the underwear drawer

hello, dolly

I've become a joint-custody dad kind of blogger. We don't get a lot of time together during the week, but every other weekend, BAM, it's toys and ice cream and candy for everyone! Now who wants some pizza before we go to the movies?

Anyway, I kind of want to buy Cal a doll. The main reason for the doll is that Cal loves to stroke hair, so I think if he had a doll with quasi-realistic hair on it, then he would go coo-coo for Cocoa Puffs. The second reason for the doll is that I want to send him the message that it's OK for boys to play with dolls, so he doesn't grow up to be some male chauvinist. And the third reason for the doll is that his birthday is coming up, and the toy wagon and tricycle and building blocks we're getting him just ISN'T ENOUGH LOOT.

The problem with buying a doll is the simple fact that dolls are creepy.

"Hello. I will kill you while you sleep."

[Hey, did anyone ever watch that old Anthony Hopkins movie "Magic"? Where Anthony Hopkins played a ventriloquist named "Corky" (heh)? And he had a dummy named "Fats" (double heh) that looked just like him? And wore the same clothes as him and everything, only miniaturized? And the dummy KILLED PEOPLE? Because it was EVIL? Aaaah!]

Aside from the no-ventriloquist-dummy rule, I don't have a good sense of what kind of doll I want to get, except that the doll has to have hair, and I'd prefer it not to be some blonde-haired, blue-eyed babydoll, lest Cal develop some sort of a self-hating Pecola Breedlove-type complex.




The first doll that I thought of were those freaky "Cornsilk Kids", an offshoot of the Cabbage Patch Kids line with less yarn-y, more realistic hair. They even have multiple different ethnicities of Cabbage Patch kids now, which they didn't really have when I was growing up (though now that I'm remember, I think I did have one friend with a black Cabbage Patch Kid), so I thought this might be promising. However, a preliminary search turned up only this:




This is the "Asian" Cabbage Patch Kid, I suppose as indicated by the hair and the fact that the eyes look kind of fucked up. BUT IT'S A FAIRY. I mean, I don't think that it'll warp Cal's sense of gender identity to play with dolls, even girl dolls, but people, THERE ARE LIMITS. I was figuring that maybe I could just get the doll, strip it, and dress it in one of Cal's old pajamas or something, but then I realize that this was a collector's piece or some such thing, not a real Cabbage Patch Kid, and was therefore only six inches tall. Ah.

Scrolling through the "Ethnic Dolls" section of the Toys R Us website seemed like it might turn up some reasonable options. This a found in a series of foreign language-speaking dolls, that not only kill you in your sleep, but do so while screaming "COMO ESTA USTED? UNO DOS TRES!"




Really, I guess that doll isn't so bad, but it looks like the hair is kind of yarn-y, which defeats the whole purpose of having a doll stunt-double so that Cal can stroke hair while I'm on call overnight. Also, I'm not crazy about the whole talking doll thing. I suppose I could just not put batteries in it, but I just feel like it would have a hard mechanized core along with EVIL in its SOUL.

So I don't know where I'm going on this whole doll thing. Maybe I'll just do what I was planning to do in the first place, which was to just cut out all the excess and just buy Cal a wig to play with. A wig for his first birthday. Thus ensuring that he will grow up to be a drag queen.

Currently eating: Cinnamon sugar pita chips from Trader Joe's. The Manhattan Trader Joe's is like a zoo. Go on a Sunday afternoon and the checkout line winds halfway around the store. And yet I still go. Because I love the pain.