When Danielle Short '13 first arrived at Streeter 209 this term, it was covered in cobwebs.
"I lived in McLaughlin freshman year," she laughs, tugging on her flannel shirt as she leads me into the small inner room, jazz streaming into her single window from Gold Coast's lawn party outside. "I had a privileged life back then!"
While the room is small (about the size of my off-campus bathroom), Danielle makes up for it with charm and detail, the most recent of which is a shaggy white slab of faux-fox she's strategically thrown over the otherwise drab grey and wood dorm chair positioned in the only open corner of the room.
Growing up in downtown New York with her mother, a photographer originally from Puerto Rico, and father, an artist whose black and white drawings crowd her walls, Danielle brings an eclectic, urban spirit to her dorm. From the wine and saffron-colored pillows she picked up in New York's Little India to a toad-shaped ceramic box from a trip to Mexico, Danielle's lush, handcrafted boudoir seems a balcony up from Hanover, N.H. On the doorknob to her closet hangs a green and red gem-encrusted amulet the size of a flask that she took back from a trip to Morocco with her mother years ago. Taped to her wall is a handwritten note from her father, reminding her to "soak up all that ivy." And by the looks of it, she's gilding green.
A dancer all her life, Danielle came to Dartmouth with a knack for the creative and a spirit of mobility.
"I want my dorm to remind me of where I've been and inspire me to go to new places," she says, showing me pictures she took on the Seine in Paris while interning under a history journalist for Antiques magazine. "Ever since my mom gave me her old Nokia when I was a kid, I've taken photographs wherever I go."
Behind her a model in La Veste Rouge skips across the street midair, the Eiffel Tower looming in the background. On the wall opposite hangs Toulouse-Lautrec's famous rendering of the outrageous Louise Weber, nicknamed "La Goulue" ("the Glutton") dancing with her contortionist partner Jacques "the boneless" Renaudin in the Moulin Rouge.
Anticipating a winter in Paris on her FSP, Danielle is studying 20th century French literature this term watching films from her favorite French New Wave director Claude Chabrol (without subtitles!).
"I spend a lot of time thinking about what cities I'll go to after college," she says, showing me a floral rhinoceros print she picked up at IKEA a week before moving into her little room on the second floor of Streeter, "But for now, this is where I live."
