This was a gift from Michael Patrick King, writer and director of Sex and the City, a couple of years ago for my birthday. I always thought the doll had a Carrie Bradshaw vibe to her, smiling and happy and looking good in red. One day I slammed my shin into the table Rolly Polly sits on and it made such a great chime sound I didn’t mind the dripping gash down below. I limped into my recording studio and dragged a mic to reach her, tilting her in all directions, spinning her around and pushing her across the table. The different chime patterns sounded great and distinctive, sometimes carrying on for 30 seconds or more.
I love working with tracks I record just by banging on things around my house. This is nothing a skilled or trained musician would do but my specialty is hearing rhythm and time in places most people don’t. As my Color Purple collaborators used to say, “All aboard for Willisville!” as I continually heard things in different time signatures they thought a piece of music was in and never cared about working off of a grid, preferring instead for everything to play as it lays, natural and funky. I love things that lazily and organically hang together and this little Roly Poly girl doesn’t disappoint. I doubt MPK thought he was giving me a musical instrument for my birthday but that’s exactly what she’s become.
If you ever get a chance to knock one of these gals around I hope you do. She makes one of the happiest sounds in the world.
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Categories:
Accessories,
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Cheap jewelry is always a popular breeding ground for Kitsch. Kitsch glitz shines especially bright when designs are made to capitalize on popular trends such as the streaking craze that began in the 1960’s and attained astronomical heights when a peace signing streaker crashed the 1974 Academy Awards blazing behind actor David Niven. From that point on, streaking was as glorified in all forms of design, from T-shirts to decals to plaster figurines to the kind of tacky finery you see here.
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I may have sore thumbs but not green ones. Not an area I have especially great skills in other than I seem to have a talent for nursing baby Palm trees. Nothing that would fit in this 5″ ceramic planter with the perfect green thumb though. Instead, seeds drop from two 80-year-old massively high Palm trees at my house and thousands of little baby Palms sprout all over my yard. They’re faithfully mowed twice a week so they look like the perfect sheared bright green astroturf lawn.
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I’ll be waving one of these all day and night today as these are the final two performances of the First National Tour of my musical, The Color Purple. The whole 4-1/2 years I was writing this with Brenda Russell and Stephen Bray we waved these church fans and others from my collection of 60 from the 1950’s and ’60’s daily. I’ve been stuck on songs before but being stuck on a song for a musical when one has to consider way more then the singer or the content of the song like the plot, which we were writing at the same time as the songs, the dialogue, whether something should be musicalized or spoken, is there dancing to it or not, does the wig guy have enough time to make the wig changes, on and ever-increasingly on…, let me tell you the sweat pours down and these church fans, totally organic to what we were writing other than a couple decades too late, came in mighty handy.
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Ponytail was one of the first if not THE first ubiquitous teenage girl brands. In the age of Elvis Presley, when such creatures felt freedom unlike any generations previous, Ponytail couldn’t crank out matching products fast enough – eyeglass cases, wallets, diaries, treasure boxes, 45s record cases, Deskette desk sets - all in the signature Ponytail baby blue or powder pink leatherette.
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One of my favorite genres of Kitsch is when objects are produced to take advantage of a massive trend in pop culture but actually have nothing at all to do with that trend. My next favorite genre of Kitsch is when the products themselves are impractical for the use they were created to serve. This “Disco Beat” earring holder qualifies on both fronts! The bouncy, clean cut 1950’s American Bandstand bobby-soxers would have never gotten into the 1970’s disco-beated Studio 54 and the zillion holes provided to dangle earrings from makes for too crowded of a surface to effectively hang more than a couple sets of earrings without them hanging over each other and coalescing into a tangled mess. All of which makes for one hell of the fantastic Kitsch product!
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These cheap, flimsy plastic fake pens were all the rage as similar ‘joke’ toys made in Hong Kong like snapping packs of gum and snakes exploding out of peanut cans flooded novelty and drugstores shelves in the 1950’s and 60’s. You pull the cap off, squeeze the pen as you hold it in water (or invisible ink!) and then aim. I bought these ultimate squirt guns by the carton full with my allowance money and spent my youth asking people if they needed a pen.
I found this set for three bucks recently. I was only paying 29 cents back in the day, which means 14.5 cents a pen/squirt gun. Though I’m still never without 10 (real and more expensive) pens on me at all times these are still my favorites.
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I only wish the real thing looked as good as this plastic trinkets box that looks like I remember Hostess cupcakes looking like back in the day. Today the real thing has shrunken to abnormally small sizes, the signature white curlicue fading to a limpy brown color as God knows what chemicals keep the cakes fresh in their individually wrapped packages. With this said, as much as I once loved Hostess cupcakes I still keep hope alive that one day when I open this box the cream filling will miraculously be waiting for me in the middle.
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A day late but Happy belated Martin Luther King Day! This bulging butterscotch keychain goes with me everywhere I go.
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Along with Postum, Sanka is the brew that revolutionized the coffee world and kicked off the decaf trend. It was also the proud sponsor of quintessential 50’s TV shows like “I Love Lucy” and “The Andy Griffith Show”. In those days, cigarettes were almost de rigueur with anything smelling like coffee, hence the promotional ashtray to top off the perfect cup.
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