Collegeville Masks

I have taught in Collegeville, PA, for the past several years, and while I thought it was cute that I promoted literacy in a town named generically for an institution of higher learning, I never recognized the name's true significance. Instead, I often saw the word Collegeville on signs and thought of imaginary places in Dr. Seuss. Like when I was sixteen and I accidentally joined the Young Republicans, I had no idea where I was or what the place really stood for.

One exit away from where I teach, in what was once a tire factory, resides the American Treasures Tour and its collections: player pianos; automated band boxes that blow horns, beat drums and stretch accordians; gorgeous, classic cars and motorcycles; scads of old tech like Victrolas, VHS players, typewriters, and princess phones; and automated figures from scores and scores of shopfront window displays. The visitor feels like Ralphie with his nose pressed against the glass on Opening Night at Higbee's Department Store.

I know a guy who must own every toy, model, or bath mat related to DC Comic's Batman. He's what they call a completist, a must-own-everything collector of worthless junk made valuable by its association with ideas and pleasures that have no physical form but can be inferred from their plastic residue. They say these American Treasures are the accumulation of an anonymous millionaire's sorrowful OCDs, which I assume were an attempt to heal the wounds of a childhood deprived of licensed merchandise. During the tram ride through his or her truly astounding collection, the ghosts of a century-and-a-half's worth of popular promotion and that rat hole behavior of not being able to part with signifyin' stuff, I was floored to see a display of plastic Halloween masks, the kind kids on my street coveted in the mid-60s, made of a crinkly polymer that tore a bit easily and packaged with a neato, and probably flammable, decorated smock. Collegeville Masks! Anonymous Collector had bought their entire inventory when the nearby factory went out of business in the last century. I had revered that magic name since I was five years old, and five years after I started teaching in the town the masks are named for, I finally recognized the sacred ground upon which I stood.

What highway in the sky have I been riding down all these years that led me to the physical crossroads of my wrges to make stuff and wanting to teach English? The only reason I started fiddling around with papier-mâché in the first place was to make masks. Not assigning any value to the object other than how effectively it carried out its Halloween purpose, I made a latex mold of my noggin and built up a Frank Sinatra version of my face on it, one wad of gluey news at a time. At the West Virginia State Fair in 1981, I made my first sale: a full-headed mask of Khomeini with a big green lizard wrapped around his head like an Imama, made over that same latex form, one paper strip after another. The work can be seen on the left in a photograph of my mask-selling booth, where it is next to a mask of Ronald Reagan, the then-current Republican idiot in the White House. To make a likeness of the first licensed-merchandized President, I had learned how to cast a multi-part plaster mold over a clay sculpture. Early on, I also used the process to make a trout mask replica replica, which is also visible in that old Polaroid.

I was lucky: some former Young Republicans never get over it. Moreover, my compulsion is to make my own toys specifically so I don't need to buy them. People should contribute to the community with their individual talents, I always felt. If one is going to compulsively collect a gazillion artifacts, each one a swipe at a lifelong pang that never goes away, for the sake of our carbon footprint, the best situation is not having to pay for the stuff and not having to keep tons of plastic in a warehouse. Although I do think it would be cool having a tram running through my house.

more photos of the American Treasures Tour