Sybil Bruncheon's My Merry Memoirs!... Dagmar's "doll"...

Darlings, I've told you about my twin sister many times and in stories that you either have asked me to dig up or stories which you like me to tell and retell again... (much like terrifying ghost stories around a roaring campfire during a girl scout jamboree... with S'mores... and calamine lotion!)

Anyway, I don't think I've ever told you the story of Dagmar and her special doll... and "The Nearly Lost Weekend". You see, Dagmar and I are (and always were!) identical, and I mean IDENTICAL twins! No one, not even our parents could ever tell us apart... well, unless Dagmar had pulled a gun out of her purse or started a fire in someone's dining room, starting a five years of age. I would find a stray kitten and be devoted to it... Dagmar might start researching recipes to serve it "en brochette". Thankfully, our family's staff of gardeners, butlers, maids, etc. managed to keep her from any serious mischief, (although old Mrs. O'Reilly next door DID disappear during our Halloween party when we were 8... and she was never found again. A piñata bearing a striking resemblance to her was reported at the Masonic Lodge's costume ball a couple of miles away... oh well. Another story for another time...)

At one Christmas when we were still quite young, Dagmar had managed to drug my eggnog claiming she was just sprinkling some nutmeg in it. I really should have known better, especially because her "nutmeg" was in tablet-form and out of a clearly marked prescription bottle! But I was still very open-minded, open-hearted, and credulous, even for a child! It turned out that Dagmar dragged me, unconscious, gagged, and handcuffed into a remote corner gable of our cavernous and maze-like attic! There, buried in stacks of crates, Vaudeville trunks, dress-forms, and clippings and posters of questionable hootchy-kootch acts, I languished while she rampaged through our family's Christmas celebrations, completely undetected! She had secretly commissioned a life-size doll from a Bulgarian puppet-maker... or was it Hungarian??... Akron?... whatever. It arrived by post, and she spirited it away to her room, dressed it in one of our matching pinafores, and then proceeded to walk it around the entire estate, conversing elaborately with it, and keeping it just out of eye-shot enough for no one to notice that it, in fact, was NOT me! 

Imagine! Decorating the house, Christmas Eve dinner with family and friends, off to bed before Santa's arrival, and then... CHRISTMAS MORNING! There was Dagmar dragging that damn doll dressed in a matching nightgown downstairs with our entire family... handing out gayly and gloriously wrapped presents! Opening them! OOOHING AND AHHHING at each lovely gift... and Dagmar using her infernal talent for ventriloquism to make the doll sound like me in complete conversations about the whole Holiday weekend! Apparently, my "gifts" to the family (courtesy of Dagmar's diabolical sense of humor!) included crayon-drawn "gift-certificates" to my Mother (building a gazebo out of field stones for her herb garden), to my Father (fetching, cleaning, and dressing any game birds that he and his pals had shot in the next 3 months!), to my Aunt Deirdre (canasta and rapt listening to her endless stories of nursing during the earlier Influenza epidemic of 1889 during which she fell in love with about 87 doughboys!), etc., etc., etc. for everyone else in the family! Given Dagmar’s natural instinct for practical jokes… and malice, you can imagine the “gifts” that I was responsible for by that evening. Thank goodness for completely disoriented and dotty Aunt Deirdre (yes! THAT same Aunt Deirdre!) who wandered away from the family festivities, blundering about unsupervised until she finally got to my remote part of the labyrinthine attic dressed in her old Florence Nightingale nurse’s uniform. Carrying her old railroad kerosene lamp, she literally stumbled over me, sure that I was a prisoner of war of the Kaiser’s German army that she needed to rescue! Despite her impaired perceptions and abilities, she still nimbly picked the locks on my handcuffs with a bobby pin plucked from her nurse’s wimple. But before she would release me, she insisted on checking me thoroughly for signs of abuse, torture, malnutrition, and lice. When I finally got back downstairs and confronted everyone, I wasn’t sure what I was more infuriated by; Dagmar’s villainy, or my family’s not noticing the difference between me and some doll… or possibly Aunt Deirdre’s highly invasive checking for lice! Whatever. This photo is of Dagmar and her doll… By the way, that’s Dagmar on the left!!!!!

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