I suppose it is a rather girly thing… or maybe even a creepy thing, that a sixty year old man like me collects and plays with dolls. This post, a lazy-writer short post, is intended just to show you some of my newest dolls and newest collections. I am not going to waste time justifying why I like dolls. That would probably require an advanced degree in abnormal psychology. So I will just show you and gloat about what I have achieved in my own weird little way.
This Monster High doll is Frankie Stein, the daughter of Frankenstein’s monster. I scored two of these at Walmart’s pre-Christmas clearance sale for three dollars apiece. This is the one I pose and play with. The other I am keeping as a mint in box.
These are the three lovely girls I bought with Christmas money from relatives back in Iowa. I went almost to the limit buying Starfire at a pricey $19.88. The collection rules clearly state, “Never buy a single doll worth more than $20.”
I bought Starfire to keep Harley Quinn, my other $19.88 doll company as part of my DC Heroines collection. That collection as it now stands follows.
You can see I still need Batgirl and Poison Ivy.
So there is my lazy-writer post about me playing with dolls, poorly rationalized and barely explained.
Getting to school and back by bus every day was tough. Especially when you are feeling rather down and blue. Now that she was a senior in high school, she no longer had Danny Murphy to sit with on the bus. Mary Phillips and Pidney Breslow had graduated four years ago and were in college now, soon to graduate from Iowa State University. Danny had graduated from high school last year, and had told her during that summer that he and Carla Bates would be getting married in the near future. Well, maybe not as near as anticipated since they still hadn’t picked a date. But no more Danny on the bus to tell her jokes or drive her home from Belle City High in that incredibly old 1950s car he inherited from his Grampy.
She sat alone in the far back of the bus now. Every day. The bus ride to Norwall seemed endless, even though it was only ten miles as the crow flies… a really slow crow named Joe with half of his tail feathers missing. But on this day, Dilsey Murphy, Danny’s younger sister, moved to the back as soon as she got on the bus. She was wearing that old purple Carl Eller jersey, number 81 from the Minnesota Vikings of the 70s.
“Um, Valerie… do you mind if I sit with you on the way home today?”
“I may be kinda grumpy company. But sure.”
Maybe the younger girl could lighten the mood for her. But, then again… probably not.
Dilsey had straight black hair which she sometimes wore with a barrette on the right side of her bangs because her mother’s fashion sense reeked of the 1960s. Otherwise, ignoring the hair and the barrette, Dilsey was dressed like a boy. Vikings’ jersey, denim pants, and boys’ sneakers.
“Um, Val, I have a favor to ask.”
Oh, boy. Here it comes. The real reason.
“Please don’t be mad at me, but…”
“It’s all right. I promise not to bite… at least, not very hard.”
“Yeah, um… you know Mrs. Patricia Zeffer?”
“Ray’s mom. Of course, I know her.”
“Well, I normally babysit for her on Saturdays when she needs to go out. But this week I can’t…”
“Mrs. Zeffer has a kid that needs babysitting services? She has a kid that young?”
“Well, yes… it’s her grandson, actually.”
“Oh, of course. But why is little Troy living with her now?”
“Uh, well… You know that family has a bit of trouble since…”
“Since Ray disappeared six years ago.”
“Yeah. I’m sorry. I wouldn’t be asking, but… I have a date on Saturday.”
“You do? But you’re only…”
“Almost sixteen, and a sophomore in high school.”
“Sure. I wasn’t trying to insult you or anything, but your mother…”
“Trusts me more than she ever did Danny.”
“Of course, she does.”
“Aren’t you going to ask who the date is with?”
She didn’t really, exactly… well, care. But…
“So, who?”
“Tim.”
“No! You have gotta be kidding me! Tim the Terror? Dim Tim? Rim-tin-Tim? The stinkilicious leader of the Norwall Pirates?”
Dilsey giggled awkwardly. “I’ll have to remember those names. They may prove very useful.”
“Why would an otherwise, very pretty girl waste her time with Tiny Terrible Tim? He’s my cousin, and one of the grossest human beans in all of Iowa. In fact… all of the Midwest.”
