EMPS: A House Full of Faces

The topic for this week's Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot was Faces, with extra credit given for a montage of faces. Let's start with that. I was surprised, once I got started, just how many human faces one can photograph here at the Museum of the Weird without photographing even one real person!



The top row here is all Disney characters, including an original sketch by legendary Disney artist Marc Davis. Dopey is from the cover of a vintage Disney book called Fantasyland. Quasimodo is a plush toy. Esmerelda, Mulan and Li Shang are all from Mattel, with Mulan and Li Shang packaged together.

The second row features miscellaneous dolls. I have two Chatty Baby dolls because I couldn't remember what color hair my original one had. So I bought one of each. Spunky is a friend of Jan, the Remco Japanese character doll I had as a kid, herself a friend of Heidi, who was probably meant to be Swiss. The best troll dolls from the 1960s were the "DAM" dolls, but Wishniks were the next most popular, and are still being made I think.

On the bottom row are some of my vintage Barbie dolls. The first doll from the Barbie line of products I ever had was Tutti, followed by a straight-legged bubble-cut Barbie I got in trade from my friend Cindy. My favorites at the time were the only other two I got as a child, Casey (left) and Talking Stacey (right). I never had a Skipper, a Midge or a Ken growing up, but they're iconic, aren't they? I got those three over the past 15 years or so, and the ponytail Barbie shown here at a toy show just a few years ago.



Now let's leave the house and check out a much larger character with a face. This giant lumberjack is known locally is Glenn Stone, or even "Glenn Stone, the axe murderer." He stands at the corner of Glenn St. and Stone Ave., and why not! There's also an intersection of Glenn and Campbell nearby! Rumor has it that new beat cops in Tucson are sometimes sent to this intersection to check out a police report of a "large man with an axe." Roadside America calls all such giant figures "Muffler Men" because historically many of them held mufflers instead of axes.

Our Glenn recently got a nice, badly-needed paint job, apparently courtesy of the Coronado Heights Neighborhood Association, judging from his shirt. He's all shiny now.

Karen