This family collects vintage family vacation slides at garage sales and writes songs about them. And they’re awesome. They’re The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players and they’ve toured with Kate Nash, appeared on Noggin and Conan and been written about in the New Yorker. They’ve also starred in their own off-Broadway show, cooked vegetarian meals on stage to share with their audience, made lots of stuff out of felt and protested Mayor Bloomebrg’s rezoning of the Lower East Side and East Village which will make housing unaffordable for lower income families. It’s pretty fun and also hard not to try to imagine what daily life is like in this family’s quirky and charming Lower East Side indie vaudeville family band vintage clothes performance art craft making world. We would really like to be invited over for dinner. Here are the Trachtenburgs performing “You’re The One Who’s Made for Me..” on Noggin.
Monthly Archive for October, 2008
Lifehacker.com posted a list of “10 ways to entertain young children for $1 or less without the tv” and while it’s a pretty good list and will likely make you smile, what’s even better are the 46 pages of additional ways to entertain young children for $1 or less without the tv that parents posted in the comments field.
As a kid, Kirk Demarais of Secret Fun Blog always had the greatest birthday cakes, made to order by his mom. As a grown-up, Kirk decided to share his cake and has posted a gallery of 14 cakes his mom made for him. Cake number 7 is pictured above. The photos of the cakes and the retro kids enjoying them are hilarious and Kirk’s reminiscences of his interactions with his mom about the cakes are super sweet. Each cake marks Kirk’s kidsession within a given year, so of course there is a Vader cake and ET, too. This family ritual has been carried over to a second generation. When their son turned one, Kirk and his wife recreated the first birthday cake his mom made for him. Do you think that kid will do the same for his kid?
Remember the scene in The Royal Tenenbaums where Richie and Margot run away to live in the Museum of Natural History? Well you can actually do it. Museums in dozens of cities, including New York ,Chicago, LA, Ottawa, Winnipeg and most recently Bunch’s hometown of Toronto, are inviting your bunch to spend the night. You can’t stay there forever but you can tour the Egypt gallery with a flashlight and camp out in the shadow of a T-Rex. That it’s allowed only makes it slightly less fun.
