Dressing a BOUS: Part Two

Barbie Of Unusual Size, in case you're wondering.  I have two:  My Size Barbie (Redhead) and Supersize (18 inch) Pocahontas.  Both of them came in the original clothes.  Pocahontas in a halter and mini skirt.  Rusty (the My Size) in a huge, fluffy bridal gown. 

I found a regular-size boy doll on one of my yard sale/thrift store jaunts and his clothes were way too big.  On impulse, I tried them on Pokey...  they fit!  So she had at least one wardrobe change. 

Mattel says Rusty can wear 4T size.  Mattel isn't wrong, but the clothes hang on her and waistbands need taken in.  That much sewing I can do.  Some experimentation tells me the best fit for her is actually 18 months, if you don't mind miniskirts. And she's Barbie, so we know she can rock the miniskirt.

A regular Barbie comes up to Pokey's boob and Rusty's knee, so they can't really play together.  So Pokey and Rusty are largely decor items and I am trying to dress them seasonally.  For Rusty,  I grab the markdowns after the holiday in question.  She does need short sleeves.  Her Halloween shirt was made to look like layers and I snipped off the long portion. 

Pokey required more research and creativity...  both my strong points!  Turns out a woman's knee sock, cut off at the heel and trimmed around the hem with lace (to hide my clumsy stitching) makes a strapless dress for Pokey.

Rusty's set for Valentine's Day, Halloween, patriotic holidays, football season, and even "dress-up" occasions.  Pokey has Christmas and Valentine's Day, along with a classic "little black dress".  But now that I've figured this out, they'll be set in no time! 

The Lazybones Guide to Doll Customization

I've been looking at DIY Barbie videos on You Tube.  My favorite is My Froggy Stuff.  She is into doll photography and creates dioramas for them.  The only problem with her crafts is that she intends them for much gentler play than my dolls get.

A good bit of the things I've done with/for my dolls, though, has been inspired by her.  I just have to find ways to make it sturdier and less complicated.  She creates rooms - bedrooms, kitchens, classrooms, even grocery stores - from cardboard boxes and various craft supplies.  That's too much like work for me.

Instead of doing all that, I invested in a strong dollhouse.  It's meant for American Girl type dolls, which gives me huge rooms for my Barbies.  On their scale, we're talking 8 X 16 rooms with eleven or twelve foot ceilings.  (A fashion doll house usually gives them  8 by 8 rooms with very little overhead clearance.)  

Unlike the interior walls of many dollhouses, these are not printed with pictures of furniture.  Just "wallpaper".  Wall art in the kitchen consists of dollar-store coasters and stickers.  Small decals (human scale) make for large wall art (doll scale). The back of a calendar of old-fashioned pin-up girls - the area that shows all twelve months' pictures - is a poster in the boys' room.  Some other things you can find on their walls are logos from Nerf gun packaging, an educational card about a fish called the sarcastic fringehead, and stickers.

The only furniture I've made myself is a pedestal bed made from a storage box.  I just covered the lid with fabric and added a colorful head board.  Nothing nearly as complex as some of those DIY videos do.  Most of the other furniture is Barbie or Monster High brand.  Very little of it was purchased new.  I love my yard sales!

The dolls themselves I don't do a lot of work on.  What I do is usually rebodying. For example, a doll with a very interesting face but a non-articulated body meets an articulated doll with a Vapid Face and a matching skin tone.  I pop the heads off and switch them!  Very few dolls the size of Skipper or smaller are articulated, so my younger set remains stiff-armed.  At least the legs are usually bendy. 

I don't try to reroot hair or repaint faces.  I have been known to trim hair if the hair is impossible to comb out or if it combs out unevenly, but that's the extent of it.  I'm amazed at the work I see in the videos and blogs, but I just do not have those skills or that much patience.  

White Privilege Revisited

I wrote a previous blog on the subject, which I'll summarize here.  In the previous blog, I took the position that white privilege does not exist.  I have since rethought the issue, learned more about it, and have relaxed that position.

My previous position came from having only been exposed to the issue by the polarized.  The fanatics, if you will.  As a result, the issue was not clearly explained and I felt attacked.  Cooler heads have since prevailed. 

Yes, I and my white brethren do get bullied (by civilians and by cops).  We do have to pay a debt to society if we break the law.  We did have ancestors who were mistreated and sometimes even enslaved.  We've had to work crappy jobs, live in crappy homes, and had folks misjudge us by appearance.   

