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Here comes Baby New Year!
Happy New Year from Marla, David, Sammy, Kitty, Wally, Yati, Mailbot and all of the residents of Kitschatoria!
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December is here! It’s time to make your Christmas cookies. Sometimes you might feel like there’s somebody looking over your shoulder, but don’t worry! Everything’s fine! Who doesn’t love Santa?
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It’s my birthday! Check out the awesome vacuum cleaner I got from my sister!
Well, it’s Thanksgiving in the dollhouse. Everybody looks pretty busy. The dinner guests are all scrubbed and gussied up. It looked like those vegan hot dogs are going to be delicious!
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In honor of David’s birthday, the Kitschatorium was transformed into a kitty-torium for the month of November.
Happy birth-month David! Meow!
I took a short break on the Annual Report stories I’ve been writing to see what’s going on in the doll house. Looks like the birthday party has dispersed and there’s a lot of TV-watching going on. That poor robot is still working away in the kitchen, though. I guess every week is Screen Free Week for our cyborg friend.
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I got a new angel at a garage sale a couple of weeks ago. She’ll join the heavenly host of kitschy angels when the holidays roll around, but for now, she’s enjoying a few moments of glory on top of the old gas stove in the kitchen.
Some have said that she bears an uncanny resemblance to Tammy Faye Baker, maybe with a dash of Courtney Love. It does look like maybe she was a little wasted when she was crayoning on the mascara…
I have a special thing for figurines whose eyes are painted in such a way that the entire white area is colored. (Don’t tell anybody, or people will start collecting them and I won’t be able to get prizes like this for 10 cents.) As you will note, this angel has all that, plus a “holy shit what a night, how did I get home?” hairdo and little flesh colored felt mitten-stumps for hands. Do you not find her winsome/terrifying?
I decided to take a closeup portrait of her, to immortalize how fabulous she is, and then got carried away taking portraits of other favorites from the kitschatorium. I haven’t quite got the hang of using my camera’s automatic macro setting, so some of them are kind of blurry. I’m kind of thinking of getting a digital SLR, so I can feel frustrated that even with the right equipment I’m still a crappy photographer. But Tammy Faye Love and I will cross that bridge when we come to it.
Meanwhile, I will pat myself on the back for recognizing a kick-ass angel when I see one.
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David and I went to a garage sale two weeks ago where I fell in love with a dollhouse, of all things. It was the floor in the kitchen that first caught my eye. Soon, in spite of the fact that it’s missing a roof and windows (and where would we put it?) I was pretty sure I couldn’t live without it.
Having recently seen an episode of “Hoarders,” I struggled with my resolution not to buy anything that might eventually become part of a nightmarish split level with jungle pathways through mounds of refuse piled to the ceiling. Plus, it was marked $30, which is more (of David’s money) than I feel comfortable spending at a garage sale.
In case you thought I was kidding about the organ
So we did what any sensible non-hoarding couple would do, we hemmed and hawed for a long, long time, and then asked if the proprietor would throw in their partially functional Magnus Jewel chord organ for free. The sale man went into the house to ask his wife, and came back to report that no, she wouldn’t deal on the dollhouse but we could have the chord organ for $2. We left toting our prizes, with me envisioning aloud how I was going to act out scenes in the dollhouse with my figurine collection, and accompany it somehow with eerie chord organ and Theremin compositions that I was going to set out recording right away, that day.
Well, I did try, but my eerie musical imaginings didn’t pan out… yet.
Various members of the figurine family have taken up residence in the doll house, which is now semi-permanently displayed on my drawing desk in the living room. (I have to put sheets of paper behind the windows when I take photos so the colored pencils don’t show in the background.)
I did a little research, and concluded that my awesome dollhouse is indeed pretty awesome. It’s a Keystone small “put away” model, from the late 40s, apparently. I found at least one person who collects Keystone dollhouses on the web, and in the process uncovered a cool dollhouse blog by an artist who seems to share my sensibilities to some extent (There seems to be a subtle Bob Dobbs informed undercurrent in his play style…).
Meanwhile, David and I have been watching with some interest the antics that unfold in our own house. I promised him that if I got tired of playing with it, I’d get rid of it (still reeling from the Hoarders episode) but I have a feeling that won’t be any time soon.
You know how everybody is always saying, “Find what you love, and do it — and eventually everything will fall into place” (and you kind of want to sock them)? How far can you go with that, I wonder?
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I’ve been toying with the idea of some Valentine cards based on photos from the figurine collection in my ever-evolving kitschatorium. I wonder if anybody else shares my weird figurine and shitty photography Valentine aesthetic…
These photos seemed a little too populated to be valentines, so they became party invites…