“You know he is a good person at heart. He’s only an icky boy on the outside. Inside he’s…”
“Only icky ninety-nine percent of the time. I do know my own cousin.”
Dilsey laughed a little more easily this time. Of course, Val wasn’t entirely sure she was joking. The brat could really get on your nerves sometimes.
“But… you don’t really think that…”
“That you shouldn’t be dating him? The girl who once told him that he was the worst, most two-faced person she ever met?”
Dilsey’s face was suddenly crestfallen. She looked like her whole positive little self was being crushed and was about to crumble into a weepy pile.
“You think it’s a mistake if I think I might be falling in love with him?”
“A boy who is a year younger than you are? One who is way less mature than you are? Way meaner too?”
Tears were forming in Dilsey’s dark eyes. Valerie had gone too far. Who was the meaner cousin now?
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said any of that. I have been feeling outa sorts and kinda depressed for a while now. I didn’t mean to take it out on you or Tim either. Forgive me?”
“You’ll take the babysitting job for me?”
“Of course. Little Troy Zeffer? He’s such a little cutie.”
“Do you really think it’s something a normal human being would do to like Tim and go see a movie with him? He wants to watch Mrs. Doubtfire with me.”
“With Robin Williams in it?”
“Yeah. The Murphy family wants to see it together too, so, if I go with Tim, I’ll be watching it twice, probably in the same weekend.”
Val chuckled softly. “That sounds good. You make sure you tell Tim I am taking this sitting job for you to be able to go with him, so he owes me. And if he tries to sneak-kiss you, hit him in the nose really hard.”
Dilsey laughed. Val knew she intimidated the younger girl. Dilsey had never been a cheerleader. Never been the leader of the Norwall Pirates. And never lost a boyfriend before. And Val envied her those things.
“Valerie? Do you need to be alone in this back seat every day on the bus ride home?”
“Are you offering to sit with me regularly?”
“Yes. Especially now that Tim is on the basketball team and has practice every afternoon.”
That was right. Now that Valerie had given up cheerleading, there was no longer any reason to stay in Belle City after school, and no reason to ride the late bus.
“I had thought I wanted to sit alone this year, without Danny here to entertain me. But I think sitting with his sister will be just about the perfect thing to take the place of that.”
How does an artist know himself? Now there’s a difficult question. I spend all my time looking at the world with the eyes of imagination. I don’t even seem to be able to take photographs in the normal way other people do. Maybe I should consider this self-think through the medium of pictures I have made with captions added to them?
Mickey is not actually me. He is my “other” me, my pen name, my goofier self.
I was born in a blizzard in Mason City, Iowa in the 1950’s.
I have learned about dog poop five times a day since 2011 when we found Jade, our dog.
I was a middle school teacher for 24 of my 31 years of teaching. I love/hate 7th Graders.
When things go wrong, I tend to make a joke about it.
I like to draw students as I saw them, not as they really were.
I always see myself as the one with the BIG pencil.
If there is goofiness around here, it is all my fault.
In spite of the title, I don’t know how to disappear.
I love everything Disney.
I tend not to be very much like other people. I don’t think like they do.
In grade school, I was deeply in love with Alicia Stewart, though I never told her that, and that is not her real name.
My high school art teacher told me that when an artist draws someone, he always ends up making it look a little bit like himself. That is because, I suppose, an artist can only draw what he knows and he really only knows himself. That being said, this post should really look just like me.
Mickey, how can you possibly talk about being illogical?
I intend to use magic.
But magic is not scientific or even factual. It’s not logical!
Voila! That’s the plan!
Oy! At least I understand why you led with the duck thing.
Yes, a large part of creativity is taking things that don’t go together and finding a way to put them together anyway to make something surprising and new.
Like two girls from outer space wearing high-tech bikinis in Avery’s south pasture?
Of course! Girls in bikinis are always good.
So, that explains the recent obsession with paper dolls, huh?
Especially the Annette Funicello doll, even with no bikini.
And it also explains turning Ricky and Stacey dolls into Butterfly Children.
Getting to make art with full-frontal nudity without worrying about exposed genitals.
That comment is a bit worrying.
Hakuna Matata, silly dialogue voice.
