Fifteen Minutes: Go Make Waterfalls: Fantasy Worlds Within the Confines of Harvard's Dorms

In the beginning, all rooms are created equal: three pieces of standard-issue furniture and a wad of poster gum. But some students turn their cubes into castles with a special flair. They go beyond postering with the Table of Elements and I Believe in Me banners, seeking to escape from a mundane, one-size-fits-all lifestyle. They submerge themselves in make-believe fantasylands. They create their own waterfalls.

In the words of Kenny Loggins, entering the bedroom of Mike S. Ovadia '03 takes you "back to the days of Christopher Robin and Pooh." Ovadia's laundry bag, four clocks, welcome mat, trash can, decorative Kleenex cover, night light, shower curtain, dishware, flatware and towel are all inspired by Winnie the Pooh, making his room a miniature Hundred Acre Woods. Even an Eeyore sticker decorates the cap of his lava lamp. To get to his bed, he wades through waves of stuffed animals that include the more obscure Pooh characters like Kanga and the Heffalumps. "I think I relate a lot to Pooh's idealized outlook on the world and all the qualities that make up this silly old bear ... By surrounding myself with the inhabitants of Pooh Corner, I am surrounding myself with an aspect of me," Ovadia said in an e-mail message.

Last year, Christopher J. Perriello '99, bought basins, drains and pumps, and screwed them together to create a tropical waterfall with a six-foot drop in his dorm room. The fluorescence mixed in with the water gleamed under his black lights. Outside, the cold New England ground was wet with gray rain, but inside, warm tropical water splashed down to a rock beach dotted in shells and starfish. Perriello painted fluorescent mermaids on his walls and installed recessed fish tanks behind his homemade wall of water, creating what he calls a "life-sized aquarium." The bamboo shades and the large beach reeds he bought at Mahoney's Garden Center swayed as if the winds of the Bahamas had taken a detour through his room. Friends frequently surfed over to slime in the seaweed and bob with the kelp. They lounged on the beach chairs that covered his sand-colored tarp floor. "Swimwear was highly encouraged," Perriello says.

Pete A. Steciuk '03 has been a Boy Scout for 12 years. The wimpy New England sensibilities have not stifled his inner woodsman. In order to escape the wilds of his roommates' mess, he constructs tents MacGyver-style with delicate everyday linens. A cave shelter over his own bed remains standing. A well-prepared Boy Scout, he admits that he has a "stash of Pringles, fruit bars and raisins buried under the tent."

If you stand on the street and look through the ground floor windows of Quincy, you can see a wild thing and a little boy dancing to the moon. Last year, Dan B. Baer '00 sketched the first chalk lines of this "Where The Wild Things Are" Mural because "when we moved in to the suite, the word 'DEATH' was scrawled across the wall in gray paint." He painted in his chalk lines to cover the entire wall of Quincy B-11 with Max and a monster arching their backs to the sky. The book was Baer's childhood favorite and his passion for the horned and hairy things shines through his work. Whenever Baer and his friends would hang out in the room last year, "People walking by on the street could be heard saying 'Check out that wall! That's so cool!'"

Dorm room beds are tiny and constricting, but the residents of Quincy 601 still revel in the childhood joy of diving into a giant bed covered in pillows. The increasingly infamous "Pillow Pit," also known as "The Pillow Palace," is filled with the pillow fighting and the giggling of a middle school pajama party. The pit is the brainchild of David A. Sivak '00, who constructed the area with a base of mattresses that contains, at present, 48 pillows. This fluffy pit submerges guests in the common room. In his suite with five other girls, his roommate Dan B. Baer '00 says it "has become the prime location for late night reading, cocktails with friends, and regular platonic coed slumber parties."

After we move into our empty rooms, as the year progresses and the trees lose their leaves, something inside us aches to be somewhere else than in front of our computers writing about Proust. Maybe we'd like to be bathing with mermaids, chilling with the Hephalumps. These rooms serve as relaxation theme parks, like the fantasy worlds we created for ourselves under our blankets in the corners of first grade playgrounds. These elaborate flowing waterfalls and bunk bed caves are just modern forts, little escapes from the coldness of mass-produced furniture and rationally-distributed wall putty.

--Nina O. Yuen