I am guilty of owning more dolls in my Star Trek collection. Here is the Next Generation set. You may notice that I still have work to do. No Commander Data No Geordy La Forge No Wesley Crusher (if such a doll even exists) These figures are all dressed for a TNG movie that practically nobody liked. I also have two Star Trek Voyager dolls, Captain Janeway and Seven of Nine. It is probable that no other figures from this series exist in twelve inches.
Captain Sisko is the only figure I have ever seen for Deep Space Nine, though I have a suspicion that more exist, at least the female crew members, and maybe that wonderfully devious Ferengi Quark. Oh, no My secret is out. I am a doll collector. (Wait, wasn’t I supposed to claim they are “action figures” so that I can get away with being a man who, at the age of nearly 60, still plays with dolls?”) I got started down this dark path back in 1965 when my parents bought me a G.I. Joe sailor for my ninth birthday. It was the beginning of an addiction that has dogged me even down to this very day.
Mego Games Obsession Rules Flats. Three Chinese teenagers undergo a military-style rehab program to help with their obsession with games. Fredericks feature Lake Eyre and the salt flats of South. Here are the rules to get this coveted hair. Our obsession with cleanliness is running afoul of scientific reality. The Vanishing of.
There are some things that just aren’t easy to admit to, like being gay, or being a socialist, or being a werewolf. Well, I am not gay and I am not a socialist, so don’t worry about that.
Those are not really terrible things to be when it comes right down to it. I have friends that are gay, friends that are socialists, and friends that are um well, enough about those things. I am writing about the terrible scourge of doll collecting.
In order to control such a rare and debilitating disease, I had to come up with a set of rules that would keep me from becoming a penniless hobo living in a cardboard refrigerator box in an alley with thousands of Barbie dolls. So let me explain the sacred rules that have kept me at least partially sane for almost fifty years. Rule #1; Thou shalt only collect and obsess over twelve-inch dolls and action figures.
That allows for literally thousands of choices to pursue, and rules out the many size variations like the three-inch G.I. Joe’s and the three-inch Star Wars figures and all the Mego eight-inch superheroes who were everywhere in the Seventies and Eighties, but now are rare and expensive. Rule #2; Thou shalt not collect and obsess over dolls and figures that cost more than twenty dollars. This is the poverty prevention rule that keeps an obsession from breaking the bank and wreaking havoc throughout the rest of my life. I have only broken this rule on rare occasions for hard to acquire dolls or figures, and most of those were actually presents paid for by somebody else. I can blame the exceptions mostly on people who know about my weakness and exploit it for their own personal reasons hopefully because they just like to make me happy. Rule #3; Thou must seeketh the lost and forlorn doll and redeem it from destruction.
Whenever I can, I look for dolls at Goodwill stores and yard sales. I have bought a ton of naked and sometimes broken Action Man, Barbie, Max Steel, Ken, and G.I. I then try to find or make clothes for them.
My daughter went through her Barbie period in a most destructive manner. She didn’t merely discard dolls and Disney princesses, she beheaded, dismembered, disrobed, and chewed them.
I have rescued and repaired many of them, but only after securing her promise that she doesn’t want to play with them or eat them any longer. I should note, though, that I no longer acquire dolls in this way, now that she is middle school aged and wouldn’t be caught dead with a doll. Rule #4; Thou shalt not let your daughter be the the only one who has fun pulling them apart, but you will put them back together again in ways that make them into something new. So, these are the sacred rules of collecting which shall not be violated in the pursuit of this weird religion, the bringing together of a multitude of dolls. That is my “Enterprise Collection” above. Specifically the “Original Series Enterprise Collection”.
Look more closely. Spock is holding a Vulcan harp-thingy (whose name I won’t quote here because I don’t want to seem too much like a Trekkie and besides, I forgot what it is called and am too lazy to look it up again What can I say?
I’m old.) Kirk is wearing a Wrath of Khan movie uniform. This green Barbie doll is a Goodwill rescue turned into a green Orion dancing girl with paint, sequins, material from a quilting project, and a hot glue gun. Uhura was the hardest member of the team to track down and acquire. After Kaybee Toys went out of business, I had to turn to the internet to get hold of this beauty.
I also had to pay $24. You may also have noticed that Sulu is missing from my Original Series set. Well, I’m still working on that one. But I do owe a debt to J.J.
Abrams for making a new movie version of Star Trek and inspiring a new set of twelve inch dolls. And let me not forget Rule #5, the most important rule Thou shalt play with the dolls you collect. I don’t know if you’ve seen enough of my colored-pencil Paffooneys to tell this, but for an old white guy, I draw a lot of Native Americans and am rather deeply in love with American Indian images. You may have seen this dream painting I posted before. The girl in the painting is a combination of this warrior’s daughter and myself. I was naked in the dream and a female, facing this huge ghost-stag. The dream came while I was reading Hanta Yo by Ruth Beebe Hill.
Maybe that book was the beginning of my Native American obsession. I am a crazy dreamer. But that wonderful book turned me on to the rich spiritual life that the Dakota people lived. I identified with it so completely that I dreamed myself into their culture. I was also struck by the manner in which a Native American culture handles education.
The grandfather is in charge of the boy’s learning. He teaches by story-telling. Here you see the grandfather in Sky Lodge teaching his grandson. The girls would learn very different things from their mothers and grandmothers. I am also entranced by the life of the people expressed in dance and ritual. Dance has deeper meaning than we white guys normally assign to it.
Dances could be magical. Of course, the notion of a “rain dance” is the result of too much simplification in movie scripts and ignorant popular white culture. Dance could connect you to the Earth, the Sky, and the Spirit World. That’s what this most recent Paffooney shows. So, you can see, I don’t really understand the concept of moderation when it comes to my obsessions in the world of colored pencil art.
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