Sticky family values
I NEED TO SAY a few things about those rear-window car decals depicting stick-figure drawings of families. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you soon will. They are, according to one of the many websites that sell them, “all the rage” in Southern California. That’s an apt description, because the next time I see one, I’m going to floor the accelerator and cross four lanes of traffic without checking my mirrors.
These stickers -- a.k.a. Stick Family car decals -- represent the natural progression from those formerly ubiquitous “Baby on Board” signs. In fact, I believe that the exact same people who used to advertise their cargo as though issuing a hazmat warning have simply upgraded to a more elaborate announcement of their fruitfulness.
They also want us to know how very, very cheerful they are. Stick Family characters are nothing if not jubilant. They often have their arms outstretched and their feet at strange angles as if dancing to a “Partridge Family” song. The girls wear skirts, the boys wear short pants, and often family members’ names appear underneath. Frequently pets are included. A friend of mine swears he saw one Stick Family that included the maid. When I said that sounded ridiculous, he asked how many families I knew named Mike, Karen, Sophie, Dylan and Juanita.
When I began seeing the decals, the conspiracy theorist in me assumed they were emblems of the conservative family-values crowd, sanctimonious pictographs that announced: “This is an intact family! No divorces, court-ordered payments or supervised visitations here!”
But on further investigation, I discovered that Stick Family decals are available in every imaginable incarnation. You can get them with two moms or two dads. You can get stick space aliens, stick people in wheelchairs, “Mr. Mom” stick dads, stick soccer moms and even stick “Goth girls” and something called “stick teen boy hip hop.”
A Google search of “Stick Family” turns up dozens of places to order the decals, but the most official-seeming outfit is an Escondido-based design firm called Decalifornia. It’s owned by graphic artist Janel Eaton, who’s been in the sticker business for five years and began drawing Stick Families after a customer saw one on a car in the Midwest and wanted her own. Eaton told me she’s done thousands of Stick Family decals (they account for more than half of her business), including a 4-foot-long sticker for a guy who wanted to be depicted as a cowboy surrounded by 23 different kinds of animals. She also, as it happens, did a sticker of a family made up of three moms and six kids.
OK, so I was wrong about the right-wing conspiracy. But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like to unleash the Grateful Dead dancing bears onto the Stick Families and witness the patchouli-soaked bloodbath.
Then again, I’ve always had a short fuse about things on the backs of cars. Bumper stickers, even if they support a political cause I agree with, usually just seem gratuitous. (Besides, if you’re driving an old Volvo wagon, we already know you hate Bush.)
College stickers on any car purchased after graduation from said college should be banished. License plate frames displaying anything other than the dealer where the car was bought should be grounds for ticketing (with increased penalties for anything using a heart or the word “luv”). As for personalized plates, I would support a candidate of any stripe if he or she proposed a ban on them even half as strict as the new Calabasas smoking restrictions. It’s miserable enough to sit in traffic. Do I really have to be told that the driver in front of me calls himself “Lipo Doc”?
Oh, and all of you who have a menagerie of stuffed animals pressed against your rear windows, please write me and explain what in God’s name that’s about.
Given that we live in a culture whose motto is “I am, therefore I make an accessory about myself,” I suspect Stick Families will be around for a while. And while it’s nice that nontraditional families and space aliens are getting their due, the trend is in its nascent state, so surely there’s hope for even more inclusiveness. It’s too late for the Stick Manson Family, but perhaps we’ll soon see “Daddy Distant,” “Mama Enabler” and “Billy the Future Glue Sniffer” waving at us from the back window of the minivan.
Why drive defensively when you can just be offensive?
