Just in time for Mother’s Day, here’s my essay on the laughter and tears of selling my mother’s dolls that I wrote for The New York Times. Be sure to check out the slideshow as well as the short video made by a very talented student in the Wake Forest University documentary program, Jacob Rosdail. Mama Jo had several Mother & Child dolls in her collection. Here are two that I love and are looking for new forever homes in Mama Jo’s House of Dolls on www.RubyLane.com.
To commemorate the anniversary of my mother’s heavenly ascent, I’m introducing the Forever Home Photo Contest using photos sent to me by new “moms” and “dads” of her dolls. Mama Jo loved to take photos. Many were of her/our dolls. Whimsy was never in short supply in her world, nor mine. What I had not realized was how hard it would be to judge this contest. So many were so good! If yours didn’t win this time it will be entered in the next contest, date to be determined. All buyers of a Mama Jo doll through Mama Jo’s House of Dolls on Ruby Lane or directly from me are eligible. For more photos, please “like” the Mama Jo’s House of Dolls Facebook page.
Carol Miller and Robert Plant, 1993.
Part 1 of my interview with New York rock DJ and Led Zeppelin expert Carol Miller ran in the New York Times. Click here to read it and listen to the accompanying audio clip. Behind Carol’s glamorous life is more than forty years of dealing with familial cancer. 5 % of the royalties from her memoir UP ALL NIGHT: My Life and Times in Rock Radio go to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. Here she talks about working in the Mad Men era versus now, dating rock stars, overtures from Robert Plant and if Led Zeppelin will reunite, and more.
Rock DJ goddess Carol Miller winding up another segment of “Get the Led Out” on her weeknight show on Q-104.3FM in New York City.
I’ve known of Carol Miller since the day she spoke her first word on the New York airwaves in the 1970s. I was an aspiring DJ myself then. There were so few women on the radio that word spread quickly when a new one infiltrated the all boys camp. Seems crazy today, doesn’t it? Really. It was a big deal to hear a woman on the radio who wasn’t pitching diapers or shampoo in a commercial.
Illustration by Meridith Martens
“I hit an animal last night.”
I told Rita this as we drove up Lawndale toward Summerfield, just after we’d passed a small carcass on the side of the road. It was late, the street fairly empty, the air filled with the sweet sadness of a fleeting summer night.
“It dashed in front of my car, out of nowhere, “I said. “Without thinking, I slammed on my brakes, heard an awful thud and saw a car behind me brake and swerve. There was nothing I could do!”
I’ve been a fan of Janis Owens since we met at the Bookmarks Book Festival in 2009 — and that was before I knew of the accolades Pat Conroy had bestowed upon her. Her new novel AMERICAN GHOST (Scribner, hardcover) is a must-read. Without giving away too much, it’s about a spectacle lynching in a small Florida town and what happens seventy years later when several people directly and indirectly affected by it seek closure and more.
Q. Congratulations on publishing a novel (and an excellent one) that you worked on for thirty years. Does it really feel “finished” and why did it take so long?
Do you think dolls are cute or creepy? Most people fall in one camp or the other. Yet every culture has dolls. Why? My theory is they go back to when a cave woman made one to amuse her kid while she rubbed two sticks together to make a fire. Or perhaps she lost a child and it comforted her. As time went on, dolls became a way for girls to practice being a mommy. The Japanese have Hinamatsuri, Doll Festival (aka Girl’s Day) on March 3rd. Girls set up their dolls in a precisely formatted display and visit each other. Do you ever watch the TV crime show “Castle”? The tough boss – a woman they call “Sir” – is a doll nut! There’s Chuckie, the evil doll. Marie Osmond the doll maker. Now reborn babies – dolls that look and feel exactly like an infant – are the rage and go for sky high dollars.
Photo by Mike Smith/At Home Gallery
He almost went into the freebie pile. He stands 7 1/2 inches tall. I should say he measures that tall because he can’t stand on his own. His clothes are moth-eaten. His feet look too wide and big for his short legs. Yet there was something about him that intrigued me. Mind you, it took several months to inventory my mother’s doll collection that became mine when we lived together at the end of her life, and to reconfigure the doll room for my next life chapter: finding forever homes for 700 dolls. One at a time. I couldn’t linger over this funny man. But he was special. I could feel it.
I took the long, scenic route to getting published. Fifteen years, seven other books, and four literary agents preceded the publication of When I Married My Mother. Whatever success my writing brings me is the result of working with great editors and agents, taking criticism extremely well, and being crazy. I’m convinced that “writer” and “addict” are interchangeable. A more noble way of putting it is to invoke the oft-used phrase “It’s a calling.”
If you’re a writer, you have to write.
Martin Sheen, age 21, with son Emilio Estevez
Co-author Hope Edelman
Ever since I read Shirley MacLaine’s 2001 book The Camino about her walking the Camino de Santiago – a 500-mile pilgrimage in northern Spain – alone when she was in her sixties, I’ve been fascinated with this spiritual trek. When I saw that Emilio Estevez had written, directed, and acted in a movie about the Camino with his father, Martin Sheen, in the lead, I knew The Way would be the next movie in my viewing queue. Then I saw that a book came out of the experience, a father-son memoir that promised to be extraordinary. I knew it had to be true because Hope Edelman wove it together. If you haven’t read Hope’s work, you should. If you have, you’ll be thrilled to hear her speak candidly about writing Along the Way.
