Dolls

Since 1996, Natalie Graham had a vision that one day she would make ladies feel like pretty little dolls. When she opened her chic and eclectic boutique, The Doll House, 525 N. Charles St., in September 2004 her vision came to life. Once inside this Mount Royal area storefront, the dollhouse theme is apparent. "Do you want to play dress up?" asks a saleswoman to a patron who just stepped inside the store. This place has an exciting and funky vibe, with creative collages of celebrities and fashion, a collaboration of small unique art, and small contemporary furniture that brings the "dollhouse" theme alive.

Typically a pedicure entails soaking the feet in a tub of warm water. But the nail technicians at Living Dolls Hair Design Studio in Highland have introduced a soakless pedicure that salon manager Lynn Lazzara calls “cleaner, greener and healthier than regular pedicures and uses almost no water.” During a soakless pedicure, the feet are wrapped in plastic with a hot towel placed over them. “We let everything sit for a few minutes and wipe off the feet,” Lazzara says. “Then we use a foot file to reduce calluses.” If you see some new faces at Living Dolls, it's because the staff of Lazzara's former shop, Biago Hair Salon and Spa, joined forces with Jane Caswell, owner of Living Dolls, last summer for economical reasons.

LOS ANGELES -- The next big fashion trend is straight out of your preteen fantasies.It's like Barbie's wardrobe. A cool ensemble for every moment of her busy life, with matching mules and cutesy accessories. Remember those plastic diamond rings?If you've forgotten the details of Barbie's fashion stance in the late '60s, it's all detailed for you in "Romy and Michele's High School Reunion," the trendiest fashion flick since "Clueless."In this case of blonde leading the blonde, Mira Sorvino and Lisa Kudrow star in the movie as two live dress-up dolls with "Clueless" tastes on minimum-wage budgets.

More than 200 girls and their American Girl dolls hit the runway at Towson Town Center on Saturday, Jan. 28. The walk was short and the line was long, but there were smiles all around. "I got to tell the guy what I liked," said Savannah Shafer, 7, of Lutherville, with her look-alike American Girl doll after walking the runway. "I wasn't nervous," she said, smiling. "I like playing with my American Girl online. " All of the girls participating had a chance of being selected for the American Girl Fashion Show, to be held March 24 and 25 at the Hippodrome Theater.

Dee Eisler, the new doll curator for the Ann Arrundell County Historical Society, vividly remembers her first doll, which her mother gave away to charity."

"Looking back on our childhood, we can all remember interacting with dolls," writes curator Sarah Tanguy in her essay accompanying the show "Soul Mates" at the University of Maryland College Park. Well, looking back on my childhood, I don't remember interacting with dolls at all.I bring that up only to make the point that I found this show, which features six artists who use doll-like figures in their works, valid and interesting -- even though I'm totally doll-deprived and have never consciously thought of dolls as "the repository and construction of cultural values," as Tanguy writes.

Dolls created by a group of third-graders at Bryant Woods Elementary School will go on display this summer at Baltimore's City Life Museums.The 14 dolls show how clothing has changed since 1900, said Leslie Weinberg, who teaches gifted and talented students at Bryant Woods. They were made by 16 students as part of an enrichment research project."The students decided they wanted to learn about the history of clothing in the United States in the 20th century, so they went out and did the research on it," Weinberg said.

Sister Mary Annina Byrne, 84, a teaching nun who collected more than 700 dolls during nearly 60 years, died Friday at St. Joseph Medical Center of a heart condition.Born Eugenia Claire Byrne in 1910, she entered the School Sisters of Notre Dame order in 1931 and professed vows in 1933, the same year she began collecting dolls.At its peak, her collection contained more than 700 dolls from around the world.Her first dolls were two from Czechoslovakia, given to her by her sister, who suggested, "Why not collect dolls?"

With natural talent and self-taught skills, Nancy Coblentz-Nelson transforms clay into award-winning dolls.Only three years into doll-making, she was inducted into the Original Doll Artists Council of America (ODACA) during the United Federation of Doll Clubs conference in Atlanta two weeks ago. To be accepted into ODACA, prospective members must be critiqued and voted on by the membership over a year's time.Last year at the conference, her dolls earned four first-place awards and two second places.

On the surface, the watercolors of Ellen Phelan at Grimaldis are deceptively simple, beautiful and innocent. On another level they're dripping with irony, crammed with psychological and sociological implications, and quite powerful.Phelan pictures dolls in various poses and groupings -- a doll alone with a mirror, several dolls as a family, two dolls as mother and child, etc. Dolls are perfect for Phelan's purpose because we tend to associate them with innocence -- little children play with them.

