Trolls! Trolls! Everyone trolls!

Trolls. Trolls! So when did this addiction start? I don't know, and I don't particularly care. How many trolls do I have? I don't count them. What are the names? Only half a dozen or so have names, and I tend to forget them anyway.

Am I attached to my trolls? As much as I'd be attached to a living thing, a pet, or at least a plant.

They are comforting to me, and sometimes I truly need comforting and can't find it anywhere else. These two lovelies are the ones I ordered from Etsy recently and haven't received yet. And I was going to just be happy and wait for them, and then. . . 

I shouldn't have gone on eBay, I know. My cat tries to get me to stop.

But somehow, it never works.

I think the vendor of these trolls either has NO idea how much they are actually worth, or is salting her shop with incredible bargains to draw people in, as most stores do.

But here. 

BEHOLD!

The thing you have to realize is that I live in Canada, so trolls will cost me easily twice what they are in the States. Shipping and handling is ludicrous, often much more than what the troll costs (even for tiny ones that weigh a few grams). And this set of three, all told, was $57.00 in Canadian dollars. 

Any one of these large-sized (7", 8" and 9") beauties could command a couple of hundred in this country, given the pristine shape they're in. There is not much in the way of clothes, but I provide those, handmade with love and tailored to fit. Troll outfits are seldom very impressive unless you get those fancy custom-made ones from Etsy vendors such as Lucretia's Lair, and they'll run you $50.00 each (plus $65.00 shipping and handling).

The hair is in particularly good shape in this group, and the orange hair is gorgeous, a rare colour, and might even be a mohair replacement which would up the value by at least another $20.00 or $30.00. I only have one other mohair troll, and though he's totally lovely, there are flaws in the vinyl that would likely cut his market value in half.

So. . . sigh. More trolls. I had to buy them before someone else snapped them up, which has happened to me more times than I can count. I need something to make me feel better, I guess, as I wander through this wilderness alone.

I do troll box openings on YouTube which command the usual one (or zero) views, but I guess I do them for myself, and because I desperately needed a fulfilling hobby once the grandkids became adolescents and Grandma was no longer "cool".

Trolls take me back to the very best year of my life: 1964, when everything happened for me. The Beatles came on the Ed Sullivan Show for the first time on my tenth birthday. My Dad gave me a horse. (Yes, a horse.) I was in an accelerated Grade 5 class in school which was total mayhem, a 1960s educational experiment in which nobody learned anything all year and the teacher had a nervous breaktown by Christmas. Sheer bliss! I also stopped taking violin lessons, which was like having a thousand pounds of chains slide off my shoulders.

And - trolls. There were trolls. Two close friends also had troll fever, and it cemented the bond between us and made it magical.

Trolls aren't like Barbies or Cabbage Patch Kids or ANY other doll. Even calling them dolls doesn't seem to fit. They have a spooky, slightly creepy quality that some people frankly hate, but that makes them all the more appealing to me.

So I have FIVE trolls coming, five times the excitement, five times the bliss! 

I WANT THIS TROLL!

I. Want. This. Troll.

Don't ever start a collection, of anything, or this will happen.

What happened was - I don't know if I want to go back that far! Let's say I had a troll collection already, but somehow it was never complete. I felt guilty about every purchase I made, since we're on a very modest budget all the time.

AND THEN.

And then, today, rummaging in my wallet for my bus pass, I spied - a cheque. It had my name on it. I had almost forgotten I had it! And it had a tasty amount on it, too, very tasty.

The Canada Council for the Arts had sent it to me, not for a specific work but for contributing to "the arts" through publishing three novels and writing approximately 300 book reviews and over a thousand newspaper columns over a substantial period of time.

Pay.

I don't get pay from too many other sources. It also delighted me because it easily covered ALL my trolls, most of them costing five bucks and none of them more than forty (most of that being postage and handling).

I couldn't think of anything more apt than covering the cost of all my trolls with my Canada Council cheque. But do you realize what this means??

That's right. We're square, and I can once more feel guilty lusting after new trolls, looking on PicClick (an eBay search site) late into the night. My last "big guy" was most unusual, looked brand new which he couldn't be, and had a totally different configuration, as if made by another company. The troll world is odd and full of anomalies and huge gaps in information. I assumed however that he would be my last "big guy" and that if I got anything else, it would be a small Wishnik, simply because I didn't HAVE any Wishniks and it made a hole in my collection.

But I don't like Wishniks. I tried to like them. Their bulging eyes were pretty much their only outstanding feature. Most of them were old and the worse for wear, with sad clumps of hair coming away from the scalp. Some had no hair at all. The larger ones had hideous flat, elongated heads with huge ears and evil faces. No charm at all.

Wishniks were a direct knockoff of Dam trolls, which are still the gold standard for collectors, mainly because there are just more of them, at different price ranges, different manufacturing dates, and with vastly different designs. Wishniks are just, well, Wishniks. The ad that used to run when I was a kid irritated me: "Just let a Wish-nik/Let you come smi-ling through." They have double horseshoes engraved on the bottoms of their feet. 

