There is a room in our house we call the Party Room. We tried calling it the Lounge, but we are not a subtle family. It has a pool table, a bar, and, as of this summer, an oil painting of the most important stuffed animals in our family’s history, piled on top of each other like survivors of something.
The painter is Brent Estabrook, a Los Angeles artist who paints stuffed animals for a living. I should say up front that Brent is my friend, that he read this before it ran, and that I have no stake in anything he sells. When I give him advice, he ignores about half of it, and the half he takes he later describes as his own idea. I worked with Steve Jobs. I know how this works.
The commission
Liz and I chose the candidates, then polled our three adult sons for their must-haves, which is the only poll I have ever conducted where every respondent answered within the hour. Our three daughters-in-law each suggested something from her own childhood. We love those young women a great deal, yet we said no. Those animals were part of their childhoods, not ours. I had to draw a line somewhere to keep the concept pure. I used the word “pure” out loud, in front of the three people who will one day pick out my assisted living.
Brent titled the piece Family Portrait. It is a portrait of a family as it stood before our sons started dating.
My stuffed animal is Ellie. A blue-and-white elephant, somewhere in his late fifties, who has seen things. He stowed away in my luggage my freshman year at Duke, very discreetly, and returned home once it was clear I would be okay on my own. We have never discussed it.
A few years ago, my sisters secretly borrowed Ellie through Liz and restored him. New stuffing, decades of grime removed, bleached back to a color he had not been since the Johnson administration. Somewhere in the process, his googly eyes were lost, and they stitched on two solid black ones in their place. Nobody could have known. I knew. “Get Ellie his eyes back” has been on my to-do list for five years.
Hold that thought.
Liz’s centerpiece was Mickey Mouse. She had kept the original from childhood. Brent wanted to add a modern, heroic Mickey as well. I want to be clear that this was a negotiation between a grown-ass woman and an artist over whether there would be one Mickey Mouse or two, and that it took more than one phone call. The painting now has both, the new one in the center of the pile and the old one off in his own corner of history.
Felix the Cat came out purple. Brent asked, and we shrugged because Felix is not load-bearing and you have to give some to get some.
Po, the Teletubby, was a different matter. Brent texted mid-project to ask whether it was crucial that this character be red, because he wanted to make her a light pink, maybe peach. He did not know who Po was. I sent him a link to the Teletubbies fan wiki and wrote, “She is red. That’s her deal :)”
He went silent, which from Brent is a concession. Po is red.
The boys contributed a sock monkey, two Ugly Dolls named Big Toe and Ox, Shrek, and Nemo.
For the dogs, Brent painted the yellow Duckie that belonged to Max, who died at the tail end of the pandemic. And then, working from a photograph, he turned Frank into a stuffed animal that has never existed in the physical world. I had asked him to make sure Frank looked like a toy and not like our dog sitting on a pile of toys. His solution was to give our dog plastic stuffed-animal eyes. It throws you at first, which is the point, because what you are looking at is a Frank plushie.
And Ben. Ben is a small elf Liz bought at a hospital gift shop one of the first times her dad was admitted. He went to every room, for every hospitalization, until the last one. Not surprisingly, he means a lot to her.
That is the painting. It hangs next to the pool table.
The unveiling
Eighty people came to the unveiling. There was a velvet rope in front of the painting. Oil paint, it turns out, can take a year to dry, and a velvet rope is a DON’T TOUCH sign that makes people feel they are at the Getty. The animals came too, on the couch beneath the painting, in bow ties, because Liz decided they were the guests of honor.
Half the guests were our friends. Half were fans of Brent, who does this so well that people who own his work speak about it the way others speak about a good therapist. The word “masterpiece” was thrown around liberally, mostly by people who had been drinking at our bar, which is also where I was standing.
Brent called the painting a collaboration and seemed surprised by how well it had turned out. One of his collectors told me that if it were for sale, he would gladly pay twice what it cost. He has never met my family. What he wanted was what Brent had done with our childhoods.
The reversal
It was a while before I noticed what had happened on my own wall.
Where the meaning was ours, like Po, we held the line. Where it was thin, like Felix, Brent got to be an artist. Nobody wrote that rule down. We just knew, because we have sixty years of history with these animals, and Brent knew because he asked.
When I loaned Brent my elephant, I loaned him the one with the wrong eyes. The stitched black ones, the five-year to-do item. I told him the eyes were wrong and that I wished Ellie still had the googly ones. I did not tell him what to do about it. That is the object that sat on his table for weeks.
The Ellie in the painting has googly eyes.
Brent painted the elephant I described, not the one I handed him. He changed the source to get the thing right, which is exactly what I would not let him do with Po. Po stayed red, and Ellie got his eyes back. Both were right, and he got to both the same way, once he knew the story.
So somewhere in a party room in Manhattan Beach there is an elephant with the correct eyes, in oil, and he is more Ellie than Ellie is. I did not paint him. I did not decide his eyes. I told a story and a man with a brush knew what to do with it.
Ellie himself still has the black stitched ones. The item is still on the list. I would like to do that one myself.
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