This little plastic doll came home with Keira one day from the Recycling Centre, and I haven't yet gotten around to giving her a wash and a new outfit. The handknitted dress she is currently wearing appears to have been knit onto her, I may have to use scissors to remove her from its clutches. Splotches of green paint are caked into the wool. Her entire body is rigid and non-bendy and she has staring eyes made from blue glass. She almost reminds me of a doll from my childhood, but I remember my mother saying she was disappointed that neither I nor my sister had much interest in dolls when we were small. I do remember a vague feeling of obligation towards dolls; as though I should like them because I was a girl, and that's what girls did. But they just seemed like a lot of 'work' to me- changing them, 'feeding' them, pushing them around in a pram.
This is the kind of doll that would make a perfect lampshade, as it happens.
Over the weekend, Tom and I attended a party at a tumbledown but once-glorious mansion on a hill in town. It was a dress-up party, and some friends were so well-disguised it took a while to work out who was who. The rooms were completely dark except for small red lamps in the corner of each one, and one room had a bathtub in the middle, filled with red rose petals and small candles.
Above the bath was a lampshade made entirely from the heads of old plastic dolls, halved to expose their eye sockets at the back, with the eyes removed. The effect, as the light shone out from the eye sockets like nail-holes through a barn wall, was eerie, but I liked it. The idea of sawing one's dolls' heads in half lengthwise and wiring them together was thrilling to me. I stood there for a long time and tried to imagine the children who had played with the dolls and what they had named them. What their dresses might have been like before being removed for surgery. What had happened to the plastic bodies left over.
I was joined in the room by another guest who told me he once made a doll-head-lamp before, aided by his small daughter. He said it had been quite difficult to saw through some of the plastic dolls, depending on when they had been made, and their design. His daughter is now 16 and plans on studying forensic science at university.
