Every time I see a naked mannequin, I just want to stick one finger out, point, and yell “NAKED MANNEQUIN!”
I can’t be the only one, and I certainly can’t be the only one who has wanted to dress that naked mannequin up in a summer outfit just so I could invite him or her—or it—out for tea time in Central Park.
Yes, certainly, we’d have a tea party as lovely as the Mad Hatter’s on a blanket spread out on the Great Lawn. Although, I’d leave the invite for the Red Queen behind, because she’d surely be too delighted with how easy it would be to “be off with it’s head—that is, if the mannequin I window shopped for on 5th Avenue had a head at all!
But we’d sit for hours in the sun…me the Mad Hatter, and the mannequin, the Alice to my imaginary Wonderland-ah yes, it’d be the perfect tea party for two. Both of us, pale, and in serious need of SPF 50, we’d sprawl out across my blanket, and we’d laugh about the kids swinging and missing in their game of wiffle ball, and we’d compliment the jazz performers we could hear off in the distance, and above all, we’d share stories.
Oh what intriguing and endless stories “it” would be able to tell me from the best looking men who grace it’s peripheral vision each day, to the mother and daughters who fight over the skirt the mother wouldn’t dish out the cash for.
And then “it” would move on from miniscule subjects to major things it’d witnessed on the sidewalk across the street from it’s display window; how many pick pockets it’d witnessed, how many purses it’d seen snatched, how many assaults, how many homeless people it’d seen begging: Or how many people’s dreams it had seen come true, how many smiles it witnesses in a day—and laughs—and tears, how many people it gets to experience...how many people it’s ever had one-sided conversations with (at least we’d have that in common).
It would delicately illustrate the diversity of the street corner it faces like a flipbook, noting how each second of each day offers a new person, a new view.
And then I’d share my stories, offering my mannequin to friend, a movie of images rather than a flipbook, with cuts from the world within the big city to the world in the suburbs, a college campus, and an entirely different country.
Oh yes, our tea party would be the reality version of A Mom for Christmas, where a little girl brings a mannequin, who has come to life, home to her father. Only at the end of my story, I’d bring the mannequin back to the store, selfishly…and face it in a new direction, so that another day, we could have another tea party, and I could discover another flipbook.
And yes, of course...I’d leave it clothed.
Libby Segal is a recent graduate of the University of Rhode Island where she studied Communication Studies and Film Media, who currently lives in New York City.