plastic titties

photo: jetheriot

Long, lustrous and impossibly black, her hair's what caught my eye. In the doll aisle at Hobby Lobby I was mesmerized by her hair. 

Now she hangs upside down from the ceiling of my studio, strung up by her feet, a twine cocoon wound tightly around her lower legs like sexy leg warmers, in tiny lace panties, bare breasted, her hands in the air like she's dancing at a party, a terry-cloth chemise obscuring her face. Combing her long black hair this morning, I let out a laugh when I realized that, for a person who never really enjoyed playing with dolls as a child -- I never quite saw the point of pretending a plastic toy was a person -- I sure did enjoy playing with them as a grown man.

I don't actually play with them. I mean, I don't pose them around teacups and pretend to have tea with them, but I do use them for art projects, posing them provocatively in an open vintage suitcase filled with cotton, for example, or hanging them from the ceiling. Some would argue that the difference between playing with dolls and using dolls to make art projects is only a matter of semantics. I would have to agree with them.

The dolls lie around my studio -- small action figures with moveable arms and legs, porcelain figurines, a life-size mannequin with detachable magnetic arms, yarn-haired school projects, a four-foot one-legged Barbie -- and I practice juxtaposing them with other toys and displaying them in interesting ways. This Native American Barbie, because of her long black hair, practically begged to be hung upside down and photographed, so I bound her feet together with a length of twine and dangled her from a thumbtack in the ceiling.

She was sold naked except for panties, and that's how she stayed hanging for a good while, upside down, naked except for panties, her pointy plastic mounds not sagging. Then my cousin Kim gave me some Barbie clothes -- official Barbie merchandise, not like this Native-American-Hobby-Lobby-sealed-in-a-cellophane-bag-quote-unquote-Barbie-doll -- and the terry-cloth chemise fit perfectly. Seriously, it fit her like a glove.

But was she a work of art? I peeled apart the Velcro seam running down the back of her chemise and jerked it down around her face, obscuring her green-shadowed eyelids, revealing her pointed boobs. Not only was she naked at that point, she was titillatingly exposed. Now that's art!

Dotting her lace panties with superglue to repair a frayed seam, it felt so wrong and it felt so right. I uncurled the little pink tag on the inseam of her chemise so that the cursive capital B would be seen in the photograph, then aimed a lamp in her direction, bathing her peach plastic flesh in incandescent light and pulled her hair into a ponytail with the smallest rubber band I could find in my desk drawer.