Doll-A-Day 20-19 #259: Another Anniversary Story and Victorian Ladies Rosaly Bride Doll

  Today is our 30th anniversary. Ken and I are in Savannah Georgia today celebrating. I'll get to the doll of the day in a moment. But first I have another story for you. In previous years I've told you about how Ken and I met and became a couple,(I don't know about that phrase. Maybe it's because I'm a smart aleck, but I always want to say,"Couple of what?"),and how I accidentally stole Kermit and Miss Piggy's wedding cake topper. This year I thought I would tell you the story of my engagement ring. Why? because I think it's a pretty neat story! That's why!

   I like old things. There aren't a lot of modern things I am going to like, compared to their vintage counterparts. So when we were looking for engagement rings, I was having a hard time finding one I liked. I really didn't like the tall prong with a stone set in it that seemed to be popular at the time. Our wedding was approaching and I still didn't have a ring. (Keep in mind that we only dated for 10 months before getting married,and we weren't engaged even that whole time, of course. So there wasn't a lot of time to get a ring between deciding to get married and actually doing so.) My sister was making lots of remarks about how Ken hadn't gotten me a ring. He felt under pressure,but he refused to have me settle for something I didn't really like. I appreciate that,since I'm going to be wearing it for the rest of my life.
  So after looking everywhere for a ring, and finding nothing I even sort of liked.we finally decided to look in a store in the little town where we both lived at the time. It had been a jewelry store and clock and watch repair in it's heyday. By the 80's it was basically a junk store. It was owned by a very old couple. He had been the watch smith,but now he was retired,and one side of the store was filled with dusty antique clocks he had never got around to fixing. The back was filled with boxes of old silverware,and postcards.  The lady proudly told us that the wall clock hanging by the door was 'the oldest clock in Marysville". The rest of the store did indeed have jewelry. Some was fairly recent. They still got new things in occasionally. But most of their things were older and out of fashion. They still had watch band displays on the counter from the 50's.
  The elderly lady who owned the store waited on us,since she was the only employee. She opened the store, I think, just to have something to do. We asked to see engagement rings, and we were shown the same old, (or should I say, new), things we'd been shown every where. It seemed another washout. Then Ken asked if she had 'anything else'. She said, "Well,I do have these." She reached in the storage area under the showcase and pulled up a little tray, with about 6 rings in it. None of them had sets in them, as they had been there, unsold, since the 1930's or 40's. And that's where I got my ring.
  

  It was perfect for me. It was old, and yet it had never belonged to anyone else. I am the first owner, so it's both old, and new (to me).

My poor cruddy ring, with all the decorative holes filled with lotion and soap. I never take it off and Ivy describes it as 'filled with crud'. I cleaned it recently!

There. I did a quick clear out. It's little better, Stuff gets stuck in all those little holes. I missed the little slot under the big hole.

It's hard to get a good picture. That brown lump in the bottom left corner is our cat Jimmy Stewart. He is glued to me all the time.

Excuse the paint on my fingers.

Ken checking out my newly wedding ringed hand,right after the ceremony. There is another,horrendous picture where my head isn't turned, and I'm ugly crying.

I have only seen one similar ring to mine, and it was on the finger of a very old lady. That was in the late 80's, around the time we got married, and I haven't seen another one since.

We did NOT smash cake in each other's faces.

   You may have seen my rings in a post here and there.  Some of you may wonder why I wear them on my pinky finger. Well, when we got married,e verything on me was a size 5: my pants, my dresses, my shoes, and my ring size. Well NOTHING is a size 5 anymore! I had to move my rings to my pinky years ago. The other thing that may raise questions, or at least make those of you who know the etiquette wonder why, is why do I wear my rings in the order that I do? I found out when we got married that the engagement ring is supposed to be worn on the outside after you're married, with the wedding ring closest to you. I wore them that way for a while. But while both rings are supposed to be size 5, the engagement ring is just a bit bigger, and was always too loose. After having it drop off a few times and always being lucky enough to find it, I decided to make sure it didn't come off anymore, before I wasn't so lucky. So I switched them and I wear my engagement ring on the inside. I lost my wedding ring a few years ago. It was missing for weeks. I knew when and how I lost it. I was weeding in the yard and tossed a handful of weeds in a pile I was making. I felt my ring shoot off when I did it. I searched everywhere,but I couldn't find it. I left that whole trash can of yard waste in the side yard for ages,until my ring turned up. I borrowed Lori's metal detector. (Or,as Fuzzy thought they were called when he was little,a 'healthy hobby'. He'd seen commercials for metal detectors where the voice over talked about how the viewer should 'get a healthy hobby'. He asked us once,"Can we get a Healthy Hobby?" We didn't know what he meant until he described the commercial. Of course,Fuzz is the same kid who asked me,"Can I play with your Kazard?" I said, "My what?" "Your Kazard." It turned out he was asking if he could play with one of my childhood dolls,'Mike Hazzard'. You know,'my Kazard'.)
  Ironically,it turned out to be Fuzz who found my ring with the Healthy Hobby. I looked to no avail. The thing thought my whole yard was made of metal. It was set to be very sensitive,and picked up every piece of aluminum backed shingle bit that had blown off our garage roof over the years. Lori reset it for me, but I had her machine for a week or two without using it. I didn't have the heart to try and fail again. This was my wedding ring. It was pretty important. Fuzz asked if I wanted him to try. I thanked him and he went out...and came back in a couple of minutes with my ring. Even without a 'Healthy Hobby',Fuzz was always our go to finder of lost things. He can find anything. He's exactly the opposite of Ivy. Ivy is the absolute LAST person you ever want to ask to find anything. I remember once Emma had sent Ivy up to her room to bring something down for her. Ivy must have been about 6,so Emma would have been about 14. I don't remember what the thing was,but Ivy came back,saying she couldn't find it. Emma tried to tell her how easy the thing was to find,but Ivy still looked confused. "It's right there on my bed Ivy!" Nothing. "It's on the bed! It's on the bed and it's the only black one! It's like trying to spot Sammy Davis Jr. in the Rat Pack!" I hope that isn't offensive to anyone. I thought it was quite a zinger to Ivy's inept finding skills.
  Some of you may remember reading about me losing my wedding ring on the airplane when we went to England a few years ago too. I was brushing off some crumbs and it flew off my finger as the plane was landing. Ken unbuckled and flew out of his seat to retrieve it before it rolled to the back of the plane.
  I've been setting the posts to go on every day. If all goes right, this will be today's doll!

She's a bride doll,obviously.
 

She was made by Ideal.

 

She's from 1983. 

She is from a series called Victorian Ladies,and her name is Rosaly, I believe.

I kept seeing dolls that look like her,only shorter,at 8 inches tall,with the same flowers and a shrunken down version of this dress. That size came up a lot more often in my searches.

This doll measures 10 inches tall.

She looks like an Effanbee doll to me.

That's today's doll,. See you again tomorrow.

Happy Anniversary to Us, and How I Stole Kermit and Piggy's Cake Topper

  Today's doll was going to be a Miss Piggy bride doll, but I can't locate her.The reason I chose Piggy for today was twofold: For one thing, Ken bought her for me at the recent auction we went to, as a gift for today, our anniversary.And that's the other reason I was going to use the bride Piggy today: She's a bride, and 25 years ago today, so was I!

How young we look! I was 27 and Ken was 26. He was the only man I ever went out with,which was just the way I wanted it. I didn't want to 'date', I just wanted to find that one person.

   Last year on our anniversary I told the story of how Ken and I became a couple. This year I have another story.
  I have always loved the Muppets. I grew up watching them on tv, long before there was even Sesame Street. I watched the tv show when I was in school, and saw all the movies when they came out. (Except somehow I missed seeing a couple at the theatre: Muppet Treasure Island, (No big loss.) and Muppets From Space, (Which I actually love.)) I got my mom to take me to see The Great Muppet Caper at the movies, where the scene where the Muppets climb a drainpipe to escape some watchdogs intent on shredding some felt prompted Mom to proclaim it, "The dumbest thing I ever paid money to see: a bunch of stuffed animals climbing up a drainpipe!" I thought it was hilarious. I saw The Muppets Take Manhattan in 1985. Years of Muppet movies were stored away in my brain.
  When I was planning my wedding in 1989 I looked through a lot of pictures of wedding cake toppers. The bakery promised they could recreate any cake topper I saw. I didn't find anything that was the 'perfect' cake topper. I liked various aspects of several toppers. Could we combine them, I asked, to come up with what I actually had in mind? Of course,they said. Just tell them what I wanted and they could do it, they said. So I described what I had in mind. The lady made the topper and I was very upset. It wasn't what I had in mind at all. I said I didn't want any tulle background. I want the arch to be heart shaped. I want driplets of pearls hanging down behind the bride and groom. So she wasn't happy, but she remade it. Finally I got what I wanted. Ken, being English, suggested what an English wedding cake topper should have. I think it was my friend Cheryl, who came over from England just before we got married, who brought us the  little silver horseshoes for our cake topper. So instead of wedding bells, we had horseshoes on our cake topper. I wanted them at the top of the arch, I said. So there they were, attached firmly above the heads of the bride and groom.
  Some time later,a year or so after my wedding, I am alone in our apartment and Ken is at work. I am simultaneously cleaning and watching The Muppets Take Manhattan on tv. I am running the vacuum I think, when I look at the tv. A big musical production number is happening on screen. The Muppets have finally gotten their play to Broadway, and the big finale is underway: Kermit and Miss Piggy's wedding. As I look up, the Swedish Chef turns around and sits the topper on their wedding cake...and my mouth drops open. At the commercial (because I'm taping!) I run the tape back...over and over again. I can't believe what I'm seeing. Seems those Muppet movies didn't just lay in my subconscious. They forced their way through into my wedding plans. What I was seeing was Kermit and Piggy's wedding cake topper, and it was IDENTICAL to the one I THOUGHT I had designed! (Other than theirs had Kermit and Piggy and ours had what was supposed to be me and Ken.)

The Swedish Chef puts the finishing touch on Kermit and Piggy's cake in The Muppets Take Manhattan.

 
And they had little silver wedding bells and I had little silver horseshoes.

Our wedding cake, with the topper I designed, (Ahem...). Note the little horseshoes. Kermit and Piggy had a more extravagant cake and topper than we did, but then, they have more money.

Kermit and Piggy's cake topper from The Muppets Take Manhattan. They have bells instead of horseshoes. It flashes past so quickly in the movie you hardly get to see it. It's almost impossible to find a picture of the thing,(and it doesn't show up well in my screen capture.) This one belongs to a lady named Ellen, otherwise known as eee1313. I have asked her permission to use it, and I hope she doesn't mind. She took this picture at the Center of Science and Industry in Chicago a few years ago, when they had an exhibit called The Fantastic World of Jim Henson. I believe the same exhibit was at our COSI too, but we didn't have a vehicle we could drive that far while it was there.

After I got finished being stunned I started to laugh. It still makes me laugh. It makes my youngest, Ivy, sigh and roll her eyes, (She's such a teenager!),"You copied Kermit and Miss Piggy's cake topper?!" Not intentionally!
  
   Now that I look at it, Piggy and I had similar dresses too...

Hers has more lace, mine's more satiny.I like her veil better! I wanted Ken to wear a mourning suit, like Kermit's!

Hey. A lot of wedding dresses looked like that in the 80's...

Anniversary Presents

  So Monday was our anniversary. One of my gifts to Ken was agreeing to eat out for lunch and dinner. After my lunch of a grilled cheese sandwich, tomato soup and garlic mashed potatoes at Applebees I was ready to pop. I'm really only good for one decent sized meal a day, and he knows it. So when I ate a dinner of a salad,Parmesan asparagus, some bread,and about three little stuffed mushrooms for dinner I was really about to explode. Absolutely miserable. Ken wanted everybody to share a brownie sundae so we could all have at least a taste of dessert, but the girls were too full to have any, and I couldn't eat more than three small bites. You KNOW I was full when I leave a brownie behind! For a fat lady it doesn't take much to fill me up. I'm like a reverse Tardis. I'm bigger on the outside.
  Ken's gifts to me included this Merida.

  I had been hinting...ok. Outright saying that the Merida dolls were on sale for $5 at Meijers, (and then having to again explain, "The 'Brave' girl!") so he bought me one...and promptly left it out where I found it.So I actually had it early, but I didn't open it until the day had passed. I also wanted to compare this one to the Disney Store one I got in June. So I'll be posting a full review of her tomorrow.
  If you read this blog last week you'll remember that I left an absentee bid on an Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra doll. Well, I didn't win her. Neither did I win the box of 1920's German dollhouse dolls,or the 1930's doll. But I did win the box containing this girl.

Tessie Talk. Her shoes make her feet look invisible, but they are in fact black.

  She's not everybody's cup of tea, but I think she's so cute! She is, as her collar says, a Tessie Talk ventriloquist doll, made by Horsman. I've always had an infatuation with puppets and ventriloquist dummies anyway,and red haired dolls,and I love Tessie Talk. This is actually my third. They all have different original outfits, which makes me think there must have been a lot of combinations of hair and clothes available.My first has a brown  version of this girl's hair, and my second has long red hair. When I bought her it was in what I always call a 'country singer hairdo', since I grew up in the era when lady 'country and western' singers, as they were called then, had big hair. Like Loretta Lynn...

 ...and Dolly Parton...

Dolly seems to be a pretty nice lady, but that hair! Please! Can you imagine poor Tessie Talk with that hair?! That 'do came down as soon as I got home from the toy show!
    Ken also indulged my love of treasure hunting and we stopped at several thrift shops while we were in the Big City waiting for Emma to get off work and join us for dinner. I found these girls for .59 cents each!

Nancy Ann Storybook dolls. These are the later, plastic ones. They could do with a trip to the hairdresser, but they're pretty nice.

  Ken also bought me this pumpkin headed fellow made by  Gathered Traditions, and designed by  Joe Spencer.     .

There is a girl to match, and bigger size. This reminds me that I need to haul out the Halloween decorations soon. Until next time...

The Story of Tammy and Ken (Not the dolls. Us.)

  Our 24th wedding anniversary is coming up tomorrow, so I thought it would be a nice time to tell the story of how we came to be a couple.The story of our first date is a doosey, so hang in there.

  I think I have mentioned that Ken is from England. His dad was American though, and when Ken's mom died his dad eventually reestablished contact with his high school sweetheart, and ended up moving back to America to marry her, after she was widowed too. Ken came to visit his dad and decided that he liked it here. Just before his 21st birthday he came over again with the idea that, if he could find a job before he was supposed to return to England, he would stay. Otherwise he would go home and forget about living here. As fate would have it, he was hired by a Heck's store in the small town where his dad lived. So, Ken stayed in America. That was 1984, and he hasn't been back since.
  Meanwhile, I lived in another part of the state, but was originally from a place very near his Dad's home town, and not much farther from the place Ken was then living. I was living a bit farther away in 1984 though, having moved to live with my dad when I was 12. In 1984 I was also very into all things British. Almost all the television I watched or music I listened to was British. My favourite comedy, movies, music: it was British, mostly English. I was a total Anglophile.(I attribute it to a harrowing experience I suffered as a child. During the height of The Monkees era, Davy Jones, the band's sole English member, was the most popular. I never liked to go with the popular vote, so I became so sick of him that I rebelled against all things English. I refused to drink tea because, "It's English." (However I still managed to love The Avengers. The English tv show, that is, not the comic book.) One day, to punish me for my anti-Britishism, my sister and cousin chased me and held me down to inflict what they referred to as The English Tea Torture. That is, as opposed to the Chinese water torture. Only, instead of dripping water in slow torturous drops on my forehead, they poured boiling tea on my stomach. Well, it's hard to drop slow careful drops on a writhing 5 year old.)

There must be something to this Tea Torture stuff. My favourite Monkee was Peter, but post Tea Torture I have always had a preference for dark haired men with big brown eyes. That's why I married a blue eyed blonde. Huh?

  I wanted to go to England so badly. I saved my money obsessively for the trip. I finally went in March of 1985, and again in 1986. I even went to Ken's home town, because one of my friends was attending art college there. I lose very few things because I'm kind of obsessive about keeping track of them. But I lost my hat there. I always joke that it sounds like a song from the Beatles parody about 'The Rutles'. Instead of  this:

