The makeover task was to turn this into a 1960s style bathroom.

Here’s what was added:

• Period ceiling fixture, handmade from a picture clip
• Window treatment
• Vanity mirror
• Rug
• Hair products
• Hair dryer
• Books
• Purple towels
• Bunny ears
• George Washington powdered wig on stand
• Masquerade ball invitation
• Copy of family painting

It’s the mid sixties, pre-Summer of Love. A young couple has bought the house, probably about the same time as my parents moved to Geneva. There are books around the bathtub rim and the woman likes to take a bubble bath and read. Silent Spring by Rachel Carlson was published in 1962, and Ariel by Sylvia Plath in 1965. I didn’t plan it when I chose them, but these books lurk over the happy scene of getting ready for a party and foreshadow events to come.

Silent Spring‘s warnings of pesticides and environmental collapse was prescient, and today we have only started to deal with the wrath of climate change. Plath had already committed suicide by the time her shattering book of poems was published. She was an artist trying to straddle worlds, trying to balance young children and the urgencies of poetry. Sylvia is an echo of my mother who faced similar stressors without the dark outcome.

To me, the bathroom symbolizes the sixties – starting seemingly innocent with a party but then rolling forward with assassinations, civil rights battles, Vietnam protests and the Manson family. The turmoil of that decade is still affecting Americans; people chose sides then, too. I think my unconscious choice of a masquerade ball, ostensibly to introduce a powdered wig, was actually pretty apt. The sixties are when the masks come off.