American society has largely been shaped by rich WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) males.  Anyone who fails to meet that criteria automatically becomes somehow lesser.  The more of that criteria you fail to meet, the lesser you are.  The non-whites who get away with shenanigans that I mentioned in my previous blog do meet some of the criteria.  (Looking at you, Cosby.) 

The way history has played out, most non-whites are still struggling with poverty.  They are not WAS, even if they are P.  Half of them aren't male.  This is what folks are really referring to when they talk about white privilege. 

For example, it's against federal law to deny someone a job because of their race or sex, but it still happens.  The guy doing the hiring may not even realize it.  We're taught to prefer "normal" and that's usually based on the WASP model.  We are not doing it on purpose - at least not most of us - but we do it.  Even those of us, like me, who feel that being called a racist is a most vile insult.

I use race as a shorthand descriptive device.  What's Bob look like?  He's a skinny black dude.  Where'd we park?  Over by where that Mexican lady is loading groceries into her car.  Strictly speaking, that's racist.  Why is their race what makes them stand out to me?  Because I've been socialized to think of WASP as the norm. 

That doesn't make me a racist in the general meaning.  It just means we all, as humans, need to work harder on seeing what we have in common.

Triggered

I've seen a meme of C-3PO shutting down after Luke and Obi-Wan start talking about Luke's father labeled "Triggered".  On one level, it struck me as funny.  On another, thought provoking... can an artificial life form be triggered in that sense?  But..  The maker of the meme was mocking the mentally ill!  What a horrible person!

I once got an email urging me to boycott the T-Shirt I was actually wearing.  It was, like the meme, mocking the mentally ill!  Those who made it, those who laugh at it, and those who wear it are all horrible people!

Today I was reading a news story about a famous murder case and the comment section was full of condemnation for the reporters.  By writing a story which sells (the entire purpose of most mass media), they were propagating the horror the victim's family has gone through.  This struck me as very like the reaction to the meme and also quite hypocritical.

Why hypocritical?  Two words: Nine.  Eleven.

Every year on that date, one of the most horrific things that ever happened on American soil gets revisited ad nauseam.  This is a very real psychological trigger for countless people.  To this day, I can still hear the voice I think of as the "Oh my god" lady.  

In 2011, I was working in the Discharge Office of a local hospital.  I collected co-pays and screened patients for possible bill assistance.  I also sat less than fifty feet from a television I could not turn off, one that replayed the footage repeatedly for weeks after the event. Thank my god, I couldn't see the screen, but I could hear it.  "Oh my god" lady and all.

I was fortunate.  My nephew was on his honeymoon in the DC area, but he wasn't near the Pentagon that morning.  I didn't know anyone who died that day.  I may not even know anyone who knew someone that did.  But thousands of us are walking around with psychological scars simply from witnessing it on the television.

The only way to avoid it is to pull the plug on everything, including your phone.  For those of us who work or go to school, that isn't possible.  The same people who get mad over a meme, a T-shirt, a news story, are getting mad if you neglect to trigger the thousands of victims of 9/11.  Social media, including emails and text, is flooded with detailed photos of the towers going down.  The mass media runs commemorative stories, usually with the same detailed photos or (worse) video.

The C-3PO meme is mocking those who think everything they don't like is a trigger.  My crazy aunt T-Shirt is whistling past the graveyard.  I will continue to enjoy those things at least as long as giving me a week's worth of nightmares every fall is encouraged.  God only knows what it puts those with real trauma from 9/11 through.

I Confess - I Don't Deserve Motherhood

Another tragic baby death in the news.  Another wave of judgement on the parents, who are already suffering the worst fate I can imagine.  But I guess now I know why God, or the Fates, or whoever you want to blame, denied me the one thing I wanted most out of life.

I'm not worthy of motherhood.  I've lost track of children in public places, which makes it very possible that one could have fallen into the Gorilla Enclosure.  I've forgotten the baby in the car because I wasn't used to having a baby in the car or because my mind was otherwise occupied.  It truly is a miracle that the dozens of children I helped raise lived to puberty.

How did Josh survive those repeated vacations with me?  What were his parents thinking, to allow him to travel farther than fifteen yards with such a terrible caretaker?  And then - horrors - Josh allowed his child to fly cross-country in my care!  Well, the grandparents went, too, but...   you know, the same folks who let Josh travel with me...  

My minions "know better" than to wander off.   But they still did and they still do.  I worry about children who don't simply forget the rules in exploring the wonders around them.  By the time they hit double digits, my minions know what to do if lost - or if grabbed.  Yes, I teach them of the dangers.  These things, apparently, render me unsuitable for parenthood.

