DONTCHA JUST LOVE DOLLIES?
Maybe not the first thing I would have thought might come out of the Rink project but it’s an idea I fleetingly mentioned way back, which is now about to happen. I am having a doll made.
First time for everything… and in the spirit of nurturing my feminine side who can say I shouldn’t? When I was a boy they came up with the idea of Action Man – tough, camouflage clothing on a body that owed a lot to Barbie, just swapping boobs for pectorals. Didn’t do it for me as I was an Airfix Army boy myself, preferring to arrange a rematch of the 8th Army versus the Afrika Corp or some similar ‘true to life’ conflict.
The doll will be a scale model of Marion Keene – the glamorous singer who first sang with the resident band at the Rink when she was 14 and very quickly became a face on television after being signed by Oscar Rabin. I have written before about Marion, and still chat to her on the phone now and again. She calls a spade a spade and doesn’t suffer fools gladly. Somehow I have slipped under this radar and she says she enjoys talking to me, so I have felt able to take the liberty of making her into an icon in a quite literal way.
Marion lives on the south coast now, and I had thought I might go and film her one day, but as the months slipped by it began to feel more appropriate to represent her in a way that was more remote. A Marion doll, resplendent in shimmering fish tail dress, is the essence of what she is to me. Marion laughs at the idea but I think she secretly rather likes it.
Having trawled the internet, it was surprisingly difficult to find someone who makes dolls like this. I settled on a lady in the States who specialises in personalised dolls with accurate features. It might be a bit spooky – I won’t be sure until I see the finished article, but I can’t wait. The lady in question has been busy with other dolls up until now and has just written to me to say she is now able to take on my commission. Not sure that she is used to people commissioning her dolls for such purposes… but I’m sure she’ll make a good job as it seems to be a passion rather than a job to her.
Hanging in on the fashion theme…I just finished talking to Nancy O’Connor this afternoon.
“You know when you asked to talk to me on the phone today” she says “I thought it would take about ten minutes… no I don’t mean anything by that Neil… I’ve loved every minute of it”
I look at the timer on the phone and we are just nudging 2 hours. Not once did it seem like she was struggling for words. It was a flood of memories, interspersed with hearty laughter and some sad, funny and surprising stories. She had written to me about being the first girl to wear a polo neck sweater to the Rink and I wanted to get her to talk directly to me about that and other stuff. Her family lived in a 2 up, one down terrace house. She says, whenever she came home you might ask where’s dad?… or where is my sister? or whoever…but she can never remember having to ask where her mother was. Her mother was always in the house. Her mother presided over the most immaculate oven range in the street. It shone.
If her mother was a social recluse, Nancy made up for it by going to the Rink as many nights as she could afford – and the fact that the polo neck cost 29 shillings and eleven pence is etched clearly in her mind. It was more than her weekly wage, but Nancy’s mother paid for it. Some people didn’t even have glass in the windows on their street, they put carpet up instead, but Nancy had a polo neck.
How’s that for designer prices.
