Rainbow collection
Early to Bed's Searah Deysach and Dawne Moon open their home to showcase an unexpected assortment of obsessions.
If you’ve visited Searah Deysach’s feminist sex shop, Early to Bed (5232 N Sheridan Rd, 773-271-1219), in Edgewater, you’d expect her to have a colorful home. Perhaps it’s something to do with the thirtysomething’s shock of bright pink hair or the melange of rainbow-colored toys in her storefront.
“If it were up to me, this would all be shades of pink,” Deysach says, referring to the walls of the North Side home she shares with partner Dawne Moon (pictured right) and their child, Asa Bex. Instead, they range from royal purple in the dining room to a yellowy green in the living room to splashes of bright orange on the spiral staircase leading to the attic. In fact, pink appears only in the kitchen in a pale, girly hue.
Colorful as they are, the walls merely provide a backdrop for the couple’s gallery of art, mostly by their friends, as well as woodprints, paintings and embroidery by Deysach herself, who attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before opening Early to Bed.
For the most part, Deysach keeps naughty souvenirs from work out of the house. “However, I have a fascination with treating myself every once in a while to something gross I’d never sell at the store,” she says. See: the rubber fist adorning the mantel and the rubber feet on the TV stand supporting their Netflix DVDs.
Metaphorically speaking, “colorful” doesn’t even begin to describe their collections of memorabilia and ephemera, most of which seem to bear some connection to the body: saved dental casts, a few pieces of taxidermy, hairstyling doll heads and two framed collections of hair clippings from friends and siblings (including Deysach’s first boyfriend, Dan Sinker, former editor/publisher of Punk Planet).
“[Hair] is so interesting as [a way of keeping a] history of people,” Deysach says. “I started keeping my hair clippings when I started dyeing my hair green in high school. It’s become a nice present for me. My old boss at the Art Institute gave me a lock of her and her husband’s hair braided together.”
The two main outliers to the of-the-body theme are cupcakes (knitted, felted and plastic, and even tattooed on Deysach’s arm) and Moon’s collection of oversize wooden forks and spoons.
“Color has always been a mode of expression for me,” Deysach says. “As for the house, I think both of us see colors as exciting and something that has the ability to make a living space more unique, vibrant and interesting...I would never willingly choose to paint a wall white.”
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