Creating a New Folding Backdrop for Doll Photos

A number of years ago I wrote this blog post on how I made a folding backdrop for indoor doll photos. I created this after I saw online how other people were creating doll backdrops but their methods weren’t feasible for me. Their backdrops were created as permanent structures and the only bad thing is that I live in a relatively small place and these backdrops would be difficult for me to store when not in use.

So I created a foldable doll backdrop using illustration boards that were leftover from an art class I had taken, scrapbooking paper, and duct tape. It worked okay for me but there were some challenges as well. For one thing, this backdrop couldn’t stand on its own. I had to find a wall or a stack of books to prop the backdrop against so it wouldn’t fall over. It was the ideal size for any doll that was 16 inches and under but it was a bit short for my taller Asian ball-jointed dolls. (I had to shoot them in a sitting position because of it.) Despite the limitations I made do with it until that backdrop began to literally fell apart and I stopped using it.

I recently created a new foldable doll backdrop using this tutorial that was posted on the My Froggy Stuff YouTube channel.

Making this new backdrop was relatively inexpensive. There were a few differences between that tutorial and what I did. When I went to Jo-Ann’s Fabrics & Crafts for the poster board, I could only find ones in fluorescent colors. (The white ones were sold out.) I decided to purchase two of the fluorescent boards. I also purchased just enough of the scrapbooking papers to simulate a carpeted floor. Instead of covering the walls with more scrapbooking paper, I decided to use stickers to decorate the walls with. Some of the stickers were ones that I had lying around the house for awhile and others were ones I purchased on sale at Michaels Arts and Crafts. Here is what my new foldable doll backdrop looks like.

As you can see, this backdrop can now stand on its own so I no longer have to go through the hassle of finding something sturdy to prop the walls against.

This backdrop is basically for smaller dolls and plushes. I’m going to find a way of making another foldable doll backdrop for my taller dolls, which will be a challenge because some of them are taller than the largest sized poster board I see on sale at most of the big box retailers. I might go to an art supply store at some point to see what I could find. But in the meantime, I can take photos of my smaller toys like the Disney Nuimos Angel and the Marvel Rising Squirrel Girl doll.

Like the previous doll backdrop, this one can be folded up when not in use, so storing it is a breeze.

Tysons Corner Center, Tysons Corner, Virginia, February 17, 2021

I recently made my first visit to Tysons Corner Center of 2021. I went to the American Girl Place where I saw the new 2021 Girl of the Year.

Her name is Kira Bailey. She is described as a girl from Michigan who travels to Australia where she stays with her two great-aunts in their wilderness sanctuary. Her story not only deals with the Australian bushfires of the previous year but her great-aunts are a same-sex couple. (In case you’re wondering I haven’t read any of the Kira books as of this writing. I got my information about Kira from this blog post.) Here’s the large display about Kira.

Since a huge chunk of Kira’s story takes place in Australia, I had written a post on a political discussion group that I currently belong to on the Discord server for the benefit of the Australian members in that same group. I was wondering what their take was. One of them said that there is currently a line of dolls that are roughly the same size as American Girl dolls that are known as Australian Girl. She said that she bought one for her daughter and she enjoys it very much. Having seen the photos of these dolls, I have to admit that they are quite cute and their clothes look stylish. Like American Girl, Australian Girl also has corresponding books but, judging on the cover, it looks like they reflect modern-day Australia.

Getting back to Kira and American Girl, there were all kinds of Kira displays in the store.

American Girl is definitely going with the Australian theme in a big way. There is a doll-sized camping tent for sale that costs $225.

There were Australian-themed clothes available for Bailey as well as a human-sized Australia cloth bag, and even stuffed koala bears and kangaroos for sale.

I found Kira to be cute but I decided against buying her because Kira Bailey looks too similar to a doll that I already own—Julie Albright. The only difference is that they have different eye colors. (Kira has green eyes while Julie’s are brown.) Otherwise, they are nearly identical because not only do both dolls sport long platinum blond hair but they also use the same face mold.

