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Thursday, April 20, 2023

Seventies Sunflowers & Apotropaic Doll

I. That Seventies Display

Yesterday Art, the volunteer who disdains kitsch, put this crewel-work sunflower panel in my area (below) : "I thought you'd like it".
I do!
He knows shoppers like this sort of stuff too, but he can't bring himself to dignify it with a decent price: he'd priced it $8.99.
OMG.
It has a tear and it's splattered, lower left, with ... coffee? I think you could spray-wash that out though, and it's a great design, and--can you see?--nicely done. (I assume it was a kit.)
I raised it to $22, went home and looked it up, and it sells for $150+, advertised "As seen on Mad Men (in Peggy's apartment)".
I will raise the price again ($38) and add that info.


With that, it was time to put out the books from the 1970s that I've been saving, though it's not the most exciting selection.
(We continue to get fewer book donations. Though the weather's improved, street life had not, and that scares people away--they'll say as much. ("I don't go there anymore.")
BELOW: some of my display, with some '70s toys too--a 1978 Ginny doll, and that Amazing Maze handheld game, which sells online for a lot, if it's in good shape (this one's not).
The best stuff sold before I'd even taken a photo--another problem with doing displays in thrift...
But it's fun anyway.

II. Dolls, Domesticated

We'd gotten a bunch of doll donations, so yesterday I did another doll display too. They're fairly standard fare for us--in fact, some have come around before. (A couple did come home with me--photos later.)
 
III. Doll in the Wild

I learned this word from Michael:
Apotropaic: having the power to avert evil

At lunchtime, Emmler  invited me to accompany her on a drop-off: she leaves stuff she makes out and about. She was taking out the little doll that she'd painted eyes on and I'd added porcelain flowers to.
The doll had stayed with me over Easter but was starting to march about saying she wanted to "go out, like the others". (Definitely this doll has Emmler's energy, which revs high.)

Emmler climbed up and glued the doll into a crevasse in the bricks on the back of the thrift store--not visible at eye level.

The doll (below) will watch over the alley, Emmler said,
"to make sure the whoors of Slob-Knob Alley only have to have consensual fuckage."
(There's a lot of . . . activity out there, definitely some of it nonconsensual--so we hear--not that the women bother to report it)

Doll is apotropaic!

Emmler looks like Little My, a fierce little person in Moomin world.
She is said to have a 
"fondness for mischief and a cheerfully morbid fascination for disaster and destruction".