Barbie dolls and Lightbulbs
The more I think about it, the more I comprehend just how wierd a child I was.
A comment that Over the Moon posted on Bag Lady regarding those strange lady loo-roll warmers reminded me of something similar I attempted to do DIY-style aged 6 or so.
I wanted a doll in a big crinoline style dress. I only had the despised modern day barbie dolls. So, in entreprenurial style I attempted to make my own. I thought that my big round wire lightshade frame would make an admirable hoop, and the material shade itself a divinely pink dress. I removed the lightshade (presumably vertigo hadn't kicked in and crippled me the way it has now) and proceeded.
Barbie was quickly stripped and shoved in the top of the frame.
She wouldn't fit so I cut her legs off.
I moulded the 'dress' around her and after quiet satisfaction lasting circa 30 seconds decided that she was a bit boring. I thought that since I had used a lightshade to create Victorian Dream Barbie, I could use her as a novelty lightshade.
I tried attaching her as before but her torso was in the way of where the bulb and cord ought to be, so I got some string and hung the lampshade upside down from the lightbulb in an uplighter effect. Her dress fell immediately away from the wire frame so I hastily tucked the loose bits around the frame to hold it in place - which it did for about a day.
Due to gravity, after a couple of days her head fell off, but I was bored of her by then and forgot about it.
A week or so later my father came in my room to give me dinner and noticed the lampshade. This is what he saw:
A decapitated doll hung upside down with dingy pink material covering her chest, leaving a clear view of the rest of the body trapped inside a torture chamber of wire, obscenely framing a melted stump of groin, the legs having been chopped off sometime previously.
Daddy didn't say much, just removed the grotesque, by this time dusty, figure and replaced the lampshade into its original setting. Later on he gave me a yoghurt.
I don't think he ever told my mother though.
posted by Shizue @ 5:01 PM
4 Comments:
That's one thing, your mother making you a birthday cake where the cake was a ballgown with one of your Sindy dolls stuck in the top 'wearing' it when you knew that sindy was a mud-covered commando the week before is quite another. Anyone who was not a wierd child turns out to be a very very wierd adult. I applaud your resourcefulness and creativity!
Oh you had me laughing so much reading this (in that internal restrained way I do when I'm in either in a library trying to keep quiet, as I am at present, or when I'm laughing so hard I can't vocalise it until I'm purple in the face and then it comes out as a Sybil Fawlty shriek!! - You KNOW what I'm referring to!)
Oh why oh why Becky have you not divulged this hilarious story to us before!!! And what on earth prompted the recollection?!!!!
Hhhm? Oh! It was over the moon's comment about a flamenco lady toilet roll cover on Bag Lady. Sticking a dolly into something prosaic caused my memory to go chuckling off to dig in my mind until it found something embarrassing to bring to the surface.
You can just write moo for short if you like!
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