Theoretically I could buy Kira’s outfits for Julie and pass her off as Kira. Even though Kira’s outfits are really cute, I probably won’t ever get around to buying them because the prices for her clothes start at $24 (and that’s for a pajama outfit) and most of them cost over $30 each.

Over the last few years the American Girl Place has had a display dedicated to the Girl of the Year. It’s usually three-dimensional and people are invited to have selfies taken at that display. Here is what these displays looked like in previous years.

The Coronavirus pandemic of the last year has had an effect. For this year’s Girl of the Year, American Girl Place has a tall poster with no 3D display. The poster is pretty nice looking and one can still take selfies next to it but there’s definitely a loss in that no one can peek through a window or stand on a fake surfboard due to the pandemic. I can’t really blame American Girl for that decision because making sure that a 3D display is constantly cleaned and sanitized would’ve been a major hassle and they would’ve had to allocate staffers to watch that area had there been such a display.

I looked around at the other displays. I took one of the historical 1980s doll Courtney Moore. She’s wearing workout clothes alongside a small TV set that has a pretend VHS cassette recorder attached to it and a yellow beanbag chair. I was definitely getting Jane Fonda-during-her-workout-phase vibes watching that display.

I purchased one thing at American Girl Place. When I originally purchased the Courtney doll a few months ago, I got a copy of the first volume of her book with the doll. Unfortunately the second volume hadn’t been published at the time I bought the doll and it still hadn’t been released when I last visited that store on my birthday. This time I saw that the second volume had finally come out so I was able to buy it.

I was even given a cute freebie for buying the book. It came in a box that’s shaped like a cassette tape and it is titled “Courtney’s Mix Tape.”

Inside the box were two hair scrunchies. One was doll-sized and the other was human-sized. My doll and I could wear matching hair scrunchies.

After the American Girl Place, I looked around at a few other stores. I went to The Disney Store where I saw that the new Disney Nuimos were on sale.

For the uninitiated, Disney Nuimos are a line of small plush Disney characters that originated in Japan and soon spread to other Asian countries. Disney decided to just release them to the rest of the world. A store clerk told me that they had just gotten the Nuimos just a few days ago.

The Disney Nuimos also have a line of clothes. The idea is that you buy the Nuimos and the clothes then dress them up, take photos of them, and share them online. I started seeing pictures of these Nuimos coming on my Instagram feed and they looked incredibly cute. They looked even cuter in person.

I decided to splurge and buy a couple of Nuimos along with two outfits. Normally I would pick Mickey and Minnie whenever I choose Disney products. This time I didn’t and that was because I had purchased the Minnie Mouse fashion doll (it was a set that included two outfits, two pairs of shoes, and its own case) during my last trip to that same Disney Store back in December. (I’ve made a video about that doll that I uploaded on to TikTok and YouTube but I haven’t gotten around to writing about this doll until now. Yeah, I can be lame sometimes! LOL!)

Instead I decided to buy Stitch and his love interest, Angel. I’ve always liked the Lilo & Stitch movie and I even saw a few episodes of the Saturday morning TV spinoff where I first saw Angel. They both looked pretty cute so I bought them both along with two outfits. The entire purchase came close to $75. It was a splurge but I don’t know how often I will continue to buy more Nuimos or outfits because this product line can get very pricey. (Each Nuimos character costs $17.99 while each outfit costs between $12.99-$17.99.) In the future I think I will wait for sales before purchasing anything else from that product line.

After I purchased them I went to a table in the mall where I put their clothes on them because I was so eager to see them in their fashion that I didn’t want to wait until I got home. I shot a video of the process that I uploaded on to TikTok and YouTube.

Once I was done with putting clothes on them and making that video I put them back in the shopping bag and went to the LEGO store. I saw that they now have kits based on the ancient Roman Coliseum.

