This is Willie Little, multimedia installation artist and author from Palm Springs and Portland, Oregon. My origin story features an excerpt from my In the Sticks audiobook and, In My Own Little Corner, a new traveling installation.

This is your life, 1968.

When I was a child, my family lived in a narrow, lime -colored, asbestos shingled shotgun shack. We had running water but no inside toilet. We used a slop jar at night, an outhouse beside my daddy's juke joint during the day. I shared a bedroom with Ernestine, my older sister, seven years my senior. We slept in a cramped everything room. The whole family would sit and watch TV there. An old, 19-inch Philco portable black and white television stood at the foot of my bed. It sat on a rusty chrome TV stand with plastic Fogo rim wheels.

The way the furniture, the art deco wardrobe and the heater were laid out in that room, somehow reminded me of the New York City's Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building. These pieces of furniture created a cozy U-shape like there was a piece cut right out of the Manhattan skyline at the foot of my bed. I was fascinated with the tall buildings of the city. I thought the Empire State Building, and that time the tallest building in the world, was the best building ever. I used to draw pictures of the towering structure.

As I sat at the foot of my bed, I could go places and be something. In my own little corner, in my own little chair, I can be whatever I want to be. That's part of the song from Rogers and Hammerstein's Cinderella. I was entranced with Elizabeth Warren in Cinderella in the 1965 TV version. I know exactly what she meant. That little space, where I sat, became a window, was a gateway to a whole new world for me.

I traveled far, as I fantasized that one day I would live in New York and be a part of “Z Luxury” and “Z Glamour”. My wardrobe and heater became the Manhattan skyscrapers through the lenses of the television sitcom, Family Affair. My New York was alive, risky, and fierce. I lived another life through the characters on TV, the adopted twins, Buffy and Jody, who lived in a penthouse on Park Avenue. I also imagined I was Corey, the little chocolate son, of correct and proper practical nurse Julia, played by Diane Carroll, a pioneer. She was the first non-stereotypical black role on TV. Period. She wasn't bugging out her eyes or a maid. She was a professional, a nurse. My eyes were glued to that set every week. I'd sit and imagine my family and I were at the Turnage Drive-In Theater in Little Washington, or at the premiere of a Broadway play. We watched a special screening of Gigi, vis -es -li -queron enchanté, I'm sure. Oui, oui, madame.

I traveled far. I used to make a game out of things. That way, I didn't focus on the tedium of living in the middle of nowhere and the mugginess and the heat of the summer in the sticks where we lived.