So, you could say, “Beauty is in the eyes of the illogical idiot?”
“Today I thought I would tell you about Bruce Timm.”
“Bruce Timm? Who the heck is he?”
“You know. That artist with that style… you know, the Batman guy.”
“You mean he played Batman?”
“No. He designed Batman; The Animated Series.”
“Oh, that guy… the guy who draws girls really good.”
“Yes, that’s the one.”
“He gave all the DC heroes their modern, animated look… their style and flair. He made them angular, immediately identifiable, and powerful.”
“Yeah, I think he not only did the Batman cartoon, all film noir and retro-cool, but the Superman series that followed it, the Justice League, and all the cartoon series and movies that went along with those.”
“But that’s not all he did, either, is it?”
“No, there’s more. He wanted to be a comic book artist, but before he got into animation, Marvel and DC turned him down.”
“I heard he worked at Filmation for a while.”
“Yes, he got a chance to draw and design characters for Blackstar, Flash Gordon, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, She-Ra; Princess of Power, and the Lone Ranger.”
“Dang! He was busy. But only superhero stuff?”
“In 1989 he went to work for Warner Brothers. He worked on Tiny Toon Adventures.”
“That Spielberg/Bugs Bunny thing? The one with Buster and Babs Bunny?”
“Yeah, that one, believe it or not.”
“Tell me more about the girls. I want to hear about him drawing girls. Wonder Woman in Justice League was hot.”
“Showing you is probably better than telling you. Be prepared to cover your eyes, though. He liked to draw the female figure nude and semi-naked.”
Betty and Veronica from the Archie comics.
“I like how he draws pretty girls.”
“You would.”
“He’s the artist you wish you could be, isn’t he?”
“Pretty much. He’s about four years younger than me. If I had gone the comic-book artist route instead of becoming a public school teacher, our careers might’ve been parallel.”
Did you know that this goofy thing was going to have a part 3? I didn’t. But when I started typing it, all I had was a title. It was a title made of multisyllabic words written with lots of letter “L” and “I” scattered through the line. But all three of those multisyllabic words do actually apply to my own life and character.
This puzzling picture features me as a boy with full frontal nudity involved.
The word “Introvert” probably applies to me more than any other. And that may be hard to believe, since a teacher has to talk and walk and make jokes and ask questions in the front of the classroom. And I am constantly talking about me being a naked nudist and posting illustrations in which I portray myself as a naked young boy. But what I am now is the result of a life-long transformation, not a set of ideas and habits I was born with.
Ballet? Or is it all about balance?
If life had proceeded from infanthood to boyhood to young adulthood normally, I might have been more of an extrovert. I was a bit of a loud and opinionated little boy with a confidence in my own creativity and grasp of the world that was pretty much fragile and not rooted in reality. But then, at the age of ten, in the spring of 1967, I endured a traumatic and unplanned sexual experience, a sexual assault really, that changed everything. It was not pleasurable in any way. He made me endure pain.and fear. He was the one aroused. I was the mouse in the mousetrap unable to even squeal.
My obsession with monsters and evil and monster movies came into full swing after my young life was changed. I had to deal with overwhelming fear. Fear of what happened to me. Fear of what it meant for my future. Fear that he might catch me again. It shut down my love of being naked. It made me afraid that I might become gay, even though I didn’t know what gay was or where babies actually came from. And I dealt with it by shutting down the memory. I forced myself not to dream about it or think about it or even remember it. And I began to watch Dracula movies to understand who he was and how to destroy him. And I learned that many monsters were merely misunderstood or made into monsters by tragic things that happened to them. I had to teach myself not to become a monster.
In school I became more of a melancholy mope. I chose to spend my time reading books and drawing secret pictures rather than playing as many games as I once did. I raised my hand less in class. I talked to fewer people, especially not people I didn’t know really well.
I became an introvert. I drew myself into myself and the many imaginary worlds in my own stupid head. I stopped being the leader of the gang. I developed more and bigger secrets. But mostly fictional secrets. It was better to have secrets about things that weren’t real. Me being an alien changeling instead of a human boy. Knowing secrets about other worlds that nobody else knew about didn’t sting as much when others found out than if they had found out the truth about what really happened to me that one awful day.
