Who Loves Baby Dolls?

No, not that sort. Don't you lot ever think of anything else? A comment to this post at Celebrating the Absurd got me thinking.

In the dim, distant Metropast I lived in a small town, more a teeny tiny suburb, only not quite, where we actually had a village toy shop. The local paper was interviewing the owner at the height of both the popularity of Cabbage Patch Kids and that of teen pregnancy in our area.

The owner of the toy shop was explaining that his primary clientelle was grandparents. Silver-haired ladies and gentlemen thronged the shop on their way to visit various grandkids. A popular gift for girls was a dolly.

But he was quite specific: They wanted cute little-girl dollies, the ones that look like they're about five. Pink dresses were popular, as were blonde curls, smiles, and bright white teeth.

The article mentioned that at the end of the line was something called, if memory serves "Your Real Baby".

The "Your Real Baby," like the Cabbage Patch Kids, came with a birth certificate, and like the CPKs, you had a choice of ethnicity rarely seen in the adorable-little-girly doll market. But there the similarities ended. While the CPKs all looked like the hydrocephalic, button-eyed little morons they still resemble today, YRB looked 100% real. It was wrinkled. It was either bald or covered in that fluff real babies sometimes arrive wearing. It had a freshly-cut umbilicus with band-aid, and a diaper with the (then-new) half-moon cut from it to accomodate said umbilicus.

It had on its face the expression babies usually have: The purse-lipped, scrunch-eyed malevolent glare of someone who's figured out that YOU are responsible for tipping it out of its comfortable liquid home and introducing it to the cold, cruel, world and is going to make you PAY once it gets the lungs and vocal chords in synch.

The article quoted the toy shop owner as lamenting that while pink-dressed little-girl dolls flew from the shelves, no grandparents seemed eager to offer their offsprings' offspringers the experience of holding a genuine, real-looking baby.

Although I'm sure they chuckled and cooed enough when the respective grandkids were also pinkish/yellowish/brownish and squidgy.

I've always remembered that article, and what it suggested about the reaction of humans to the real world.