Wings, Blimps, Respect is spelled D-O-L-L-S!!

One of my all time favorite television shows is Wings, the story of two brothers running a small airport on Nantucket Island.  The characters are quirky and lovable, the dialog and writing witty.  The entire show is poignant, because one of its creators, David Angell, was killed with his wife on 911.

He was a literature major, as was David Schramm, who plays the slick Roy Biggins, owner of Aeromass Airlines.

During a recent episode, Lowell Mather, the eccentric but gifted mechanic, spent six years creating the most amazing model of a Graf zeppelin that not only flew, but that had a miniature furnished interior with captain and crew.  Things never quite go right for poor Lowell.  This episode was no exception. 

It took Lowell, played by Thomas Hayden Church, six years to build his blimp.  He brought it to pilot Joe Hackett’s office for safekeeping till the weekend model show, with orders no one was to touch it or fly it.

Joe, usually so upright and uptight, strays and flies the blimp behind the closed door of his office; then brash Roy barges in and smashes the Blimp to pits behind the door.  Lowell is besides himself, and Joe tries to save face by reminding Lowell his creation was just an inanimate object.

It was right out of the scene from Hawthorne’s “The Artist of the Beautiful” when a little child smashes a miraculous butterfly automaton.

Lowell descends into tears creaming “My Baby! My Baby!” He mourns when he finds the tiny captain on the floor.

It’s meant to be funny, to accentuate Lowell’s eccentricity, but stop and think.  Any artist or collector would cringe.  That’s the difference between us and them, artists/collectors and those who aren’t.

Really, let’s talk.  How many of you feel betrayed, angry, upset, when someone carelessly destroys something in your collection.  Does it make you feel better when you are callously reminded it’s just an inanimate object?

I hate to put “don’t touch” signs all over the place, but I feel like it.  Someone just broke one of my blue willow plates, accidentally, but she just threw it in the garbage and didn’t feel she had to tell me.  When I asked her what happened, she didn’t apologize or anything.  Just laughed at how it “slipped right off the counter.”  It was an old plate, too.  I fished out the pieces and I’m going to mend it.  Me and Doris Duke, I guess, thought it was just the idea.

I have another “helper” who averages one break a week.  It’s always my fault; things that have been in the same place for ten years have the nerve to run afoul of her clumsy fingers.   No apology there, either.

In the past, I’ve had friends with little kids who think it’s ok to let them run amok among the dolls.  Twenty years ago, one little boy walked into my house, went to my shelves, picked up a three-faced doll and ripped it’s head off.  I nearly bit my tongue into, not saying what I really wanted to.  “Now Paulie,” said his mom, “how would you feel if Ellen ripped the head of one of your toys?  That’s the point, it wasn’t a toy; it was a collectible.   On a shelf.  Shouldn’t Paulie have learned to respect other people’s things?  Isn’t that sort of a basic rule. 

For all those who think it’s ok to destroy other people’s inanimate objects.  Read the Property Clause of the Constitution.  Take American History; a lot of what we fought for had to do with the right to own property, real, and yes, personal.  

As much as I love hands on children’s’ museums, there’s something to be said for the traditional kind where dolls and artifacts are preserved behind glass, where they can’t be destroyed.

It’s about respecting other people’s space, either in stores or private homes.   I now have rules about packing up dolls after programs and putting them on my shelves because early on, I gave a program at a junior college that ran long.  The hosts began taking the dolls on display and tossing them, unwrapped, into boxes so they could go on with their next activity. These were old dolls, mostly bisque and composition.

At the end of the Wings epsisode,  Joe Hackett realizes what he has done, and moans a la Hindenberg, “Oh, the humanity!”  Now he gets it.