>The Valley of the Dolls

The Valley of the Dolls

On the steps of the Nashville Parthenon, a group of adults is playing with dolls. They pass them back and forth, stroke their hair and admire their outfits. “Hi,” I say shyly, after walking over to them. “I’m Lindsay.” Awkwardly, I reach into my bag, fumbling for a plastic figure wrapped in a dish towel. Finally, I get the thing unwrapped and hold it out. “And um, this is my Blythe doll.”

OK, technically, she’s not mine. I’m a grown woman and I’m telling you, I don’t play with dolls. The fact is, I got my daughter the doll for Christmas, after discovering tons of adorably hip, handmade Blythe clothes for sale on the Internet that I, er, she, simply had to have. Further investigation revealed that the bubble-headed Blythe, whose eyes change color with the help of a pull cord, has quite the cult following. Today, the original 1972 Kenner models sell for more than $1,000 apiece on eBay, and a Japanese company makes cheaper (though far from cheap) reproductions that are eagerly collected by adult devotees all over the world.

Search Blythe on the Internet and you’ll find thousands of pictures posted on photo-sharing sites, Internet tutorials on customizing the dolls, and message boards, where women (and a smattering of men) discuss talking to their “girls,” bonding with them and taking them to work and on vacations. Some freely admit they’re addicted.

“You know you’re addicted to Blythe,” one woman writes, “when you open up a special checking account and skim money from the other one to ‘secretly’ fund more adoptions/clothing splurges.”

“You know you are addicted to Blythe,” another woman counters, “when the ratio of Blythe photos versus photos of my own children reaches about 100 to 1 in Blythe’s favor. (My kids are going to grow up and ask me why I have so many doll pics but none of them.)”

After reading all this, I spend a restless night imagining the doll, which is stowed under my bed, suddenly blinking her eyes, crawling out of her box and padding across my bedroom floor. I shiver in terror, wondering what kind of power Blythe wields and how long it will take before I’m infected. When I read online a few days later that a meet-up for Blythe collectors was scheduled here in Nashville, I felt my (daughter’s) Blythe doll and was inexorably drawn to it like zombies to a graveyard.

And that’s how I end up at the Parthenon on a sunny Saturday afternoon with an offbeat group of local collectors. There’s Jade, a dreadlocked belly dancer/Roman reenactor who, like me, has recently bought her first Blythe. There’s Margie, a toy store employee who makes some of the fabulous Blythe fashions I found online, and her boyfriend, Mark, a self-professed toy geek whose passion for the non-Blythe dolls he’s brought with him frankly alarms me. There’s Sadie, an affable art student who organized the gathering, and her roommate Teddy, a newly converted Blytheist who has dressed his borrowed doll in clothes coordinated with his own outfit.

“When I first moved in with Sadie,” Teddy confesses soon after meeting me, “I thought her Blythes were really creepy. But after about six months, I said to myself, ‘Well, I guess they’re actually cute.’ ” Before Teddy knew it, he was dressing Sadie’s Blythe dolls, brushing their hair and compulsively searching the Internet for a Blythe to buy and call his own.

Sadie’s friend Ned shows up with a camera and begins taking his own pictures of the dolls. He’s never heard of Blythe until today and stares curiously at us with the appraising eyes of an anthropologist assessing a tribe of Pygmies. When he offers us a cookie, I hold out my (daughter’s) doll and say in a squeaky voice, “I’ll take one.” No one laughs and Ned looks stricken. I clear my throat and look away. Awk-ward.

I can’t pinpoint what it is exactly that makes me feel so uncomfortable about playing with dolls in public. It’s not the passersby, who give us only the most casual glances as they tour the Parthenon, and it’s not the other collectors, who for all their quirks are bright, articulate and involved in the community. All I know is that I feel childish, vulnerable and judged by some unseen eye of public opinion as I hold my (daughter’s) doll in the middle of Centennial Park, which doesn’t seem fair when I consider that men can play with remote-controlled airplanes and video games and no one thinks twice about it.

“I’m so glad you weren’t all weird,” Jade gushes before departing for a belly dancing workshop. “I was a little worried.”

“You want to see weird,” Mark says a few minutes later. “You should see the Lionel train collectors. Those guys…” he exhales sharply and rolls his eyes skyward, before going back to fussing over his own doll, a mannish redhead in a football jersey.

Come to think of it, maybe I should have just stuck with Barbie.