 ...mine is "I Left My Hat on a Bus in Hull".
   So most people assume that I found Ken in England, but the fact is, he was already here. I've been there twice since he has been there. But the point I was aiming at here is, I think it was destiny that brought us together. So many things had to happen in exactly the right way for us to meet. If he hadn't moved to America. If I hadn't moved to live with my dad. If both of us hadn't gotten jobs with the same chain of stores. If Ken hadn't been moved so many times. If I hadn't come back to work at the Heck's store when I came home from England. I wanted a nice, sweet Yorkshireman, and Ken was sent to me!
  While I toiled at my Heck's, Ken was transferred several times to other locations. As an unmarried guy, and someone for whom work was everything, (This is Ken, so the possible exception would have been food.), he was asked to move to several different stores when they needed someone. He got promotions for doing it, but after awhile he got tired of it. Finally he refused to move unless they gave him something he wanted: to be allowed to take all his vacation weeks at once so he could travel far away to visit someone. The someone was his former girlfriend, whom he still pined for, but who had married someone else. She was getting a divorce so he figured it was time to make his move. So in exchange he agreed to move again. Of course, you're guessing by now that the move was to the store where I worked.

  I remember the night, in July of 1988, that he first came to the store. I was behind the jewelry counter, as usual, across from the service desk, right up front. Somehow I missed him coming in, but the girl at the service desk said, "That guy. I think he was English." Jokingly, I nearly flew over my counter. "Where?!" She didn't know. "What did he look like?" "He was blonde, with a mustache." "Oh. Never  mind." I said, sliding back off the counter. My preference ran to dark hair, brown eyes, and clean shaven.(Fortunately Ken's mustache wasn't blonde. That might have been a deal breaker. I could never stand a blonde mustache. Brings to mind that invisible mustache Martin Mull had when he was young. It's like his mustache is wearing the mustache equivalent of those perception filters from Doctor Who: You know the mustache is there, but you can't quite see it.)

Martin Mull and his amazing invisible mustache. You have to look very closely, but it is there.

   Ken was introduced to everyone that night except me. I did get to talk to him briefly when I went to the office to get my check. I asked for another girl's check too, since she had asked me to get hers for her. Ken was the one in the office, handing out the checks. When he gave me both of them, I  said, "Oh boy! I get two!" I can still remember Ken hanging out of the cash office doorway and  joking, "Yes, but one's a credit and one's a debit!" He smiled and he had my favourite kind of teeth. (My sister calls them 'bunny teeth'.)  I was unprepared for that. Blonde, okay. But he has bunny teeth! I joked back that "I might level out."

  Since it was Friday and I had the weekend off, I didn't see him again until Monday. When the store opened Monday morning the first thing that happened was someone telling me, "The new guy is coming up to put the door on your counter.", (That was something that was supposed to have been done weeks before.) So Ken arrived at my jewelry counter. We talked while we worked and he seemed nice, but when he finished putting the door on, a very meaningful moment happened. He decided to "see if it works" by swinging the door. When he did, it cracked me right in the knee. That could have been the end of any possibilities, right there. But I guess we're both weird. Instead of getting mad, or figuring this guy was a clutzy loser, I joked, "Now let me test it. Put your head right here." He laughed. And that is probably where we started. If I had gotten mad, or he had gotten mad when I said that, (He was my superior, after all.), that would have been it. But we shared an admittedly odd sense of humour and, I suppose, a matched temperament. (To an extent. In those days it was practically impossible to make Ken mad. I however have always had what I grudgingly would call a 'redhead temper'. I only use the biggoted  phrase because I did read somewhere that the same genes which give us red hair also give us bad tempers. That also allows me to claim that I can't help it...)
  So we became friends over the next few months. Because I was familiar with the accents, and because my friend Jenny, (She's the one who was attending art college in Hull.), has a heavier Yorkshire accent than Ken could ever hope to have, I had no trouble understanding him, as most of the employees did. Because of my infatuation with all things British I got most of his references and he got most of mine. That kind of confused him sometimes, as he didn't know my 'history'. Ken has crazy curly hair, made crazier by his insistence on making it lay down, rather than, as I like to say, 'embracing his curliness'. One day some bigwigs were in the store and Ken ran by, desperately trying to flatten his hair. "How's my hair?" he quickly asked. "Is your last name Dodd?" I asked. He gave a stunned look. I never found out if it was at the thought that he had Ken Dodd's hair, or that I knew who Ken Dodd is.

British comedian Ken Dodd, And yes, those are his real teeth.

