-In depth-
How do you get records for your collection?
Emma loves going to pawn and thrift shops to find new records for a good price.
“A lot of times [the pawn shops] don’t know what their stuff is worth. So I’ll find something really good at it’s like 2 dollars and I’ll be like ‘oh, that’s mine!’ and I'll snatch it. But if I go to Ann Arbor and go to an actual record shop, [the records] are really expensive ‘cause [the shop] knows what they're worth so I like to go to little shops and find the golden [records] in-between.”
What's your favorite item in your collection?
Emma's favorite record is "That's All Right/Baby, Let's Play House" By Elvis Presley which is still in its original casing.
“When you look at records you can see who they are made by [and] if they were the original or if they were copies so [this record] is the real deal… and I just really like Elvis. I read biographies on him when I was little and I did projects on him in school...I’ve always really loved Elvis so to have the original record is cool.”
How did you start collecting records?
When living in an apartment complex, Emma's neighbor was evicted and forced to get rid of everything in the span of one day. The neighbor ended up throwing their record collection away into the dumpster where Emma found it.
“My brother helped me climb into... the dumpster to get all these records out and there was boxes and boxes of them. So we.... were hauling these records to the house... going back and forth and our mom’s like ‘what are you guys doing, where are you getting all these?!’ My brother and I were like ‘we’re gonna become rich! We found all these records...we’re gonna make so much money! And I’m gonna get fifty percent and your gonna get fifty percent or we’ll give some percentage to our mom cause she’s our mom…’[but] we ended up keeping all of them.”
“My brother helped me climb into...the dumpster to get all these records out and there was boxes and boxes of them... So we were going back and forth and our mom’s like ‘what are you guys doing, where are you getting all these?!’"
-In Depth-
What made you decide to start collecting?
Emily cites her mom as her biggest inspiration to start collecting fossils.
"She collects fossils and rocks too and she really likes fossils and all sorts of stuff...she really likes trilobite fossils, I don’t know why. She collects stuff like that and plus she’s a gardener so we’re always outside so it’s sort of just like while my mom gardens I look in the decorative rocks for fossils.”
Which item has the most interesting story to it? What is that story?
Down on her grandparents farm, Emily found an extraordinary surprise in an ordinary place.
“When I first started getting into trying to find fossils I was at my grandparent's farm and they had a path that was made out of white gravel and I realized there was a bunch of little coral fossils in there so...I’d sit off the the side and look through the rocks and the car would come by sometimes. I used to almost hit by the car a lot. Which I don’t really know how fun that is…”
What is your favorite item in your collection? Why?
“I feel like a lot of people...just collect cool rocks when they go on vacation which is like what I did but then I realized that there’s even cooler rocks: fossils!”
-In Depth-
What made you start collecting?
At first, Jadyn didn't have much interest in collecting movies.
“But then I started to get them as presents and I liked having a physical copy of one instead of just watching it online”
What is your favorite item in your collection? Why?
Jadyn has some trouble deciding between two of her favorite movies
“‘Can’t buy me love’ and ‘Breakfast Club’... I love both those movies... I could watch them on repeat and never get sick of them."
Which item has the most interesting story to it? What is that story?
"The Wedding Singer" is the movie in her collection which Jadyn believes to have the most interesting story.
“I bought that because I started getting into Adam Sandler... it was the first Adam Sandler movie that I bought and I had never seen the movie before. It was a double feature and it came with this other movie about a wedding and my parents took it away from me because it was rated R and they said I couldn’t watch it."
“I love all kinds of movies. My favorite genre, though, is romantic comedy. I love romantic comedies! I love 80s and 90s movies and those are my favorite kind of time period to go into but I've watched a lot of 50s movies and the newer ones, early 2000s to now.”