I Grew up with Mannequins.

Tweet

When I was younger, my mom liked strange things, she liked to decorate our house/s in strange things. What do I mean by strange things? Well, here’s a funny story…

Once upon a time, my mom was dating a policeman she had met I believe in a minor car accident she had gotten in to. I believe I was in either pre-school or kindergarten at the time, so I wasn’t there, but I had heard this story so many times growing up.

One day, while driving past the dumpster at the mall near our house my mom saw that they had thrown away several mannequins. My mom, being the odd collector she was (she loved collecting antiques, old signs, old pictures of people- even if she didn’t know them, etc.) couldn’t pass them up! She started loading the mannequins in her car from the dumpster, piece by piece. Yes, arm here, leg there, hand way over there, etc. Someone from the mall came out and told her that she couldn’t take them, she needed to put them back in the dumpster or they were going to call the police. This made no sense to her, her thinking was, why couldn’t she have them if they were just throwing them away anyways? She continued to load the pieces up.

The police were called…guess who showed up to answer the call…my mom’s boyfriend at the time. Awkward.

I’m guessing somehow he smoothed things over because we ended up having 5 (I think) complete mannequins in our home. Oddly enough a couple members of our family were all excited about these new additions and all wanted one??? What?! So my mom gave two to my grandma (one, she setup sitting at her piano in front of a window at the front of her house- she says to scare away potential burglars. The other was dressed up like a maid and stood in the corner of her dining room) I believe she gave one to an uncle, I’m not really sure what he did with his…and I remember always having one or two setup in all of our houses growing up. I guess I had never really thought much about it, I did always wonder why my friends were so scared of them when they would come over. I remember thinking my mom was sort of strange for dressing them up, (in winter/summer clothes) changing wigs, and moving them throughout the house every once in awhile…

But now looking back on it, it is sort of weird right? Almost everyone that came over made a comment about them, some people said they were “creepy”. These things looked pretty life-like! They even had eye lashes!

Here is little me, with one of them (the one set up at my grandma’s piano).

Did you or your parents ever collect strange things when you were younger?

Tagged as: awkward/awsome, decor, funny