Oh, I never should've gone there! Never!
Every instinct of decency in my body told me not to go there. And I went there. Am I out of my mind?
I am under enchantment, there's no other explanation. Walking through the waxy, pollen-scented underworld of Marina Bychkova and her ball-jointed porcelain dolls, haunted by the memory of Victorian post-mortem photography displaying dead people propped up with staring eyes: it all got to me, I guess, and then I remembered a little black-and-white photo of "something".
Something from my scanty but cherished collection of Harold Lloyd books.
This. This thing, this strange thing. Free Harold Lloyd Dolls While They Last from the Piggly Wiggly. What the fxxx is the Piggly Wiggly??
The fact that you can still buy one of these things from antique doll sites is more than creepy. They average $175.00 and strike me as, well, probably knock-offs, or the cloth would be all brown and greasy like cloth goes when it's turned rotten.
Or loved to death.
The doll looks too fat to be Harold, who was pretty lean and toned from all those stunts, and I can't figure out why his feet are turned backwards.
Okay, next comes the Harold Lloyd paper doll, and I have even more trouble believing this is authentic. When I was a girl you didn't punch out paper dolls (don't take that the wrong way), but cut carefully around them with scissors. It was a tricky business because the paper was so flimsy, and vital parts were often lopped off. But I wonder how such a fragile artifact could ever be so well-preserved. Perhaps he was printed on card stock, making him nice and stiff?
Whatever. I really like the upside-down Harold: he did, after all, hang off the hands of a huge clock in his best-known movie Safey Last!, and was often upside-down in one way or another.
I should apologize for this, but I'm in so deep now I must continue. This thing puts Marina Bychkova's fair lilies of the funeral parlour to shame. It's a hideous object, something that I presume has a big key in its back, and I have to admit at one point during my research I wanted to buy one. It's something like a thousand dollars, but when I discovered it doesn't walk (a Harold toy that doesn't WALK??), I gave up on it. What it does, if it's working at all, is wag its head back and forth, probably with an awful grinding noise. I think its eyes crank open and shut, and the big seam above its upper lip implies that its mouth also moves. In light of the fact that he was in silent movies, this doesn't make much sense.
I'm beginning to feel a little sick. This is a Harold Lloyd bell. That's right. A bell. It rang, probably like an alarm clock. I think there must have been a Harold Lloyd clock somewhere, maybe with a tiny bespectacled man hanging off the hands. But this is just so useless. Why would anyone want a Harold bell?
Old toys creep me out, sort of like those bisque dolls with sunken eyes and cracked, mottled skin. The sarcophagus look. Tin things kind of shrink up and warp and look tarnished, and the paint flakes off. But the representation of Harold is hideous to begin with, like a nightmare. The back view of the bell looks sort of like an upside-down kamikaze angel made of lead.
Excuse me, I'm going to go lie down for a while.
http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm
