My relationship to dolls and to many objects came from going with my parents to antique car shows and swap meets. While my dad hung out with his car guys, my mother and I would wander the booths of antiques dealers. There was never much extra money, much less extra free time in my house, so these occasions made an impact. My mother loved talking to the vendors about the before life of the objects and often there were little cards with elaborate stories detailing the history of the object – example – I saw a different side of my mother, who could most readily be described as the drill seargean in our house. Chores and homework piano practice.. Here she became a curious detective, a historian, interested in the places in the past a given thing had been. In hindsight, I’m sure many of these stories were concocted by vendors to make the object seem more worthy of its price tag, but it served to form my early impressions that objects held stories. My mother bought my first “investment doll” a Floradora with real human hair, porcelain face, sawdust filled body and a somewhat hastily sewn costume, definitely not of her original vintage. When these dolls were made in the early 1900s, they were considered too realistic and unpleasant to look at and play with.. too uncanny…Perhaps that is what appealed to me…That doll meant a lot to me, my mother rarely spent money on frivolities and that she valued this doll and even more that she thought me a good steward of this antique meant a lot to me. The FLoradora doll ( I never named her) sat in my childhood room in a wicker rocker we purchased for her, doll sized and perfect. I kept the small card with details of her origins held in place by a rusted pin. As one of the items in my portfolio for submission to art college, I made a drawing of her, accidentally choosing a very hard lead, so her drawing seems like a wisp of a thing.. Many years later I loaned her out to a filmmaker to make a macabre little short film in which she shone and she still resides in a cabinet in my studio, her joints loose and head lolled at an angle.