The Blue Room

As a teenager, my room was my sanctuary. Lucky for me I had tolerant parents. My mother, in particular, felt that every person deserved and needed his or her own space that was pretty near inviolate.

This is a tour.

A sign for my bedroom door read, "You are now approaching the Blue Room."

Three walls were painted a pale, powder blue. The fourth was papered. Bright blue, purple and lime-green psychedelic flowers cavorted madly over a silver-blue metallic background.

My bed had blue sheets with a checkered blue spread and pillow sham. A deep royal blue, sinfully plush, bed-side rug greeted my feet in the morning with a wake-up massage.

Instead of curtains, the glass louvers of my windows had the same paper on them as the wall. When closed, my room became an igloo, an ice cube, an underwater cave of cool blue.

I had a white vanity table, with skirts that matched the spread, a long white dresser and a white bedside table. On one wall was a set of floor to ceiling metal shelves that were covered with the same paper as the wall and the louvers.

Have you got a nice image?

Okay, shift gears.

Every available square inch of flat space was cluttered with stuff.

The vanity was loaded with make-up I never used, brushes, combs, fragrant perfumes I never wore, gooey lotions and smelly acne medications that never worked. Various pieces of jewelry were tangled together in a Gordian Knot only Alexander could have hacked apart.

School books, binders, paper, pens, pencils, coloring books, crayons, paints and stationary were haphazardly stacked on my dresser. The metal shelves were stuffed with my stuffed animals -- everything from a three-foot Snoopy to a one inch lady bug -- and my library -- everything from Alice in Wonderland to Thus Spake Zarathustra.

I had a record player my father made for me that lived on my bedside table. The shelf below it held my growing collection of albums. Whether it was the Allman Brothers or Frank Zappa, what I chose to play was played loudly.

The walls of The Blue Room were covered with posters. The Beatles, The Doors, The Who, and Bob Dylan had eyes only for me.

My guitar sat in a corner next to stack of song books.

I burned incense. The odor of rose, patchouli, cinnamon and jasmine mingled together into a mysterious unidentifiable soup. Anything made of fabric was permeated and carried traces of the scent. The air could almost be tasted. And there was incense ash scattered about like sacred offerings.

Cups and glasses that once held tea or milk, plates and bowls that once harbored PB&J, dill pickles, or chocolate ice cream kept forgetting to return themselves to the kitchen. They pushed aside books and papers on the dresser, hid under my bed and peeked out from under the piles of clothes that had been hung on the floor.

There was no room, in my room, for more stuff. But it was there in boxes under my bed, stacked in my closet...ten pounds of stuff crammed into a one pound can. It was everywhere, all over the place, all of the time.

Below the sign on my door that read, "You are now approaching the Blue Room," my father posted another.

It read, "Danger! Disaster Area! Three Feet Deep!"

So when you were a teenager, what was your bedroom like? Neat or messy? Cluttered or austere? Eclectic or co-ordinated? Inquiring minds want to know.