There was a cool looking grand piano LEGO kit that looked awesome to see in person.

I ate dinner at Wasabi, where I shot this last photo of my two new Disney Nuimos—Angel and Stitch—wearing their trendy clothes. Angel is wearing the Alice in Wonderland cosplay outfit while Stitch is wearing a cool looking leopard suit. (Yes, it’s made from fake fur. No leopards actually died for Disney Nuimos clothes.)

Visting My Mother’s Family’s Old Stomping Grounds in Baltimore, November 17, 2020

My mother lost her 12-year battle with multiple sclerosis back in February. I went to her funeral, which included a very abbreviated graveside ceremony because it rained a lot that day. I managed to note where her final resting place is located with the intention of visiting her newly-dug grave for the first time around Easter or so.

But then the Coronavirus pandemic hit and everything was literally shut down. The cemetery eventually reopened but I still couldn’t visit because I was driving a car that belonged to my former housemate that was literally on its last legs as a functioning vehicle and I was afraid of having the car finally die while I was visiting her grave in Baltimore. (That car had over 212,000 miles on it. At one point one of the wheels blew out. I had it replaced with a temporary donut tire but I was very reluctant to buy a new tire for a car that was on the verge of dying. So I made do with the donut tire but the cost was that I couldn’t travel very far because that tire was meant to be a temporary one and I wasn’t about to risk that donut tire giving out as a result of traveling too much. Due to the ongoing pandemic, I didn’t go to many places besides the grocery store, the liquor store, the pharmacy, Target, and the nearby Metro station if I wanted to take the Metro to DC or Northern Virginia.)

My former housemate decided to get rid of that car because the registration had to be renewed and he wasn’t willing to pay for a car that was literally dying. (It was also the main reason why I decided against buying that car off of him.) So I went car-less for a while. (I would walk or take a bus if I needed to go somewhere.) But then my neighbor had an extra car that she was trying to unload and I now have a car with only 98,000 miles on it. It’s still a used car but it’s in better condition than the other one.

By the time I decided to finally make a visit to the grave it was late October. I thought it would be an appropriate time to visit because it was Halloween/Samhain/Day of the Dead/All Saint’s Day/All Soul’s Day holiday extravaganza when the veil separating the living and the dead tends to be thinner. But then it rained just before Halloween and it rained again during the Day of the Dead period (November 1-2) so I had to postpone it until November 17.

I finally made the trip to Loudon Park Cemetery in Baltimore. I took a doll along with me for the ride.

She is a Volks Dollfie Plus that I customized as an angel doll. It was the first doll I had ever customized in my life. At the time my mother collected both dolls and angels so I thought it would’ve been cool to buy a blank Volks Dollife Plus doll along with a wig and a pair of eyes online. I purchased a dress that was originally made for Barbie and I purchased the wings from a craft store that I sewed on the dress. You can read more about how I customized this doll right here. (By the way, Volks has long since discontinued its 1/6 scale Dollfie Plus line but I believe that its rivals Obitsu and Azone still make the blank 1/6 scale dolls that one can customize.)

I gave the doll to my mom as a birthday present and she said that she really liked it. But then a few years later her health had declined so bad that she could no longer live on her own and she decided to sell the house that I grew up in. She took what she felt she needed but she called me and told me that the house was open to the rest of the family for them to take whatever they want because she couldn’t bring everything with her. Among the numerous items left behind was that angel doll so I decided to take her back since she was the first doll I had ever customized.

So it was me and the angel doll on a road trip to Loudon Park Cemetery in Baltimore. I managed to find the grave quickly. My mother is buried next to my father, who died 20 years before.

My mother died a few months before what would’ve been her 80th birthday this year. Sure, it’s sad that she wasn’t able to celebrate that milestone but at least she avoided the possibility of catching the Coronavirus. (She definitely would’ve been at high risk of getting that virus.)