Puberty was hard. I wet my pants in Science class because I was afraid to go to the bathroom during class when no teachers were watching the hallway and other boys might be there in the restroom too… bigger boys. I endured teasing because I didn’t strut like a peacock in front of junior-high girls, and later, high-school girls, the way the other boys did. And you had to take showers naked in groups at the end of every P.E. class.
But teachers saw me as quiet and competent, a smart kid. And the other boys who became my friends began to realize that I was one of the smartest people they knew. I got A’s in class. I could help with homework and group work in class. And I was a problem solver who could be relied on to figure out difficult things.
So, in the sunshiny meadow full of extroverts and introverts, I was not a bee going from flower to flower to flower. I was the flower, letting the bees come to me. And I stopped being the prey animal, motivated to go into the forests full of fear because I needed to eat to stay alive. I grew into the thoughtful hunter, able to navigate the thorn-trees and brambles to find everything I needed.
I never became an extrovert. But I did learn to take the good things inside and share them with the outside world. Hence, 31 years of teaching, becoming a novelist and an illustrator, and doing so much more than just being trapped inside my own stupid head.’
I hate to tell you this now that you made it all the way through this soul-clenching essay, but there will be a Part 4. After all. I haven’t talked about the whole illogical thing yet.
But I am much more comfortable with who I am now. An introvert still, but no longer shy about sharing the naked truth.
You know that old doll house that my wife rescued for me? You don’t? Well, about six or seven years ago she spotted it on the sidewalk with a pile of other trash waiting for the city garbage collectors. She asked the homeowner about it. It was a kit they had bought at Michael’s but never finished, so my wife immediately thought, “My goofy old husband collects dolls all the time, so he will love this.”
“Take it,” said the homeowner, “It’s a shame to have to throw it out.”
So she brought it home and gave it to me. I of course, collect twelve inch dolls and action figures, none of which fit in a doll house of this particular scale. So it had to sit practically empty for a space of about four years. Then my daughter got tired of some of the small Happy Meal dolls that she had gotten from McDonald’s when she was a wee gamin. (Yes, that’s a real thing… you can look it up.) I acquired two mostly naked Mini-Barbies, and four other doll-house size dolls, two baseball players and a Lullaby League Girl from Oz, along with a small Winkie Soldier. Then Dreamworks did the Trolls movie.
They began moving in by two different routes, these trolls. Teacher Troll and Baby Troll and Big Troll, whose hair in the back is the only visible part of him… or possibly her, moved in from where I found them in kids’ bedrooms and the garage while cleaning. I used to keep a stash of them to give out as classroom prizes back in the 90’s. I bought the movie Trolls from Walmart at $5 a shot over a bunch of weeks between Thanksgiving and last weekend. The empty spaces where I didn’t even have appropriate doll furniture were now being filled by Trolls.
In the downstairs bedroom you can see the little yellow Troll has joined Naked Mini-Barbie, the Lullaby-Leaguer, Ceramic Book-Lovin’ Bear and the Angel who used to hold my wedding ring. (I could never wear it due to arthritis, and it eventually got lost in the move from South Texas to Dallas.) (Yes, I know it is not a good thing to lose your wedding ring, but it is possible my wife sold it so she could shop for a better husband. At least, that’s what she told me while she was really angry.) (And yes, I know I’m supposed to be talking about Trolls taking over my doll house, but I actually like bird-walking while telling such stories. It lends such every-day Mickey-ness to the story.)
The baseball player in the upstairs sitting room where nobody sits, once spent an entire winter at the bottom of the swimming pool. That’s why his blue uniform turned a bit putrid green. He stays in this room with my Wish-nik Troll from 1967 and the Winkie Soldier from Oz, who is naturally green in the face and never took a swim.
Also upstairs are my Troll-topped Pez dispensers, two more movie Trolls, and the former Teacher Troll who lost her apple and my daughter gave a modelling clay diaper to for modesty’s sake which has long since melted a bit (the diaper, not the modesty).
