hello, dolly

Recently I was talking about the mini news headlines that I see on the TVs at the gym, and my fascination around the choices made as to which stories to "report" on in this way and how they attempt to convey the salient content with half a line of text. Well, apparently I am far from the first person who's been struck by this, because I recently learned that you can in fact buy tee shirts from CNN with various of these actual headlines printed on them. I saw another good one earlier this week: "CHARLES MANSON SPENDS MOST OF HIS TIME ALONE." Uh, isn't this guy in solitary confinement? Also, I think that right around the time you finish carving a swastika into your forehead is also right around the time when you are making a decision to henceforth spend most of your time alone. I am not seeing the news here.

This brings me to my mom. Last time I visited my parents, I was working on a fiction piece involving the concept of giving young girls a "last doll," and I was wondering whether this sort of thing, this manikin moratorium if you will, had perhaps been common in wartime or other occasions of economic stress in the past (I encountered the idea in an antique photograph; I didn't make it up). Mom reported that no, she had never been given an official "last" doll, and then went on to casually mention that she'd had a doll she called Edda, named after Hermann Goering's daughter. This caught my attention. The manner in which she conveyed the information suggested that naming one's poppet after the child of a war criminal was somehow, you know, what's the problem? Given that she was maybe six years old at the time and had spent her entire life in Nazi-ruled Germany, I wouldn't expect her to have questioned it then, but to report on it 65 years later as though it were the most normal thing in the world, and with no apparent retrospective queasiness...that to me was a bit odd. I pressed for further details. Turns out the Goering family was sort of Fascism's version of the Pitt-Jolie clan. They were celebrated in the press and there were Goering family propaganda calendars with scenes of the carefree, wholesome tots frolicking happily through Teutonic meadows or some such. One of these hung in my grandparents' home.

I'm not really sure where I'm going with this, except...Goering family calendars!!?!!?

A while later James and I were watching movie previews on his Apple TV, and we called up the trailer for The Reader. Neither of us had heard of it yet, and it was unclear at first what it was all about. Then the scene switched suddenly to Kate Winslet sitting in a severe suit as a defendant in some kind of war crimes tribunal, and I said, "Ohhh, I see. She's someone my mom would have named a doll after."