Paper Avatars

Before the vast array of video games and Farmvilles that people spend their time on today, there were paper dolls. As you can see in the photograph (probably posed, as these girls are wearing their school dresses), kids in the 1950’s, if they didn’t have anything else, had plenty of paper, pencils, colored pencils and crayons. Kids could trace anything they wanted by taping a page to the window, putting a sheet of paper over it and tracing the outlines of what you wanted to make a copy. The copy could then have a different color of hair, a different smile, whatever you liked. And most especially, new dresses!

Of course you could play house with even less, using hollyhock flowers stuck with toothpicks to make dolls with long dresses, or piles of leaves raked into “houses” which resembled house plans out of the magazines. “This is the door, and here is the bedroom, and this is the kitchen,” one child explains to another. And it is absolutely so.

Imagination runs rife in kids. If you were the Brontes, stuck in a gloomy manse with paper and pencil on the moors of England in the 1820’s after the deaths of two older sisters, you might write dark romances about people in imaginary kingdoms. If you are the kids in the photograph, enduring long North Dakota winters with books, magazines, and the Sears catalog coming to your post office box, you have plenty to feed your thoughts, in the optimism of the post-war period. Plenty of ideas about what people should look like and how to make poodle skirts and princess dresses for your paper dolls.

Every kid imagines what his future will be like, basing it on the stories of the people he sees around him. And every kid makes up stories about himself. [I use the masculine English pronouns to stand for humans, as we all are.] I suspect growing up in a high-rise apartment, as kids all over the world now do, must give rise to a need for avatars as strong as those of kids in isolated towns once did. The stories of celebrities, sports figures, musicians and actors fill our kids’ heads these days. With luck and parental help, they have room for the stories they make up themselves, for their own stories.