Waxing Rhapsodic About Eloise

Who does not wish to sklonk the kneecaps of someone?

I am in love with Eloise in the Plaza. A life-size portrait of her hangs in the hallway between our son’s rooms. The border surrounding her consists of small illustrations of her infamous escapades.

Joe made it for me long before there was a Leo or Finn.

She is my saving grace.

Feisty royal rebel. Prankster diva. Deliciously upside-down alternative heroine. She is precocious and wise—a creatively resilient abandoned child.

We all get abandoned. By ourselves. By our parents– when they die or long before. The question is not if this will happen but when and how often. Are we resilient? Most of us, in our time, yes.

The more important question is: are we CREATIVELY resilient?

I would say comme ci, comme ca.

I rebound with creative flare a solid 75% of the time when it comes to piddly not-so-important things and a sketchy 30% of the time when it comes to heavy, mind-burdening things.

My goal this spring is to become 10% more creatively resilient in all areas.

Absurdity and imagination rule Eloise’s world. She could sklonk the kneecaps of Vincent the barber in one breath and order up petit dejeuner in the next. She skibbled and skiddered, took rawther long bawths and used a paper cup to telephone Mars.

As a little girl, she demanded fervently of me…be BOLD, be FUN, irreverent and absurd!! She heralded imagination as vital to my sense of confidence and happiness.

She proclaimed playful as the only tolerable way to be sophisticated.

She transformed empathy and compassion into a riotous five-star emergency celebration, caring deeply and demonstratively for creatures that could not care for themselves—turtles, dog-cats, deformed dolls.

She was light-hearted, fierce and wildly creative with love.

She was an agent of change.

In “The Story of Eloise,” Marie Brenner says, “Eloise was our ticket out of a gray flannel society–Holden Caulfield for kindergarten girls. We marveled at her exotic life at the Plaza Hotel and bombarded our mothers with questions:

Where were Eloise’s parents? How come she was so lucky to stay home from school? We wanted her life…Her Plaza was as magical as Oz and as exotic as the South Pacific. Eloise was a proto-feminist… She was an ancient child with the musical vocabulary of a poet.

Her words would enter the language of Eisenhower’s America.”

We need her today.

Leo and Finn crave her. They request I read Eloise at Christmas time every week. And I do. There is something deeply affirming about her rebellious nature, about her innate instinct NOT to conform, NOT to be bored, NOT to feel sorry for herself.

Author Kay Thompson and illustrator Hillary Knight encouraged her (and US) to explore terra incognita– the unknown regions of the imagination.

 

In a culture, adult and child, where we have come to expect external stimulation 24/7, perhaps Eloise is the answer. We may not all live at the Plaza.

But the Plaza of our imagination is far more vast.