I am creeped out about many things: Frank's "designs” from Trading Spaces, the bathroom at the playground, hotel bedspreads and ventriloquist dummies. Ever since I saw the Twilight Zone episode where the dummy talks and vows vengeance, I can’t look at a woodenhead with painted on lips without feeling creeped out.
So of course my daughter’s favorite toy is Charlie McCarthy.
Charlie was a childhood pal of my husbands' and about a year ago my mother-in-law brought him over for Mamie. I immediately told her that he frightened me, but I didn’t want to raise Mamie to be afraid of inanimate objects so I thanked her nicely --- and then threw him in the closet. Every now and then when I opened that closet I would scream because there was good ol’ Charlie, half propped up, STARING at me. Phreak.
Then the day came when Mamie noticed him. And well, she liked him. She kissed him. She dragged him on the floor, his big ol' head bouncing hard along the way. She then motioned for me to dance with him while her father danced with her (oh, what a video that would be.) Mamie got a great kick out of this and when I made Charlie “talk” she thought that was hysterical. We fed him veggie booty until we had to take off his head to get the crumbs out.
I started making up dialogue with Charlie during those long afternoons when the weather was bad and we had nothing to do. I pretended he had a crush on another one of Mamie’s dolls. I imagined he was a drunkard, living a secret life in her closet where he got the other stuffed animals to run out and get him liquor (gin, he likes gin.) He asked Mamie a lot of questions about her diaper and then we put one on him. I would put plastic meat in it and then ask the babysitter to play “change Charlie’s diaper” with Mamie and then wait for shrieks from the next room. Oh, what fun we had!
I know all of this is insane, but it got me over my fear of ventriloquist dummies. Now all I have to deal with is the kids who come over to the house and cry uncontrollably when they see him sitting on our sofa in Mamie’s old leopard pants.
That Charlie! What a sport.
