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Cabbage Patches & Koalas |
Thursday, July 31, 2003
The Dummy
So, if you read the last post (and judging by all my responses, you haven't), you know I mentioned the lifesize doll I got for Christmas one year. I'm still not sure why.
The dummy has never had a name. I got her in either 3rd or 4th grade for Christmas. My Aunt Nina once owned it along with another dummy that hasn't been put together yet. It was for safety driving at night in the 80's.
I dressed it in my dresses and took pictures of it posed in various places.
Then I had nightmares where it came to life and tried to kill me. It had glowing red eyes and the only way I could stop it was by pointing my finger and shouting "You're a bad dummy."
The dummy was blank and faceless, with cloth ears on the side of it's head. I used to imagine the different faces it used to have and what had happened to it to have lost a face like that. I think I finally decided on either a bad accident or a sin so great that the gods decided she didn't deserve a face. I really don't remember which.
My fifth grade (11?) birthday sleepover, I pulled out the dummy. Someone (I think Tami Efron) found the toy makeup kit someone had given me for a birthday. And the dummy had a face, suddenly. The crude, 11 year old artist kind of face. She got earrings, blue eyes, nose, lips and freckles. She looks like she has a really bad case of chicken pox.
Currently she wears white leggings and a yellow t-shirt from a week long Girl Scout sleepover camp I went to in 7th grade. She's been in the garage since high school or so.
This is one of the many bizarre things from my pretty normal childhood.
Tuesday, July 29, 2003
Well, I was lazy today. Hence, no pictures and blogger is acting annoying. But still, koalas. Well, a koala. Though technically, not a real koala at all. A configuration of stuffing and fake fur with some plastic.
Katie the Koala.
I can't remember when I got Katie the Koala. No, seriously, I can't. I think she just appeared in my life one day. I don't know how old I was when I got her, who gave her to me, or even how much I loved her.
Actually, I don't think I loved her all that much. I seem to recall putting underwear on her head at one point. I really don't remember why.
What memories do you have about a stuffed animal? I've got a story behind the homemade humpty dumpty doll, Jennifer, and the life size dummy I own (that's a whole other post), but it's a story of their owners, the history behind them.
I never had pets, so I never had a doll I could no longer touch because the dog humped it or the cat shat on it. Well, I had a rat (Vanilla) and a mouse (Gus), but they never got out and chewed up the childhood loveys. Or the furniture.
I did photograph Kati as part of a Girl Scout project. Lit from different angles using my brother's green desk lamp which looks it belongs in an accountant's office.
She was also part of the big school I set up in the living room. Every chair in the house facing the piano, and in every chair a stuffed animal. I was the teacher. Probably also I was 8.
She might also have been a part of that series of still lives I did for art classes in 8th grade.
Currently, she's in a green bin in the garage.
AAAAAAAAAAH! Two seconds on google and find Jennifer:
with a better haircut. Scary.
Sunday, July 27, 2003
Cabbage Patches and Koalas? What's up with that, right?
When I have a minute or 20 tomorrow, you'll find out why exactly. These are two of my favorite loveys growing up.
I got Jennifer, the cabbage patch doll, when I was 4. I think she was a Christmas present, but I'm not sure. Her original name was something really ugly, so I renamed her Jennifer.
This was back in the day when cabbage patch dolls were all the rage, probably around the time my little brother was born, 1985 or so. They had matching girl/doll outfits. I remember we had matching nightshirts that were a light blue with something on the front. I usualy ended up losing her outfits.
I think I was about six when a mysterious package ended up in the back of the tree, for a girl named Jennifer. We were all mystified. I thought Santa had brought it to the wrong house. We were sitting there, wrapping paper strewn everywhere in our pajamas, still waiting to figure this out, when the lightning bolt flashed over my head, and I ran to my room to get her. I opeened the package for her, of course, and she got herself a new dress out of it.
Andrew had a male CP named drew. He had red hair.
Probably around 10 I stopped playing with dolls. Around 14 or 15 and the arrival of Monster, cabbage patch dolls became cool again. Monster had a CP named Caelo with curly hair. He collected about 78 at last count. That was 6 years ago. I'm sure he's doubled or tripled it by now. Caelo and Jennifer took baths together in the washing machine. We had a band at the time, and one of our songs was 'Caelo and Jennifer are Cool.' If you ask me to sing it for you, I probably will.
This was probably around the same time that Jennifer got her current hairstyle. I think Rin Rolla did it. Or one of the 757 girls.
My maternal grandmother died when I was a junior in high school. She sewed at about the same rate that I knit, and had a ton of stuff in her sewing room in her apartment. Jen wears a dress my grandmother sewed.
Jen has been one of my constants. She followed me to college and back. She stayed with me through the hell of middle school, the not hell of high school, and the innocence of elementary school. That's why she's got the prime name for the blog.
Koalas? That tomorrow as well.
I decided to start this blog yesterday at work. Now, I work at a retail hellhole, and I usually have a lot of time to think. When you work at a bookstore and you hope to be a writer, you think about writing a lot.
Then you realize you've written maybe two paragraphs in the past two months. I had ideas, and nothing I thought could really work.
I've been really dissatisfied with my writing life lately. Or, to be more appropriate, my lack of writing. The last time I had this problem, writing simply to keep writing didn't work. I wrote crap, I was unhappy, and it made me want to write less.
Oh, but that was ages ago. January, to be exact. Last time, I read Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird, a wonderful book about writing that helped inspire me. Anne discusses childhood and why you should write about it.
So, I decided I was going to. And from my lj and my knitting blog, I knew I would regularly write if I thought people were reading. Hence, I decided to start Cabbage Patches and Koalas. Live long and live strong. Or something.
