Hello Dolly
The ways to decorate a home are as varied as the people decorating those homes. Some people want to paint their walls black, some want to cover everything in their house with gold leaf. It’s all fine with me. There is one thing that I’ve never understood–doll collecting.
If you collect dolls maybe you can enlighten me because I’ve never understood the appeal. Earlier today I was in the home of a doll collector. The whole time I was there, porcelain baby dolls with pink painted on mouths and unbelievably rosy cheeks stared at me through blue glass eyes. It was creepy.
How could you sleep in a bedroom with shelves and shelves of dolls looking at you? Haven’t these people ever watched a horror movie? Don’t they know that dolls can come to life in the night and try to kill you?
Not too long ago, I worked in a day program for the mentally disabled. There was a man in the program, I’ll call him Bob, who was afraid of dolls and rightly so. One day we went to a folk museum and I couldn’t find Bob. Okay, I admit it, I lost him. After looking around the museum frantically, I finally found him in a small room with a giant doll display. Behind glass on all of the walls were dolls from all around the world. A voice played through a speaker in the ceiling and talked about each doll as it was lit up by a light. In the center of this room was Bob with his arms crossed tightly across his chest. He was muttering, “They can’t hurt me,” over and over. When he saw me he said, “They can’t hurt me, right?”
“Right,” I said. “They can’t hurt you. They’re behind glass.” But what if they weren’t, I thought.
Sitting in that house today, I understood how Bob felt in that doll display. I’ve seen the ads in magazines for ceramic dolls that look just like real babies. I sometimes wondered who would buy such a thing and what they would do with it. Now I know.
