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Suzy Gorman
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I was one of those little girls who played with dolls for hours on end. I blessed them with names and personalities. I continually fussed with—and frequently cut—their hair. Within days of arrival, they looked loved but bedraggled. According to my mother’s dictum, my dolls came in two versions: baby doll or Madame Alexander. No Pitiful Pearls for me. “Why in the world would I buy you an ugly doll?” I remember my mother replying when I begged for what was actually a dead ringer for Whoopie Goldberg, if she were white.
Sorry, Whoop.
My sister, Thirza, spent her hours either burrowed in a book or outside on the back of her beloved buckskin horse (cleverly named “Buck”). She, too, had Madame Alexanders, but hers remained untouched and pristine. There was Polly Pigtails in her blue-checked pinafore, the bride dressed in satin, and the skater with feathers on the hem of her red-velvet skirt. If I glanced in their direction, my life was threatened.
Years went by, we both grew up, and my dolls disappeared. But somehow hers, wrapped in blue tissue paper and plastic, remained in the bottom of our closet at the farm. When her granddaughter, Lily, was born, we fished them out. The years had not been kind. While the outfits were fine, the dolls’ glass eyes were glued upwards, the skin mottled and the hair matted. As they were, they would have sent Lily screaming back into her mother’s womb. So Thirza checked around and was ultimately sent by the owners of a doll shop in Kirkwood to a local doll doctor.
This is why I am bringing up these long-gone days. Getting something repaired means entrusting an item you may cherish to a total stranger. Sometimes it’s great. But other times, like in this case, it’s definitely not.
Thirza took her Madame Alexanders, with the original tags dangling from their wrists, to a woman whose house was filled to the rafters with dolls. Perhaps her fervid aversion to the presence of children should have been a tip-off that something was amiss. My sister unwrapped her treasures and asked for an estimate of how much it would cost to bring them back to (so-called) life. The doll lady said she’d call. She didn’t. My sister called, but never got the total until she returned to pick them up. The amount was a small fortune, and clearly not in my sister’s budget. Unfortunately, the woman would not release any of them without full payment, so Thirza left them there—and then called me, in tears. The next day I called the woman back and told her I would pay the amount due. (Exactly how I was going to pull those hundreds out of a hat was a detail I hadn’t quite figured out.) They may have been just dolls, but they were so much more than that to my sister.
Too late. The woman had already sold them. I heard later that she actually passed them on to some doll collectors for more than $1,000. Nice pay for a little resurrection work.
And it’s just that sort of sordid tale that makes this issue so important. I’d like to think that there aren’t many locals just waiting to rip people off. But the West County doll lady made it so clear that you can assume nothing. So for the second time since we started publishing, the AT HOME editorial staff has taken on the task of interviewing dozens of people about their experiences—good
and bad—when getting things repaired. Our resulting list details where to get almost everything fixed.
But dolls? I’m sorry. I can only tell you where not to go.
Christy Marshall Editor, AT HOME