Plus they just cost too damn much, $40.00 or more for a small troll in so-so repair.

Whether I get this "big guy" troll or not is undecided. There were a ton of photos on the eBay page, which was nice because sometimes you only get one grainy one, so I was able to make this wonderful animation. Often when I finally make my move, the troll is gone. Or I suddenly change direction and decide that I hate that troll and want something else.

THAT troll.

Post-mortem. Sigh. It happened again. Somebody bought that troll. That troll that was far too expensive for me, anyway. This is what happens when you start a collection. And the weird thing is, I've never collected anything in my life before!

Now I know why.

Trolls! Trolls! Everyone trolls!

It has been a while since I posted about trolls. In fact, I can't remember if I ever posted about them at all, so I guess it's time.

I now belong to not one, not two, but THREE Facebook troll groups. By the time I actually post this, I might belong to zero troll groups, because I have gone back and forth a lot in my feelings about them.

Yes, it's nice to connect with people who love their trolls and have an enthusiasm for them. No, it's not so great to have someone push and push and push to try to sell expensive trolls to me, or tell me they collect nothing but one-of-a-kind 24" trolls from Denmark that Thomas Dam created with his own two hands in 1942. Or see photos of ultra-expensive trolls posing on the deck of a cruise ship, or in a room with a view in Sicily. Or see someone casually mention a small collection of, oh, say, about 5000 or so Dam trolls, only the finest and the oldest, and -

You know what I'm saying. It's all the same problems I have had with social media from the beginning. Troll elitism! It's beyond my powers to comprehend.

My trolls, the ones I started out with until I began to branch out a little, came from the wrong side of the tracks. They came in a little plastic bag:

. . . and cost me, rounded off, about $5.00 each at the dollar store. I had never seen a troll at the dollar store before, so soon I was stoking my collection and making them little felt outfits. I began replacing their silky but rather sparse hair with great spills of yarn, the fibres all pulled apart for maximum volume.

I thought they looked great! 

Needing a place to store them and not wanting to just use a shelf, I  converted some old CD racks and began to stack them in. 

There weren't too many at first.

I am not sure which troll group I joined first, but it didn't make me very happy, even though I got some initial "likes" for my poorhouse trolls in their CD highrise.

But I still had the feeling they were from a different social stratum, and I was never allowed to forget it. People talked in "troll-ese", I am convinced to make people left out who DIDN'T speak troll-ese. It didn't occur to me that Facebook and its intentional envy syndrome had anything to do with it.

But then the inevitable happened, and I began to "covet". I knew I couldn't begin to afford the holy grail ones, but even the mid-sized Dam trolls cost plenty, what with outrageous shipping charges and conversion of the American dollar to Canadian.

But I went ahead. I looked on eBay, I ordered trolls, I bought trolls. I couldn't help myself.

I don't know how to feel about it now. I haven't counted how many trolls I have, and I don't want to, though I did move a bookcase into my office for the overflow. I have spent a lot of money, for me at least, which translates to a few hundred. Money I can't spare. I think I still like my "Dollarinas" best, my yarnies with all the masses of hair I created from material I already had. But the problem is, their faces all look pretty much the same. They're identical cousins. Their bodies are so fragile, knockoffs of knockoffs made of thin plastic, that you could squish them flat by sitting on them.

The feeling is exciting when I order "real" trolls, and even more exciting when I get them and open the box. It's Christmas morning! One of my faves is the one I call Grumpy Grandpa:

But now I want another one. With the same face. Should I get it?

Collections are horrible things, voracious, insatiable. I've never really had one before, and now I don't know what to do. Stop buying them, maybe?

Am I honestly trying to reproduce my Year of the Trolls when I was ten years old, which was (though of course I didn't know it at the time) the best year of my life?

Troll Towers: the view from the ground floor

When I sneaked back into troll-collecting, I know not when or how (or why), I had to find a place to stash them. I saw these pictures of massive collections, seemingly thousands, all lined up on shelves on the wall, and didn't want that. It seemed to me you wouldn't be able to find a specific troll, and I didn't want enough room to let my collection get that big. So I racked my brains for something I could use, something with shelves, something I could put on my desk and look at and access so I could have trolls right beside me all day.

So I came up with this. I didn't even have to buy anything! Old CD racks, gathering dust in the corner. I came close to painting them, as they looked kind of  jail-ish, but someone in my troll group (yes, I have a troll group) told me to leave it alone, it had an Elvis jailhouse rock/'60s discoteque feeling to it and made it look pleasingly like trolls a-go-go. The clear shelves make photographing them from the bottom floor kind of interesting.

This is an earlier model, and since then I've added trolls, and added a breezeway between the two towers, mainly for more shelves. I soon had to reinforce the middle ones (made from more empty CD cases) because they kept flying out the back. 

Bentley, yes, Bentley does love these trolls, and he sometimes grabs one by the hair and makes off with it (though lately his interest has waned). I peruse Amazon and Etsy sites to see what I'd love to have, and can't afford. I think I wrote about Trollina already (didn't I?). She was a rescue, and I had the predictable reaction of bonding with her. Since then I've become, if not a serious collector (can't afford it), then a fairly serious obsesser.

