Is this some kind of sick joke? I signed up for multi-colored hair modeling fun not a lapful of neon doll dung.
It took me months to get this Play-Doh set–its pretty rare. It comes with the Hair-Do Dolly figure, a little plastic chair for her to sit in, Play-Doh’s trademarked “Stylin’ scissors” and “Cool Comb,” plus one container each of purple and pink Play-Doh. I decided to go wild and jump right in with a little pink and a little purple. I did everything right–I inserted the doh carefully, pushing it all the way up to Dolly’s extrusion follicles, eliminating air pockets as a went. I wanted to start simple with a short coif which I could then fashion into a sassy punk Mohawk. Later, I planned on going full beehive. I had dreams.
But when I squeezed her head to initiate the hair-growth sequence, what I got, after all my grand visions of doh-hair glory, was a prolonged fart-sound and purple-pink splorch shooting out of her butt on to my Union Bay khakis. The fart was the humiliating part—mostly because all my coworkers heard it and came to my cube to investigate. I didn’t know if it was better to claim the fart as my own or explain that it came from my new Hair-Do Dolly with the defective bunghole. I’m no hero. I hid Dolly and claimed the toot. I wept silently after they’d left.
I called Play-Doh tech support. It was a bad connection and they seemed really busy (probably fielding similar complaints) so they misunderstood the problem and offered to send me a tub of brown Play-Doh for some disturbing reason. I said Ok, because, hey … free doh.
But I’m on my own now. No tech support, audibly humiliated before my peers, alone but for my bald Dolly and her blown-out bung. I tried fixing her myself but that just made things worse when co-worker Tom walked in while I was plugging Dolly’s off-ramp with a carrot.
I’m depressed now. If things had gone well, I was going to get Dolly a sister, maybe two. Start a little doll band revered for their no-holds-barred, hair-do based rock-n-roll. But this incident has stained my spirit along with my pants. Maybe I need return dolly and find a new hobby.
Or, maybe I just need to turn things around and look at it from Dolly’s point of view. Maybe this was her way of telling me she doesn’t want a haircut (or hair). She’s saying, “I’ll lose my crap if anyone tries to force me into their own narrow visions of doll fashion.”
Ok, I get it now. I won’t return Hair-Do Dolly. I’ll keep her and honor her baldness and divergent o-ring for what they are—odes to individuality.
And instead of cleaning the errant doll feces off my pants, I’ll leave them on as a sign of support and to say, “My colorful crotch stains honor the free spirit of my bald Dolly and her aberrant drop box!’
I’ve learned something today. I hope you have too.