. . . & THAT IS MY THEOLOGICAL EXCUSE TO BUY MORE ORPHAN REDS, and I'm sticking to it.
"Lila (Hinduism), pronounced Leela: an Indic concept of the universe as a playground of the divine" *
Ha-ha!
But, really. A new girlette arrived last week and soon went out the door again--"I only meant to stay a while"--she's going to live with HM's grandchild.
And two of the four pairs of shoes that came with her went to an old coworker from publishing days who has a couple shoeless girlettes and whose son my age recently took his own life.
"We walk on," I wrote her, "and shoes help the dolls stand up."
So I need to replenish the Orphans.
They want to do a version of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold... with a happy ending.
"They were just pretending to die," Penny Cooper points out.
Me: Penny! You're supposed to warn about Spoilers!
P.C. says that everyone already knows it's a sad ending.
Penny Cooper will play the Richard Burton role in her pink fluffy coat. ("We must adapt.")
Option E is perfect for the Oskar Werner role. He doesn't look so blond and sweet in Spy––in cap, top left––but you can see the two are pretty much the same person--a person I love:
"the rosebud garden of girls"
I
have discovered FB market (another display of humanity that would make a
great a comic novel). The dolls there are priced all over the board--often
way more but sometimes way less than eBay.
I just scooped up five with outfits and traveling box for $35 (well, $47 with shipping and tax, but still a v. good deal).
I don't need another Miss Clavel (Linda Sue?
want her as a gift? She needs to get out of that outfit!), but I've
been wondering about having some other orphans to play roles in
tableaux. Penny Cooper: Secret Agent may benefit from some supporting actors.
Maybe the doll with long hair can take Clair Bloom's role.
The
darkhair girlette is Pepito--a boy in the Madeline books, but the doll
has no markers for people who don't know that, so they sometimes turn up as a
girl on Instagram, like here, from mlle madeline in Korea: "🍭 Suddenly Fall in 🖤 w/ Madeline".
(The Asian girlettes get The Best Clothes Ever.)
Maybe this doll is Leela, for the playfulness of gender & sex.
(A friend who loves Cabbage Patch dolls [her IG] say people in that doll-dom tend to be conservative and get intense about correctly identifying what gender their dolls are.
I say,
People. These are things of plastic and cloth.
(But of course the dolls are also us, so. )
Here's another thing:
I cannot stand to leave a Girlette in the Orphanage Jail, especially if she is only wearing panties and shoes (and is affordable).
I usually wait a while to see if someone else will take them.
This brave and hopeful darling was on FB market for weeks, so now for [a relatively measly] $7 she is coming here.
Her name might be Maud, from a scrap of poetry I remember:
"Come into the garden, Maud,
For the black bat night is flown..."
Looked it up--that's "Maud" by Tennyson.
Penny Cooper suggests I got the wrong end of the stick, though--this doll's name might be Black Bat Night!
We will have to ask when she arrives.
Wow--I just now see that in "Maud" there's a description of a redhead --" little head, sunning over with curls"––a rose from "the rosebud garden of girls"!
| Queen rose of the rosebud garden of girls, | |
| Come hither, the dances are done, | |
| In gloss of satin and glimmer of pearls, | 55 |
| Queen lily and rose in one; | |
| Shine out, little head, sunning over with curls, | |
| To the flowers, and be their sun. |
Okay, then!
"Let them name it who can,
The beauty would be the same."
* More:
"Lila is the play of creation.
To awakened consciousness, the entire universe, with all its joys and sorrows, pleasures and pains, appears as a divine game, sport, or drama. It is a play in which the one Consciousness performs all the roles.
Alluding to this lila of the Divine Mother the physical universe is a 'mansion of mirth.'"
--Ramakrishna, in Selections from The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna (2005), p. 130
