We've all enjoyed those wonderful window displays at the Brown Elephant, but who does them? Well, it's the immensely talented Edith Corra, who grew up in ... where the hell is Libertyville?
"It's the home of the Lambs Pet Farm," laughed Corra. "Libertyville, Illinois, was, and is still, like Edward Scissorhands: very creepy, very white, very suburban, and people love to shop. But growing up it was great, because we lived on the outskirts, and it was heavily wooded and there was a lake, and we would tear around on our bikes and cause all kinds of havoc in the woods."
Like a lot of gay people growing up in small towns, Corra finished school and "got the hell out." She had dreams of being in the mountains, so she moved to Denver and went to commercial art school for a while, before returning to Chicago. "I couldn't deal with the mentality there," she explained. "Back in 1982, it was not very sophisticated, although it was my first introduction to queer life. I lived across the hall from these gay boys and they took us to the queer bars, so that was a great time."
Back in Chicago, Corra got a job at Marshall Field's, as an assistant to an art director in the advertising department. "It was a great job," she said, "This young guy was a hotshot there and he took me on, and about three-to-four months later I became an art director myself. After Marshall Field's I went to Macy's in Atlanta and worked in their advertising department doing the same thing."
Corra describes herself as "a recovering advertising junkie." After Macy's she returned to Chicago and, with a partner, started Two Ideas, an advertising agency. "I have this love/hate relationship with this city," she explained.
After Two Ideas dissolved, Corra moved to Spiegel catalogs, but doing fashion ... "shave a hip off here, curve a breast there" ... she felt she was contributing to the problems of anorexic women, so it was time for a drastic change; she moved to New Mexico, got a job as a landscaper, and got "all butch in Albuquerque."
She returned to the Windy City in 1998 and answered an ad for a stock person at the Brown Elephant. "I didn't want to do advertising anymore. I wanted to share my knowledge with something I believed in. So I was a stock person for a year and then I made a bid for myself that I could do the windows. I'd had so much experience in advertising, it naturally translated to being able to do visuals in the store. I was bumped up to display coordinator, then to visual merchandise manager. I'm now doing the windows for all three stores, and also consulting on the interiors.
"We get mountains of things, so I've got all this stuff at my disposal. I never sit down with this fully complete vision. I just start to look around the store, pull this, pull that, and I've got all kinds of junk upstairs in the display loft."
A particular favorite of Brown Elephant window-watchers was the display over the last International Mr. Leather weekend. For those who missed it, the windows were blocked out and the viewer could look through peepholes at the "adult-oriented" display. "The best part about those windows was arriving in the morning and seeing all these fingerprints and noseprints on the holes," laughed Corra. "It just made it even more seedy."