![]() I think about tying Nantucket knots out of newspaper with my dad to start a fire in the family room.Īnd I think about the TV. I think about my mom setting the dining room table for Christmas Eve dinner days in advance. I think about the wicker-patterned wallpaper in the upstairs bathroom that can trick you into thinking that you’re looking at real wicker if you relax your eyes enough (or if you’re drunk). When I think about my parents, I think about the Corian countertops ringing their kitchen. Hundreds of them, all of them worth preserving in my memory. So I know this house only through visits. I never lived full-time in the new house, because I went off to school the same year that Mom and Dad moved into it. But fuck me if it wasn’t the coolest TV I had ever laid eyes on. It was only standard def, because HDTVs didn’t yet exist. My folks’ new TV was a rear-projection Sony, with the projector nestled inside and beaming the picture out of the screen rather than onto a wall or pull-down scrim. This was back when big-screen TVs were still marquee luxury items: the kind of shit you won as the grand prize on a game show. To christen the media room, my parents bought a big-screen TV to serve as its centerpiece. ![]() They put in a kitchen with an island (islands were a newish thing at the time), an adjoining family room, a whole new master bed and bath, and, of course, the media room. When my grandmother died, sometime around 1990, my parents decided to move from Minnesota and into her house. If I had a TV to watch, any TV, I was a happy kid. It was no fully armed and operational media room, but it did the job. There was only a small TV room (now a bathroom) adjacent to the front entrance, where I would eat Cheez Balls off a folding tray table and watch a black-and-white television to burn the clock on extended visits. There was no media room in the original house. ![]() In fact, she was an architect and designed it herself. The house originally belonged to my grandmother on my dad’s side. ![]() Hence, a “media room": a wonderland of televisions and hi-fi sets and more practical VCRs than money could ever buy. While building it, they indulged in all of the de rigueur architectural terms of the day, terms they continue to use as long as their new home stood. My mom calls it “the media room.” She and my dad renovated this house, on a massive scale, in 1991. Upstairs in my parents’ house, there is a TV room. And buy Drew’s book, The Night The Lights Went Out, through here. Got something you wanna contribute? Email the Roo. Drew Magary’s Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday at Defector during the NFL season. ![]()
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