“Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky,
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same.
There’s a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.
And the people in the houses
All went to the university,
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same,
And there’s doctors and lawyers,
And business executives,
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.”*
Boxes. People. Sameness.
But when you put people in boxes that are the same… things happen. Same boxes beg for personalization and individualization. People bring themselves with them, they weave themselves in, reforming the box just as the box reforms them. They abolish the just sameness, filling their little boxes so full that it spills over the balconies in joy!
A sight to behold for the outsider, setting the imagination reeling with tales of the people within.
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*intro song to television series Weeds (HBO) in reference to the sprawling American suburbia homes.
words and music by Malvina Reynolds; copyright 1962 Schroder Music Company, renewed 1990. Malvina and her husband were on their way from where they lived in Berkeley, through San Francisco and down the peninsula to La Honda where she was to sing at a meeting of the Friends’ Committee on Legislation (not the PTA, as Pete Seeger says in the documentary about Malvina, “Love It Like a Fool”). As she drove through Daly City, she said “Bud, take the wheel. I feel a song coming on.”
similarities in the postwar housing between cold war enemies.