My troll/doll videos never get too many views, but I keep posting them anyway. My channel is now up to more than 20,300 subscribers and well over 3,000 videos, and yet, people with a few hundred subs/videos are getting thousands of views every day. Such is the weirdness of the internet, and YouTube specifically, because one of the stupidest videos I ever posted is now well over FOURTEEN MILLION views.
Don't ask me why, or how, as I made a total of twelve videos which are virtually identical, just with different audio - yet THIS one went through the roof. I get all sorts of bizarre comments, many of them pretty gross, and in some cases people are all angry with me because the audio and video don't sync up! They say things like, oh, this is fake, folks, this is a lie, this is inaccurate, this is just a way to make $$ (though I'm not monetized and never will be).
So I keep on going, as a way to share my interests and hobbies with others, and as a way to keep a record for myself, or to make a video to send to one specific person. Nobody thinks about that.
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Maybe it goes all the way back to voodoo and burning your enemies in effigy, but humanity has always had a very strange relationship with dolls. They're both cuddly and creepy, calling forth a weird mixture of maternal tenderness and hair-raising shock. We don't expect them to talk, and most especially they weren't supposed to talk in Edison's time, which is what made this doll so - unique. The fact that the mechanism inside them (which was actually a teeny-tiny phonograph that played a miniature disc) broke after one or two uses meant that their popularity soon faded. Most of the dolls were returned. A few must have survived more or less intact. It was decades later that Chatty Cathy took over as the most "possessed" doll (meaning, of course, that more little girls owned them) in history.
I had no interest whatsoever in dolls when I was a child. I was more interested in frogs, toads, newts, snakes, polliwogs, mud puppies, millipedes, salamanders, and anything else that crawled (or barked or whinnied or meowed). I have no idea what has happened to me in the past few years, but my doll collection (if you count the trolls) has boomed, so much so that I don't know how many I have now, and don't want to count.
I can't account for this, except to say that the reborn doll craze has given rise to dolls that are much more realistic and less creepy (some would say MORE creepy due to the uncanny valley effect) than the staring-eyed, round-headed, stiff-limbed hunks of plastic we used to play with. I've knitted clothes for my dolls, made tons of videos about them, bought more and more of them - and, of course, during the pandemic, have relied on them as a source of comfort. They say we return to the enthusiasms of childhood as old age approaches - but in this case, I seem to have aged backwards, and am catching up on what never appealed to me in childhood.
I still like crawly things, and LOVE birds, which have become a serious interest in the past few years. Sometimes the only thing that pulls my spirits out of a bog of sludge is feeding the red-winged blackbirds at Burnaby Lake. The glossy, sassy males tilt their heads this way and that, their brilliant red and yellow wing patches flaming in the sun. The females, much more practical and industrious, are no-nonsense creatures who get right down to the business of eating, without any flirtation needed.
I can't see ahead right now - can anyone? Are we out of this woods yet? It seems to me it grows darker with every step. Each day HAS to be sufficient unto itself, because I can't plan. We try to focus on how much better our situation is than someone else's - but don't I also bleed for them, my fellow suffering humans?
For some reason - this is terribly disjointed, sorry - a song jumps back into my head, one that gave me great comfort during another time when I couldn't see ahead. I'd be walking through the woods with this song playing in my ear and try to find some sense in what was happening to me. Mostly I was just trying to stay out of the hospital, and when I was unable to find the light, I had to try to develop a taste for the dark. I don't know how I survived that time, why those soul-destroying times kept returning, and why I am not in that state now when I suppose I have every reason to be. Maybe the message was finally delivered.
It took me a while to figure out just what was going on here. They're paper dolls from old newspapers, obviously, but they look a little different. I know who Tillie the Toiler is (who doesn't?) - a famous newspaper comic-strip office girl who basically gets chased around her desk a lot. This strip was so popular that it ran from the 1920s flapper era all the way into the late '50s. There was even a movie made from it, starring Marion Davies (more about her later). One of the most popular offshoots of Tillie's exploits was the Fashion Parade. Tillie had more glamorous clothes than any working girl I've ever heard of. But that's because they were designed by her fans! The newspapers that carried Tillie had an ongoing contest in which readers could submit their dress designs to Tillie's creator, Russ Westover, and someone in the art department would try to make them look like something (not to say that SOME of the kids didn't have talent). It was a nice idea, it promoted reader participation, and made everyone feel as if they were somehow part of Tillie's magical, exciting, well-clothed life.
It interests me that, along with their names, the page always included complete addresses for the guest designers. Genealogists have used newspapers for years to sift out information about ancestors, and to discover a published document that has not only the name but the address of a long-lost relative (not to mention, if you were lucky, a date) would be a tremendous find. Who knows how many people Tillie helped to find a lost link in an ancestral chain. If a fictitious character can be of this much help to people long after she's gone, then what is wrong with all the rest of us? (Don't be surprised when this gif/slideshow starts to go REALLY fast!)
About Marion Davies. A very talented B-movie actress mainly known for being the mistress of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, the titan who was the subject of Orson Welles' biting satire Citizen Kane. Davies and Hearst rolled around in diamond-encrusted splendor, but there was a peculiarity in one of the opulent rooms: a statue of the virgin Mary set in a prominent place. Hardly appropriate for a couple so flagrantly living in sin. This prompted some wag - some say Dorothy Parker, but it's not quite good enough for that - to write: Upon my honor I saw a Madonna Standing in a niche Over the door Of the glamorous whore Of a prominent son of a bitch.