And at the top of it all, in the attic, are the two movie Trolls that I bought first and started this whole Troll-collection nonsense. So now the doll house is no longer empty. But the Trolls are beginning to complain that there is no paint on the walls, and I really ought to do something about that before they take matters into their own hands. You never know what they might do in the middle of the night when nobody is looking.
There is so much left to be said before my time runs out. Wisdom, whether hard won or acquired entirely through wit, bears a certain responsibility in the possession of it. We are duty-bound as wizards, the masters of wisdom, to pass it on.
Now, you certainly have every right to protest that I am not wise and I have no wisdom. You are certainly right to point out that I am a doddering old fool that sits around the house all day in the midst of his poor-health-enforced retirement doing little beyond writing silly stories and drawing pictures of mostly naked cartoon girls. I get that. But the beginning of wisdom is the realization of how big everything is and how little I really know about anything.
Take for instance the question of where we came from and what our purpose is? (And the question of why I put a question mark on that when it really wasn’t a question.)
I originally believed in the God of the Christians and in the promises of Jesus… everlasting life and an eternity of sitting on a cloud with a harp and… Okay, it didn’t take me long to see the logical holes in that line of reasoning. So much of that is fear of death and the need to believe that I am the center of all things, the most important person in existence. The truth is I am only a tiny part of a nearly-infinitely-large universe. And the universe is conscious… self aware. How do I know this? Because I am conscious and self-aware. I am an infinitely tiny piece of the whole… but there are untold trillions of others just like me. And when I die… when this body ceases to function, as it already has a great deal of trouble doing, the parts that make up the individual creature and thought patterns I identify as me will be scattered to the far corners of everywhere to be gathered up once again and be something new. All of mankind passes away. Human beings and the planet Earth will one day be no more. But that is not what matters. There is so much more beyond the boundaries of what my limited eyesight can behold, and what my limited mind can comprehend. I am made of star-stuff (just ask Neal DeGrasse Tyson or Carl Sagan), and I am a part of the universe as a whole. I am in no hurry to die. Life is worth fighting through the pain for… but I do not fear death. Like birth, it is only a stop along the way in a journey that, as far as I can tell, never ends.
I claim to be a literate individual. But, of course, before they let you teach English Language Arts to seventh graders, you have to prove it. They want you to prove you can handle a classroom, and not only can read and write, but can teach seventh graders to do it too… at least to a minimum competency level. After all, the English language in the hands of a hormonal personality-bomb otherwise known as a seventh grade boy or a seventh grade girl, it is a potential weapon of mass destruction.
I set out to become more than merely competently literate in high school. Even then, I wanted to read all the best books ever written and learn to write like that too. In fact, I set myself a quest when I was a junior in high school taking Mr. Sorum’s version of the novel-reading class set out by the Iowa State Board of Education’s curriculum guide as The Modern Novel, a quest to find and read the greatest novel ever written. I started in that class with Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye.
But that fit too easily into the “Modern Novel” thing since it was written in the 60’s and I was reading it in the 70’s. I had to be more illogical than that. So, I also found a book on the Scholastic Book Order form called The Return of the Native, by Thomas Hardy and read that. It was not exactly a modern novel having been written in the 1870’s and was actually a 96-year-old book when I read it. And it was a tragic love story where everybody ends up married to the wrong person and true love was thwarted up until the chapter where there are multiple drownings. I, of course, fell in love with the Reddleman, Diggory Venn (Reddlemen go from farm to farm dipping sheep in the reddle to kill ticks and fleas) who is covered head to toe in red dye from dipping sheep. He is the humble soul who loves the good girl that the bad man wants to marry even though he’s actually in love with the bad woman who wants to marry Clym Yoebright (the returning native of the title) for his family fortune so she can escape the hated heath country. I realized from the first chapter onward that I was supposed to identify with Clym as the main character. But, illogical introvert that I am (and that Diggory also is) I had to identify with the humble Mr. Venn. And guess what? Diggory not only saves Clym from drowning as he lets the bad man and the bad woman visit Neptune the hard way, he also gets to marry the good girl in the end.