My troll Facebook page displays things that would cost me hundreds of dollars, if I could even find them. They aren't supposed to buy and sell on that page, but most of the posts seem to be in the nature of, "Look at this gorgeous thing. I am looking for a forever home. Are you interested?" Sometimes I think it is set up to incite troll envy. But never mind, I post Trollina in hand-knitted things, and so far no one has thrown me out. I will never be able to afford a 17" Dam giant - hell, even a 7" is a hardship for me. 

Why am I doing this? I collected "Dam things" when I was ten, the best year of my life. I associate it with two significant friendships (both of whom I am still in touch with on Facebook).  I also think it's a sort of echo of empty-nester syndrome: the grandkids are now either pre-teens or adolescents, and the sense of loss is palpable. 

I look at videos of reborns, some of whom move, breathe and make sounds, and even pee. It freaks me out, but I am still drawn to it, the "morning routine", the "shopping trip", the "temper tantrum" and reborn toddler getting sick and running a fever and even throwing up. There is even realistic poop - I don't know if you make this yourself or buy it. I am sure there are recipes.

I am not that far gone yet, but sometimes I wonder. I will do almost anything to dodge the clinical depression that nearly finished me through most of my life. You can't cuddle a troll or make it talk (or, at least, if you hear it talk you're in trouble). But they tweak something in me, something I like. I want to dodge the elitism I already see, which seems to be part of human nature. A lot of my trolls, the majority in fact, cost me $4.50 at the dollar store. Then I make them over with new hair and eyes.

Where does it end? I guess, when I get tired of it. It hasn't happened yet.

Harold and Ginger and boudoir dolls

During my long Harold trek, which I don't think is over yet, I found some pretty sweet photos. The candid shots generally came with no explanation. But this one doesn't need one: it's Harold Lloyd hugging his dear friend Ginger Rogers, in the kind of gorgeous mink coat you never see any more (because someone will throw paint on you if you do). At first it isn't obvious, but you can plainly see his injured right hand with its missing thumb and forefinger. I've found a number of photos like this, where the hand is obvious in public, and it flies in the face of the "information" I found that said he always hid the hand in his pocket.

But he didn't. He was cool about it, so probably few people even noticed. He was relaxed about it with his friends. I think his attitude was: hide in plain sight. I like that, I like it a lot, and it took some courage in an age when "deformities" were kept carefully out of sight.

But this one is even more interesting. It's surprising what you miss when you don't look too closely. I never even noticed, until I posted this on my Harold Lloyd Facebook page (yes! I have a Harold Lloyd Facebook page, though hardly anyone knows about it: https://www.facebook.com/theglasscharacter/). 

I knew about the craze for boudoir dolls, a Russian-inspired fad that raged through the '20s and '30s. I even collected some photos of them several years ago, yet still I missed this one! I wonder now if this was a gift from Harold to Ginger. With Harold's great generosity, it might have been.

http://www.jazzageclub.com/fads/the-boudoir-doll-craze/

This link will take you to an extremely detailed and informative post about boudoir dolls and their cultural significance.

And here is a slideshow I made just for you, dear readers, so you'll know what they looked like. Obviously, there was no one style, but at the same time, they have a certain sophistication in common. Their bodies and limbs were very long and skinny, as if they were mere frames for the clothes. Doll mannequins. I wonder how costly they were? If movie stars were carrying them around, they must have been, though no doubt there were knockoffs then, as there is now.

As I was working on this slide show, I realized I was seeing something with a startling resemblence to the eerily beautiful Enchanted Dolls of Marina Bychkova. I've been obsessed with those dolls for years, and have posted about them many times (and my hope of even seeing one of them in person is very slim - they command tens of thousands of dollars, and only appear at the most prestigious doll exhibits in the world). 

At one point I had the two sets of doll pictures mixed together, and - oh shit! - was it hard to separate them, because of all the similarities. Bychkova's dolls tend towards the waiflike, though some of them are downright fierce. They echo ancient story and reflect the true darkness of the fairy tale. Boudoir dolls have a flapperish quality (some are depicted smoking, or reclining in a seductive way with their legs apart). But the sexuality, the gorgeous costumes, the weirdness and slight creepiness that all dolls exhibit - I see them in both types.

Another slideshow I made of Enchanted Dolls. I think you can see the similarities, as well as the differences. And now I wonder if Bychkova, born in Russia, was influenced at all by these exotic European-made dolls. How could she not be?


BLOGSERVATION. I just noticed another thing. Ginger's doll has a certain resemblance to Marie Antoinette: the elaborate gown, the very high hairdo. 

And behold, this - 

I don't want to start researching the life of Ginger Rogers and trying to find out if she collected boudoir dolls, if this was in fact from Harold, or if they were carrying on together (as he did with so many women). Let it rest for now. But it's a fascinating subject. Though I return to dolls again and again as a topic, I'm not much of a collector.

But I do have a few.