BIG DISCOVERY! It's Sunday afternoon, I just had a recipe not turn out and I am kind of pissed off because I'll have to throw it all out. But I was happy to uncover a mystery about Tillie. I dug a little deeper into the movie, and discovered it wasn't Marion Davies who played her at all. It was someone named Kay Harris. Wait a minute! There couldn't be two Tillies. One was obscure enough. I had to figure this out. It couldn't be a very early TV show, could it? The kind I love, love, love, the kind from 1948 which seems to be the first year a cathode ray quivered in the air in the living rooms of America? But no. She wasn't on TV at all, but in a movie from 1941, a B-movie obviously, the kind Turner Classics loves to show in the middle of the night (usually in an endless series no one knows or cares about). A bit more checking revealed that the first version with Marion Davies was a silent made in 1927. Though YouTube usually has fragments of almost everything, it didn't have Tillie the Toiler, not in either incarnation.
In fact, it looks like she hardly existed at all. Now all we have are these beautiful paper dolls from the funny papers, and a strange fragment of genealogy with mysteries unlocked, but only partially solved. POSTSCRIPT. Do I detect the odor of frying Spam? Not any more! For a while at least, I will have to restrict my comments.
Clap pat clap your hand, pat it on your partner's hand
Right hand.
Clap pat clap pat clap your hand. Cross it with your left arm.
Pat you partner's left palm.
Clap pat, clap your hand, pat your partner's right palm
With your right palm again.
Clap slap, clap your hand, slap your thighs and sing a little song.
My mother told me, if I was goody.
That she would buy me a rubber dolly.
My aunty told her I kissed a soldier,
Now she won't buy me a rubber dolly.
Three six nine, the goose drank wine.
The monkey chew tobacco on the street car line.
The line broke, the monkey got choked
And they all went to heaven in a little rowboat.
Clap clap (clap your hands and prepare to pat)
Pat (take your right arm put your partner's right palm with your right palm)
Clap (take your hand back and clap)
Pat (take your right arm, cross your right arm with your left arm. Pat
Your partner's left palm with your left palm)
Clap (take your hand back and clap)
Pat (take your right arm, cross your left arm pat your partner's right
Palm with your right palm.)
Clap (now back, with a clap)
Slap (take the pats of your palms and slap your thighs and watch the
Fun materialize as you sing this little song
My mother told me, if I was goody.
That she would buy me a rubber dolly.
My aunty told her I kissed a soldier,
Now she won't buy me a rubber dolly.
Three six nine, the goose drank wine.
The monkey chew tobacco on the street car line.
The line broke, the monkey got choked
And they all went to heaven in a little rowboat.
Clap pat, clap pat, clap pat clap slap!
Clap pat, clap pat, clap pat clap slap!
Clap pat, clap pat, clap pat clap slap!
Clap pat, clap pat, clap pat clap slap!
Rubber baby buggy bumpers.
Rubber baby buggy bumpers
Rubber baby buggy bumpers.
Rubber baby buggy bumpers.
POSTBLOGSCRIPT. Just a tiny bit about Sun Rubber dolls, which I had never heard of before. These were a particularly creepy form of soft rubber doll, the earlier models being squeaky toys such as you'd give your dog to play with. Many of them drank and wet.
The shortest history I can find (because who wants a long history of a rubber toy company?) is this:
Sun Rubber Toys of Barberton, Ohio was founded in 1923, in the midst of a rubber boom for the area, as wartime rationing ended for companies. The Sun Rubber Toy Company produced rubber toy and squeak dolls, including many licensed characters like Gerber Baby dolls, Mickey Mouse, and Donald Duck.
I am right now trying to fathom the ramifications of a rubber boom. When I think of the fact that condoms used to be made out of rubber, before they were made out of whatever-they-'re-made-out-of-now, "rubber boom" takes on whole new dimensions. I am also reminded of poor George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life (basically, a festive Christmas movie about a man on the verge of suicide reflecting on how useless and pointless his entire life has been), who could not serve during WWII because he caught a chill saving his brother from drowning and sacrificed an eardrum. He had to stick around town ringing curfew every night around 6:00 p.m., which was late for old George, and take part in various drives - drives being not urges, but great efforts to beat the bushes and gather up something you need for the war effort, like - I'm guessing here - rags, tin, glass, rubber. Yes, there were rubber drives, and George was in charge of them.
So I don't know how Sun Rubber Co. held on as long as it did. If there were rubber drives going on during the war, then rubber dollies would surely have to be melted down. A couple of the dolls pictured here look like they HAVE been partially melted down, or at least run over.
The clapping song - I never could make any sense of the lyrics, and to learn the clapping sequence you'd have to slow it down so far it would make no sense. Yet we DID use "my mother told me" as a clapping rhyme, with a slightly different tune. We were singing this long before the record came out, and I suspect it's old, if not very old.
I am now reminded of something else, damn it, because I don't feel like transcribing this and the only reference I can find is in a book! While researching his masterpiece opera Porgy and Bess, George Gershwin visited Southern black churches, "one-room shacks called praise houses". With typical Gershwin brashness, he didn't just sit in the back row but jumped right into the middle of their rituals. "He did not hesitate to join in as the congregation sang and clapped their hands and engaged in a local ritual called shouting. It was an activity that involved not just the voice but also the slapping of one's chest, knees, and thighs in complex rhythmic patterns." To make a long story short, George kicked ass at shouting and astounded everyone. This complex folk-rhythm seeped into his music in all sorts of ways. And I see hints of the shouting tradition in the pat-clap-pat-slap of The Clapping Song. History hides inside the enigma of music.