   Nowdays, when the mustache and hair get a bit too long Ken sort of resembles Einstein.

My husband the genius. No wait. This is Einstein

    He still planned to visit the old girlfriend and, in fact, ask her to marry him. But he was beginning to feel guilty for having some feelings for me in the meantime. (He told me this later.) I was beginning to like Ken very much too. When he returned from his trip he looked so sad. She had turned him down, saying there was 'no spark'. I knew none of this at the time, only that he had gone to visit his 'girlfriend'. One night soon after his return we were closing the store together.(Managers were required to have an employee follow them to the bank.) Just the two of us in the whole place. I remember standing on a cart while he turned everything off in the stock room, and he asked me out. I was 26, but I'd never been on a date. I had been asked a few times, but never by anyone I would have been tempted to go out with.(The first person to ever ask me out was a guy I worked with. It was nearly midnight on New Year's Eve, 1984, and he had asked everybody in the store out at various times, except for me and a middle aged lady named Helen. Helen wasn't there that night...  This set a precedent for the type of offers I got.) I never really wanted to 'date'. I wanted there to only ever be one person. I wouldn't have gone out with anybody unless I already knew I had some feelings for them. The idea of just dating for the sake of dating didn't appeal to me. But when Ken asked me I said yes. (Although I did ask him about that girlfriend thing.) My dad told me later, "I knew you were going to marry Ken." "Why?" "Because you went out with him."

  Being an assistant manager Ken wasn't supposed to 'fraternize' with the employees. (Even though a previous assistant had married one of the employees.) So for our date we had to leave town, so as not to be seen together. The day was overcast, but we started to the Big City to the zoo. (Ken figured that because I'm a vegetarian I must like animals. Not necessarily, but in this case he was right, although zoos have a tendency to make me cry.) When it began to rain half way there we started trying to think of somewhere else to go. Suddenly Ken said, "Have you ever been to Canada?" I hadn't, but I thought it was too far away to go to in a day. "Can we?" Ken assured me that it wasn't all that far, so I said yes, I'd like to go. (Why not? Well, I'll tell you why not...)
  We made it to Canada. In those days they didn't check your passport, which I would have been prepared for  anyway. I didn't drive, but I traveled, so I always carried my passport. Ken had been to Canada before and they had never asked to see his passport. 

  We looked around and had dinner at a terrible Chinese restaurant. It was called The House of Lee, but the sign was hard to read and it looked like 'The House of Noise', so we still refer to it that way. It started to get late so we decided we should head back to Ohio. When we tried to go through we were asked for our passports. I had mine, but Ken didn't. We were detained. Ken tried to tell them that he was an American citizen since birth because his father was American and had registered him in England. (Ken has dual citizenship since he was born in England to an English mother and an American father. If we ever get them their papers, our kids have it too, since Ken can pass on his British citizenship to them because they had the reverse situation to him. And strangely enough, if we bothered to get the paperwork, I have, in a sense, become English. Technically that is.) He tried to show them his Ohio driver's license, which only received the response, "Anybody can get one of those." They finally threatened to put him in jail if he didn't stop arguing with them. He calmed down a bit then, not wanting to leave me stranded in Canada alone. In the end Ken had to call his father and ask him to bring his passport to Canada so he could get home. His dad wasn't too pleased and said he wouldn't bring it until the next morning. That put me in the awkward position of having to call my Dad (I still lived at home.), and tell him that I wouldn't be coming home from my first date that night because I was trapped in Canada. I saved both our hotel receipts to prove we had separate rooms. Canada took us back with no problem. (We actually had trouble reentering the United States on subsequent trips, even with Ken's passport. As soon as they heard his Yorkshire accent there was a problem. Eventually I took to doing all the talking other than Ken's response to "What is your citizenship, sir?", which was limited to "U.S." I figured nobody could detect an accent in that.)
  Being trapped in Canada meant we spent more time together than we would have on a normal date. Once again, my reaction to Ken's international equivalent of banging my knee with a door wasn't anger or even 'This guy is cursed.'. I wouldn't even let him pay for my hotel room because, "It was an adventure." Ken was an underdog, and I always had a thing for Underdog. I just didn't realize I was

 Sweet Polly Purebred.

Just a quick note from Ken Tam I love you (my sweet polly pure bred).