Conventional Dolls...

I'm going to the Hollywood Ahoy! doll convention aboard the Queen Mary in Long Beach CA. I'm going to have a Dolly Diva Designs table for Swap Night on Thursday, 8/13, where I will have for sale the clothes many of my dolls came in (see my first post) and many accessory items received at the Gene Marshall Doll conventions—2003, 2004, and 2006. I'll also have stuff that I got by being an absentee for the 2005 10th Anniversary Convention—the last for Ashton-Drake.

But the real reason for going? I'm not sure. It is no longer an exclusively Gene convention. The convention doll is to be the Tonner Joan Crawford. I'm not even going to the Gene event. A–It doesn't fit into my convention budget. B–I don't really like or want the J. Wu Gene even though he is now famous as the designer of an inauguration ballgown for Michelle Obama. I've always liked Ashton-Drake Madra Lord best of all anyway, because she has attitude! All the Genes, while very pretty, still remain so much vanilla pudding. My first 16" fashion doll was the A-D Madra Lord in Unsung Melody.

This convention will be my bellwether. Will I maintain an interest in my project? Will I find the whole doll world thing too far removed from current reality even to serve as an escape from it? If I find this to be so, will I put ALL the dolls I have on sale, clear out the sewing room and get serious about writing? Or perhaps, will I sell all but a few dolls for which I would make the copies of concert gowns and costumes for my own amusement and perhaps to illustrate my memoir, forgetting about any such thing as a business?

There are doubts out and about this evening, are there not? Well, I expect that my long-time dream of playing with dolls and mixing that with my love of fashion history and the stage will not let go of me so easily. I will probably try to do everything! Just as I always have.

Singing, sewing/designing, scribbling... Music, Art and Literature, my three long-pursued passions. The singing took over for a long time and still has it's hooks in me, hence the plans for a concert on October 10 (what will I be making to wear for THAT?). But the sewing/designing stuck around too because of the concert gowns and "diva" clothes I had to have. And the writing? How about the zillion journals I've filled up since I started my first one in February 1961? And the many writing classes I've taken? And the boxes full of first paragraphs of stories and outlines of novels? And now this blog?

Well, we will see what we will see. I am full of plans. I expect that some of them will come to fruition. I also expect that I will not stop planning and working out those plans until they carry me out feet first!