Natalie Graham's first meeting a year ago with "Modern Family" actress Ariel Winter could have been a disaster. Graham, owner of The Doll House, a Mount Vernon boutique featuring Graham's Ragdolls Clothing Line, didn't recognize the waifish, chestnut-haired tween combing through the racks of Graham's vibrant, funky garments. To make it worse, at first, Graham and Winter's mother didn't see eye to eye on outfits. "Her mother was saying no to garments that were still on the hanger," Graham said with a laugh.

Here are your concert news for the week, including upcoming shows by Kid Rock, the Goo Goo Dolls, Drake, Ami Dang, Aimee Mann, and Lyle Lovett. Kid Rock, who played Jiffy Lube Live in August with Sheryl Crow, announced Monday he's going on a tour of mid-size clubs . Naturally, he's playing another Live Nation venue, the new Fillmore in Silver Spring. Kid Rock is on the road promoting "Born Free," which was released last year. The show at the Fillmore is November 20. The announcement did not include ticket price or on-sale date.

The newly-renovated Hays-Heighe House at Harford Community College was the site for a "Fun With American Girls" youth enrichment camp during the second week of August. During this week-long summer camp, girls ages 8 to 12 combined learning about American history with a variety of cultural projects. They experienced the stories and characters behind the American Girls dolls, making crafts, toys, decorations, recipes, and other fun activities similar to those done by Kersten, Josephina, Addy and other dolls in the series.

In the mid-'90s, after nine years of unsuccessfully slogging through the indie rock scene, Goo Goo Dolls singer Johnny Rzeznik set a personal deadline. If the Goo Goo Dolls still weren't making money by the time he turned 30, Rzeznik would go back to college and pursue a normal life. He cut it close: Rzeznik was 29 1/2 when his ballad "Name" lit up the charts in 1995 and became the elusive hit he'd been looking for all those years. Rzeznik was blind-sided. "I was like, 'You've got to be kidding me,' especially with the song that broke us, which was a ballad," he said.

A century ago, carousel builder Rudolph Dolle and his wife, Amelia, left New York for the young resort town of Ocean City, Md. "Our family did business in different parts of the country," says Anna Dolle Bushnell, 31, the couple's great-granddaughter. "The story goes that they were invited down by the Trimpers," she adds, referring to the founders of Ocean City's oldest amusement park, Trimper's Rides. Rudolph Dolle set up a hand-carved carousel near the corner of Wicomico Street and the Boardwalk.

On November 19, 2009, Naomi Doll (nee Chell) Hardman A private celebration of her life is planned. Donations in her memory may be made to the American Heart Association .

Some mothers make photo albums. Others record family memories on video. Patricia McEntire of Hickory Ridge village keeps the memories of her two sons close to her in the form of dolls.For Christmas in 1992, Mrs. McEntire decided to make each son a 9-foot-long garland with fabric dolls that would remind them of the things they had done as children and as a family.Now, Mrs. McEntire tells the stories of other people's lives through her dolls.It has turned into a full-time job. Five days a week, the 53-year-old Columbia resident begins working at 5:15 a.m. and sometimes doesn't finish until 8 or 9 p.m. She hand-stitches each 6-inch doll with clothes, paints each face and carefully chooses props to accentuate that doll's personality.

They are called "Dottie's Dolls" -- little babies as individual as Cabbage Patch Kids preemies, only smaller, birthed from muslin cloth instead of the cabbage patch.Each clutches a familiar soother, a blanket, a pacifier, or its own baby doll.Each handmade member of the "Dottie's Dolls" collection has its own identity.Their parents are sisters. Lorie Dungan and Dawn Hof, local artisans, created the dolls as a tribute to their departed mother, Dottie Morlock.Dottie would have been proud.The dolls are just the tip of the creative iceberg for these talented sisters.

Ethel Legrand had put on her silky black beret for the occasion, and sat in her wheelchair cradling a blue-eyed baby doll in both her arms, pressing her chin into its head, rubbing one of its feet with her left hand. She had already named the doll "Betty Jean" and meant to keep it close to her, "right on my bed," she said. She'd had a few dolls in her day - "Ooh, brother, I had a whole lot of dolls" - but now she is 88 years old and was tuning in and out of the morning's proceedings in the chapel at Summit Park Health & Rehabilitation Center in Catonsville.