Closet Of Dolls
June 23, 2005

Don't laugh, but I have this thing about dolls. Cheap plastic pirate figures litter my bookshelves next to my pirate novel. I've done holiday nativity scenes made up entirely of Troll dolls. On Oscar Night, I find myself compelled to dress up five of my vintage Barbies as the Best Actress nominees; guests arriving for the show are obliged to admire my ingenuity, while they delicately refrain from asking the obvious question.

What the heck is a grown woman doing with all these dolls?

Some women crave shoes, or chocolate. I'm a closet doll person. They don't have to be Barbies, or even "collectible." I don't care if they're mint-in-box or three-dollar Goodwill finds, and I would never lock them behind glass to protect their eBay value. Their value to me is strictly hands-on.

Something about dolls appeals to the writer in me; I see them as raw material for building characters. Even as a kid, my impulse to play with dolls sprang from the same place as the impulse to write fiction: making up stories and inventing characters to play them out. Especially dolls in the extended Barbie universe, whose personalities can be completely re-imagined with a change of clothes. Barbie-sized dolls dressed as characters in my novel become both totems and muses.

Baby dolls always seemed a little creepy to me; if I wanted something that cries and wets all the time, I'd have children. In the early '60s, I had a Caroline Kennedy doll, and a Pebbles Flintstone doll, but my favorite toys were animals, all with their own complex histories: Yellowish, the rubber squeaky dog; Woofie, the sad-eyed stuffed hound; Karen the cat and Horsey the horse, who had exotic global adventures in spite of having had all their nap nibbled away by my brother Steve in his infancy.

I was nine when my girlfriends, the twins, got their first blonde pony-tailed Barbies, so of course I had to have one too. My Barbie community multiplied like rabbits: boring Ken with his peach-fuzz hair, kid sister Skipper, and my favorite, Midge, the less glamorous friend, with her short dark hair and freckles that vaguely resembled mine. When the movie Mary Poppins came out, I dressed Midge in a long blue coat, stuck an umbrella in her hand, unhooked the curtains from the rod over my bedroom window, and attached her to the sliding curtain-pull. When I pulled on the cords, she "flew" across the window. It was an instictive way to stay in the movie, to keep telling the story.

Midge, Barbie, and the gang were among the childish things I put away when I discovered the Beatles. (Although I soon possessed not one but two Paul McCartney dolls, the little plastic one with rooted hair so popular back in the day, and a cloth doll with a painted face I sewed myself.) I forgot all about my old dolls until I was a young wife with a home of my own, when my mom decided to clear out the remains of my childhood and ship it up to me. By mistake, all my Barbies went to the Goodwill, although I kept the trunk of vintage clothes. Haunting thrift shops and garage sales to replace my original dolls, I acquired dozens more. Friends enabled my addiction—like Buff, who gave me first pick of her daughter's old Barbies when Kendra outgrew them at age 10—until I had a mini Central Casting of dolls suitable for any storytelling emergency.

When Pirates of the Caribbean came out, I went to the Disney Store, in search of pirate characters. "She's looking for a Johnny Depp doll," Art Boy outed me. "Or Orlando Bloom," the twenty-something salesgirl agreed wistfully. Disney could have earned another $300 million in the doll market if they'd only gotten a clue.

Eventually, I became more interested in making up my own outfits for the dolls (my Bride of Frankenstein Barbie is a Halloween tradition). But as my creations became less outfit-oriented and more pagan, I started sewing my own dolls out of scrap fabric, offshoots of that old, totemic Paul McCartney rag doll. I call them Weird Sisters, after the witches in Macbeth, "so wither'd and so wild".

Weird Sisters began as a way to pass the time back when Art Boy was doing outdoor art shows; we'd set up the booth, hang the paintings, and sit there for eight hours. So I'd take my sewing basket and work on dolls. Originally they were art pins with bead eyes, wild raffia hair, and whatever props I could scavenge—seashells, feathers, odd earrings. Nearly 200 dolls later, they've evolved in eccentric ways: muses, nature spirits, bell-eared jesters, mermaids with painted Sculpey faces. To my amazement, I've sold them all (often to customers who exclaim, "Hey, I have a weird sister!"), except for the handful I've kept, given away, or donated to auctions.

Whether I'm sewing Weird Sisters or outfitting my corps of fantasy Barbies, it's a Zen thing for me. Working with dolls is completely non-verbal, a way to give my inner spell-checker a rest and still do something creative. Liberated from language, my mind wanders off into oblivion—where new stories are always waiting to be born.

(No Barbies were harmed in the writing of Lisa's pirate novel The Witch From The Sea)