The Me Show: Buy Me That: Tippi Hedren Barbie Doll

Back when I was in graduate school the first time around I fell HARD for film studies and managed to finagle a degree in English by taking mostly film classes and writing about feminist film theory for nearly every paper. Ever an enormous coward, I surprised myself by finding that I really enjoy the horror genre as long as I approach it from an analytical and academic standpoint (any other standpoint and I just pee my pants and stop sleeping at night) and did some fun work on Psycho and Rosemary's Baby. But the most fun I had at the place where fun goes to die was in writing one of my master's theses on The Birds.

Tippi's costume and hair + Jessica Tandy's face = weird Oedipal shit from the get-go, yo! MY GOD, I love this movie.

As I was working on my The Birds paper, cleverly titled "Rip Her to Shreds" and featuring an introductory quotation from the Blondie song, I became strangely obsessed with the movie and its star, Tippi Hedren. I went so far as to buy an autographed 8x10 of her as a victory gift once the paper was finished and to drag my friend Jacob to see her speak at a screening of the film at the Siskel Film Center, where Ms. Hedren took umbrage at my questions about the anomalously terrible hilltop scene and berated me in front of the entire audience. It was humilitng! It was hilarious! It cemented a fixation that necessitates this purchase:

Accuracy right down to the stilettos...

That, dear readers, is the Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds Barbie doll, and you'd do well to consider it under my name on your Christmas shopping list. If it makes you feel more comfortable we can pretend that it's for Livy. Of course, if she ever touches it she'll be grounded for weeks, so she'd better get smart and stick with playing with matches and kitchen knives.

Or, if she really must participate in Mommy's madness, perhaps next year I'll wear a Tippi costume for Halloween and then dress her up in a crow costume to chase me around the neighborhood.