Declarations of Love

I have found my muse, and she is the embodiment of the museums of Eddie Bert. They just get more and more and more fun. For me, museums are no longer stiff, austere galleries where you go to learn and appreciate. No, the museums of Eddie Bert have shown me that museums are places of amusement. Today, I present, the Museum of Childhood.



This is Lauren joining the rally of the scary child mannequins. Unfortunately, in her eagerness to side with the children, she blocked the children out of view. But trust me, they were not Sunday's children.











At the museum, there were not a lot of old toys and not a lot of plaques to read, which was a real pleasure (save for one exhibit). My favorite was this doll house here, for some really loaded kid way back then. Check out the details in the butcher shop, with all sorts of cuts of tiny meat. I wish I had a doll house like that when I was a kid, but no, I had to settle for a Barbie mobile home.



I took the picture from two angles, then stitched it together to double the viewing pleasure. Oh, it's been too long since I've had a prime rib. Somebody take me out to a proper dinner, please.


And here, to prove that I don't lurk around city museums all by myself, is a picture of Scottish Friend Hannah, putting on a puppet show for us. Behind the puppet theatre, we found, in addition to some puppets, empty bags of chips. Not cool to litter in children's museum, people, not cool.

Also not cool in the museum: the dolls. Their houses were meat-tastic and meat-beautiful, but the dolls were a reminder of how harsh and caustic life was back then and also that people used to be racists.

Exhibit #1: Asian doll with really angry eyes.







Exhibits #2: Blackface 'golly' dolls. These 'gollies' were a part of some children's book series that people loved and the images were used for a brand of jams that managed to resist protests until 2001. (It spun out some crap about how "the golly was simply a 'loveable' nursery character that symbolised warmth and had no connection with black people" that no one believed.) That's just 5 years ago! And even now, I see golly dolls being sold at a little knick-knack shop a couple of blocks down, as some hip, retro item. And even the museum, where I got these nice history tidbits fails to acknowledge any racist undertones in any of the labels and plaques. It's only on their website that they mention these things.

Exhibit #3: Exotic African doll. Check out them ear rings.







These last dolls aren't racist, as far as I can make out, but I loved the little one with the t-shirt in the middle, with her wild, crazy hair and modern look. She looks totally out of place, but also looks like she's trying hard to blend in. And has the best shifty doll eyes ever.