"Lila is the play of creation. . . "

. . . & 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