The Emma Edition: Psychedelic 17

I had a mini teen life crisis this week. I wish Avril Lavigne had written a spunky pop song about turning 17. Instead, one of the few songs of guidance I have is Janis Ian’s “At Seventeen,” which although applicable, is rather depressing and just suggests that I have " a lot to learn at 17." As if I didn't already realize that, Janis. But, in my restlessness of avoiding my birthday, I came home to a SURPRISE PARTY!!!!!!!!!

A perpetual dream of mine is to have a tea party with Andy Warhol, and this is just about as close as I’ll probably ever come. I’m still in disbelief that the it happened!!! Not sure at what point exclamations lose their emphasis, but this requires lots of them.

My house was transformed into POP Art gallery: from the Campbell’s soup cans stacked up in a pyramid to British Invasion paper plates, Warhol posters, and even Lichtenstein door stoppers that my mom used as table decorations. My mom bought all of my favorite candies that were visually “pop,” and retro popcorn bags for movie snacks. I already had a playlist called “Lava Lamp Grooves” on my iPod, so we were able to also jam out to Cream and The Kinks.

The best was of course THE VELVET UNDERGROUND CAKE!

My birthday gifts were all 1960’s themed. I find gnomes so comical and also misunderstood, and collecting gnomes are like the alternative for the crazy cat lady. My friend got me this vintage gnome-print maxi skirt from Paris; if you look closely there are satanic cats on it, which also speaks to me because I’m not a big animal person and I can imagine some little French women tending to her lawn gnomes as she wore the skirt.

I also got The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine DVD for my birthday. I’ve always wanted to see it because its the animation style that inspired psychedelic commercial artist, Peter Max. Above the DVD is a flower power dress from Etsy, which I would definitely wear had I the chance to be in Andy Warhol's actual Factory experience. I'd wear it with the white mod sunglasses, reminiscent of ones Kurt Cobain used to wear, that I got this weekend as well.

Below the sunglasses are an Andy Warhol sticker book. The thing about this book is that usually with stickers I feel no remorse peeling off pages of them, but with these, I think I’ll be savoring each sticker for a while.

Strangely enough, my favorite thing I got for my birthday was getting the chance to go in my building’s basement storage. My family hadn't opened our storage unit in nearly 20 years, and so this weekend, I went down there with my dad and uncovered all of his old records from when he was in high school/college. One of my favorite ones I found was The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour. Not only is it a great album cover, but it came with 24 pages of color pictures from the film.

It seems like people who made records put so much care into and had so much fun figuring out what unique inserts could be put in their albums, let alone the front album artwork. Take when Andy Warhol designed The Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers album art. It was so controversial at the time to put an actual 3-D zipper as a way to open up the record, but obviously paid off both The Rolling Stones and Warhol!

The gummies are supposed to match these iron-on fried egg boobs that me and my bff both have.

Had I known about the party ahead of time I would have gone full-out in a Go Go outfit, but suffice, I wore a vintage halter-dress passed down to me from my friend Lyris passed to her from our friend Julia of Supercute!