Linda Tessner

I did not love living in the Middle West, the Midwest, and I really wanted to move.

And I thought, what the heck is this?

And at the time, there was no internet in 1983.

There was no way to kind of check it up or look at their website.

I had no idea what this museum was about.

Maryhill Museum is in the middle of nowhere.

The closest town is Goldendale, Washington, which is 13 miles away.

It's a very curious place because you drive to it and the museum just unfolds like a castle on the banks of the river surrounded by basically nothing but hills.

Glamour was kind of my Bible for a long time.

I mean, as a teenager, I read every single issue of Seventeen magazine.

A friend of mine said that she gave me a year because I couldn't live among cowboys.

My husband was a research glaciologist, and he was on expeditions about nine months out of every year.

So even before our marriage fell apart, I was living alone mostly.

So it was mostly just me living there with a big dog.

I don't know.

When I was a little girl, the boxes of sugar in our kitchen were always Spreckles Sugar.

Some of them were taken apart, so you'd see a mannequin, a wire mannequin with a disembodied head.

You'd see these parts, little shoes, little purses, these wire bodies, these very blank, ghost-like faces.

Frankly, there were so many things that had to be done at Maryhill.

I mean, absolutely everything was in some sort of disrepair or dysfunction.