Goofy choice for a great book, right? But it is a great book. It is about people who love drama in their lives and live for the wrong things in life getting what they probably deserve while the plodders and reddlemen get the real rewards in the end. Victorian hooberglob, sure… but good hooberglob with vivid characters, an oppressive setting, and a darkly comic look at love, repressed love, evil love, and just plain love in the end.
But I couldn’t go on thinking forever that The Return of the Native was the best novel ever written. I would go on to read some very good Hemingway, some x-rated Heinlein, and a couple of dog stories before I finished that class. (I definitely read more novels than anyone else in that class as most of them were making their book reports from the blurbs on the back of the book and the part they hide inside the front cover rather than actually reading a whole book.)
But then, as a freshman in college, I was introduced to Saul Bellow.
Good god! Why had they been keeping this writer a secret from me?
Humboldt’s Gift was the book we read and discussed in class. It was written the year before we read it and it both won Bellow a Pulitzer and helped him win the Novel Prize for Literature the year after I read and studied it. It is the story of a friendship between writers. The narrator, Charlie Citrine and the Humboldt poet from the title get to know each other in a friendship that spans the decades between the 1930’s and the middle of the 1970’s. But it also convinced me that most great writers and the books they write that become great books are totally obsessed with sex and death. Charlie is mourning in the story about his latest divorce, his new love that his last love is keeping him separated from, the death in an airplane crash of his love before the lady he just divorced, and his own obsession with his own death.
Yes, sex and death. Lesson learned about great books.
And I learned all those lessons again in a book I found at the university book store by Bellow and read on my own. Henderson the Rain King is about a rich and socially powerful man who is seeking the meaning of life and totally dissatisfied with everything he has discovered so far.
He goes on a trip to Africa complete with guide and tourist group only to take off on his own when he gets there, hiring a native guide, visiting a native village, lifting a gigantic stone statue of a god, and accidentally becoming the official Rain King of the Wirari tribe. He then goes into a long period of philosophical discussion with the tribal king, pokes around at learning the meaning of life from an African point of view, and then goes on a lion hunt with the king wherein the king is killed by the lion, making Henderson the new king, the next step up from tribal Rain King.
And then there was William Faulkner.
Yes, the drunken postal clerk who wrote some of what may be the best novels ever written.
Make that some of the best super-wordy novels ever written, long paragraphs and all.
I have read more Faulkner than just The Sound and the Fury. But this is the first Faulkner I read as part of an American Literature class in grad school.
The title of this book is based on the Shakespeare quote from MacBeth’s soliloquy. “…It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury… signifying nothing.” So, this writer can poke fun at himself.
The three main characters of the book, the Compson brothers, are three very different viewpoint characters that take the swirling toilet bowl of stream-of-consciousness narratives about life in Mississippi and show us how meaningless and pointless our lives are. Benjy is the mentally handicapped brother who barely understands anything about the world around him. Jason is the hot-headed brother working in a farm-supply store and constantly fuming about money and class struggles. Quentin is the lucky brother who gets to go to college and mess up his life on a bigger stage than the other two. Caddy is the sister that all three talk and think about, especially when it comes to the tragedy of what actually happens to her. Everything is one big joke to Faulkner, as demonstrated by the scene in the end of the story where Jason (symbolizing Fury) is beating the snot out of his loudly squalling brother Benjy (the Sound.) It almost seems like the entire story is one big set-up for that one final sight-gag.
I have to say, I considered all of these books as potentially the best novel ever written. But none of these were the final choice. And the four books that I intended to add to this discussion weren’t the final choice either, so I had no trouble editing them out as this essay is way too long already. But the fact that I read and loved these books is basically proof that the reading part of being literate I have down. I’ll bet, if you have read this far, that you haven’t read any of these classics. But I don’t bet money. And you probably didn’t even read this far into a big-windy essay like this one. It doesn’t matter. These books exist. I love them. And I am glad I made them part of my little introverted and totally perverted world.
The baseball player in the upstairs sitting room where nobody sits, once spent an entire winter at the bottom of the swimming pool. That’s why his blue uniform turned a bit putrid green. He stays in this room with my Wish-nik Troll from 1967 and the Winkie Soldier from Oz, who is naturally green in the face and never took a swim.
Catch a Falling Star 