As for the car, I guess my minions have been lucky that I had other people around to call me on my negligence.  The toddler who interrupted me (even though she knew better) to remind me about the baby - she saved Baby Sister from being MURDERED.  

I'm stunned that my flouting of gender roles for children hasn't resulted in a Pride Parade at family reunions.  And don't even get me started on the heinous crime of letting them have dirty faces or mismatched clothes.  But, thank the Higher Powers, my baby-forgetting and child-losing uterus produced nothing larger than that damn fibroid.  

Appropriation or Appreciation?

We hear so much about Cultural Appropriation like it's a bad thing.  Appropriate can mean steal or usurp, but it can also mean borrow or adopt.  Borrowing and adopting come from appreciation.  The Great American Melting Pot is and was all about appropriation - we borrow ideas from one another. The whites came here from Europe and took some ideas from the folks that already lived here.  Those folks took some ideas from the Europeans.  Corn for metal tools, maybe, or booze for tobacco. Italian immigrants traded recipes with their German neighbors.  

My own lineage is mostly German and Irish.  I have a friend who is Sioux.  Are we not allowed to celebrate Christmas because it's largely based on Mediterranean traditions?  Of course we can - we appropriated it because we appreciated it.  The Mother Earth/Father Sky motif reflects my beliefs much more accurately than anything else.  Ethnic foods are just plain yummy.  I am not victimizing anyone by braiding my hair.  No one is being hurt because my names are (in order of appearance) Latin, French, and German.  

That's not to say it's never a problem.  Plagiarism is a form of appropriation and the only people that approve of it are the plagiarists.  Eminent Domain is appropriation, but every time a government uses it, there is an outcry.  But it's hardly the problem it's made out to be.

A white dude that wears dreadlocks is not appropriating black culture.  Many European cultures (and some native to the Americas) wore similar styles or maybe he just appreciates the look.  There are legitimate reasons why a non-Asian might wear a kimono.  

Most Americans, regardless of race or religion, start the day with a cup of coffee.  Coffee was invented by Arabs and adopted by Europeans.  Sometimes they have grits, made from corn and borrowed from the natives of North America, for breakfast.  If they eat spaghetti or pizza, they're appreciating Italian food.  Maybe they have popcorn in the evening (see previous mentions of corn) for a snack.  

Think for a moment of all the things you enjoy that came from a different place than your DNA. Those things were all appropriated, borrowed, adopted...  because they were appreciated.  Some of the things others enjoy were benignly filched from your ancestors.  And that's okay.  No harm, no foul.  Usually.  

Tarred With The Same Brush

My mother warred with the school, usually for justifiable reasons,  But there were times... like when my sister didn't want to take a required class or the English teacher who punished my brother for saying "ain't".  A few of my siblings were trouble-makers and the ones who weren't, Mother made up for.

I was the seventh Schmidt to go through that school.  Very few of the faculty saw me as the quiet, scholarly thing I was.  I was a trouble maker from the moment they saw my name on the roll.  One teacher even confronted me the first day of class to tell me as much.  That would have been bad enough, but the class in question was something I was looking forward to.  Eagerly.  Like Christmas. 

Creative Writing.  A subject already near and dear to my heart.  On one assignment, my character was meant to be brutally honest but came across - in the words of a classmate - like "an asshole."  I asked for advice on how to write the character better and the boy responded with something along the lines of "stop being stupid".  She ignored the vulgarity and the verbal abuse.  She had a student, near tears, in her class room and did nothing. 

The "Asshole" incident was only the most egregious example - in that class and in others.  Because I was a Schmidt, I deserved it.  It's on a much smaller scale, I admit, than racism or homophobia or religious prejudice. But the principle is the same. 

I've also been on and off Welfare all my life and been on the receiving end of "Get a job" (usually when I was already employed).  I've had people make snide comments to me because there's no way that lady using Food Stamps is not the mother of those kids that are with her. (I'm The Aunt.) 

I don't get offended at jokes about stereotypes.  I see them as a useful tool against ignorance. I will, however, give you the sharp side of my tongue if you believe those stereotypes.  Most of any given group are good people.  If I defend whites against being tarred by the same brush as the KKK, it is not because I'm white.  I'm just as likely to defend Muslims against the ISIS brush. 

Because no matter who you hit with it, no matter how small it is, that brush bruises souls.