that you could comb, wash, curl, and even dye different colors. Their names were Toni and Tint-hair (named after the brands of hair care products that sponsored the dolls). They were like a little bigger version of Barbie, but Barbie dolls had not yet been created when I was a little girl. Toni and Tint-hair had lots of doll dresses from the Dime Store near our school, and a special place in Dorothy's room with their own doll beds.

Dorothy herself had beautiful long reddish hair. Every week her mother went to the beauty parlor, and she went too. The ladies at the beauty parlor would set her hair to make the ends curl. Once I went along with her, but it was pretty boring to wait while she and her mother had their hair washed and curled. My mother never went to the beauty parlor: she cut her own hair and my hair and Elaine's hair, and we washed our hair ourselves. I still think it would be very boring to go to the beauty parlor every week.

I had other friends too, but I really liked to visit Dorothy after school.