Paper Dolls

Story ID:	381
Written by:	Virginia Allain
Organization:	none
Story type:	Family History
Location:	El Dorado Kansas USA
Year:	1959
Person:	Virginia Allain

I was a dreamy child, self-absorbed and shy. Although I was one of six children I liked playing alone. Often I spent hours playing with my paper dolls, immersing myself in their fantasy lives. I had complete families with furniture and accessories, carefully clipped from the outdated Sears catalog.
The scale of these paper families and their household goods lacked consistency but my imagination overlooked such discrepancies. It mattered little that the end table was too large for the sofa. Some dolls lacked part of an arm or a foot from overlapping in the catalog picture, but that deficiency was also ignored.
Each was assigned a glamourous name that I penciled on the back of the doll. One might be christened Tiffany Charade DeLora or Shana Claressa O’Malley . The sound of the words carried more importance for me than any possible meaning of the name. They would never have such mundane names as my real family had, like Clyde or Susan.
I also drew my own paper dolls and created a wardrobe of elaborate gowns for all occasions. These dolls did not live in a farmhouse in central Kansas. They did not have a garden to hoe, chickens to feed or logs to carry in for the woodstove. These dolls lived lives of sophistication based on ideas gleaned from my voracious reading.
They were stored in a shoe box kept under the bed. Their lives consumed many hours filled with imaginary conversations and convoluted plots as I arranged and rearranged them on my sisters’ double bed. Books, laid flat on the bed, made ideal rooms for the furniture. The color of the book provided the carpet and basic color scheme. By raiding the bookshelf, it was easy to add rooms to their houses as the families grew.
My sisters had their own collections of paper dolls and sometimes we played together, but it wasn’t always as satisfying as being on my own. Their dolls did not always cooperate with my story and carry out their part of the conversations to my liking. On my own, my dolls performed their roles impeccably.
The absence of a television set freed us for hours of self-invented entertainment. I’m glad I had those hours of playing and creating rather than hours of idly gazing at a television screen. Perhaps being poor has its benefits. I can’t imagine that store-bought paper dolls would have captured my imagination the way these flimsy, free ones did. Perhaps it even influenced my career choice, since being a librarian meant surrounding myself with books and the intriguing stories within them.