Perpetual Girlhood

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored!" Do you clean your upholstery and your toilet with the same product? Of course not! Then why worship just one god? Don't be deity insecure. (see post below) Branch out to those specialized pantheons!

I'm inspired today by an editorial in the Philadelphia Inquirer. They don't archive their editorials, so here it is in a nutshell:

The author, a mid-life guy, laments his inability to run, jump, shoot, and score the way he used to. In a strictly sporting sense. He sees his arthritic knees as a harbinger of the end of all boyhood, truly as the bones-scraping-bones that will lurch him to Geezer City.

Poor fella! I mean that seriously. If your entire concept of boyhood revolves around your ability to compete in a sporting event, you're doing 110 on Mid-Life Crisis Boulevard.

EXHIBIT A: ANNE'S CHILDHOOD TREASURES

Aren't these dollies cute? They're called Liddle Kiddles. When I was a girl of seven or eight, these charmers came on the market at affordable prices. I had a bevvy of them and played with them until they became, well, played-with. Today collectors will shell out $500 or more for the poor unfortunate Kiddles who were never removed from their boxes and played with.






EXHIBIT B: FREEZY IN THE DAY

This Kiddle is Freezy. I have a Freezy of my own, but she sure doesn't look like this.

Last Christmas I decided to give my Freezy doll a Mid-Life Crisis. Heck, Freezy's almost as old as I am, which means she's at mid-life or maybe even a little past the peak.

The out-of-pocket cost of Freezy's crisis was about ten bucks. I bought a teeny tiny string of lights that really light up, tangled her hopelessly in them, drew circles under her eyes, and mis-matched her snow boots. I already had a little Christmas tree to lean her against. It helped that her hair was already standing on end from too many childhood experiments in doll grooming.

Originally, Liddle Kiddles always came in packages with little comic books telling of their adventures. So I wrote a new one for Freezy's changed life circumstances. It was aptly titled: Pity Poor Freezy.

Once a happy-go-lucky sledding cutie, Freezy had become a harried church lady, trying fruitlessly to untangle her outside Christmas lights while baking cookies for the Sunday School pageant and spearheading a fundraiser for her teenager's youth group trip to Sri Lanka. Freezy didn't have time to search for the mate to her boot, so she shoved her foot into her teenager's undersized footwear. And Mr. Freezy can't come to her aid because he's making a Finance Committee report at the church's Administrative Council meeting.

Freezy's standing knee-deep in the snow (I used cotton) recalling her brief experimentation with quaaludes in college. We leave her there in that predicament.

My daughters, The Heir and The Spare, helped me to create Mid-Life-Krisis Freezy. We made a special ceremony of illuminating her tangled rope of lights. Fully lit, with that hair standing on end, she looked like she was being electrocuted. I hope I'm not bragging when I say it was an evocative tableau.

So yes. I, Anne Johnson, still play with dolls at the age of ##. I am determined never to leave childhood behind, so thank goodness mine didn't revolve around some stinking soccer team.

Forever young in mind and heart I remain,

Yours truly,

ANNE
THE MERLIN OF BERKELEY SPRINGS