My father died 20 years ago this month. Looking at that grave, it dawned on me that he would’ve turned 85 this year if he were still alive. My parents were married 41 years when he died in 2000 so there was never a golden wedding anniversary. (I’m sure their marriage would’ve made the 50-year mark if he had lived longer.)

After I took those pictures at my parents’ grave, I decided to take the doll back with me mainly because there is no way that doll could’ve withstood the outdoor elements. The doll isn’t made out of biodegradable materials and I didn’t want to contribute something that was just going to ultimately sit in a landfill. If I ever visit the cemetery again, I’ll bring flowers because at least they are biodegradable and the cemetery workers would have an easy time dealing with disposing of them once they wilt.

My parents are buried near other relatives on my mother’s side of the family. My family used to visit the cemetery twice a year when I was a child. It was usually once in the spring—sometime between Lent and Mother’s Day—and once in the fall/winter between Thanksgiving and Christmas. I used to skip around the nearby headstones and I would sometimes walk and climb on some of them—which usually resulted in one of the adults yelling at me to get off the headstones.

It took me a while to find the graves of these other relatives because I hadn’t visited them in person since high school. I eventually found the grave of my mother’s parents (my grandparents). Their name was Banahan. My grandfather was a first-generation Irish-American. His parents (my great-grandparents) were two of the many Irish who left for America in order to escape both the potato famine and oppressive British rule. My grandmother also grew up in an immigrant family, which I’ll write about later in this post.

Here’s my grandfather, whom I never knew because he died a few years before I was born when he was only 55 years old.

I was told by my mother and grandmother that he was an alcoholic, a heavy cigar smoker, and a womanizer. He had an affair with one of my grandmother’s own friends. I remember when I was a child and my grandmother would mention that she regretted not separating from her husband. But she wasn’t able to mainly because she was a devout Catholic and, in those days, Catholics were strongly discouraged from ever getting divorced. Even if she found the internal strength necessary to leave him, the divorce laws in Maryland were extremely stringent at the time and getting a divorce was very difficult and expensive. And that’s not to mention that she was a housewife with very few job skills other than the ones that she developed during her time when she worked in a straw hat factory before she was married. Plus she was a woman so finding a job that paid well enough so she could live as a single parent would’ve been more difficult for her back then. So she basically did what other women in the same situation did in that era—suffer in silence while standing by her man. Eventually both the alcoholism and cigar smoking caught up with him and he died of cancer at 55.

I remember visiting that grave when I was a child. At the time it had the full information about my grandfather. My grandmother’s name was also etched but it only had the year of her birth with a blank spot where her eventual death year would be engraved. My grandmother said that, at the time of my grandfather’s death, the cemetery had this deal where the names of the two of them would be engraved on the headstone at the same time in exchange for a lower price on the headstone. My grandmother took that deal but for years she would say that she regretted her decision because she would feel creeped out whenever we visited and she would see her name engraved with the year that she was born and she realized that she would eventually die. (In contrast, when my father died, my mother turned down the deal to have her name and birth year engraved because she didn’t want to go through what my grandmother went through. For years there was a blank square where her name would go until this year.)

When I was younger I used to wonder what would’ve happened had I known my grandfather. Would he decide to become a better grandfather to me than he was as a father and husband? Or would he have continued to drink and smoke heavy and we would not have gotten along very well because I somehow was the target of one of his alcohol-induced rages? As I’ve grown older I’ve given up on such speculation because it’s a waste of time and brain space. The fact remains that he died before I was born and that’s the way it goes. These days I have more things to worry about than speculating on what kind of relationship I would’ve had with someone I’m destined to have never known because he died before I was born.

Here’s my grandmother, whom I knew very well. She was born Anna Marie Carle and she later became known as Anna Marie Banahan but everyone called her Marie.

She grew up in poverty and she dropped out of Catholic school in the 8th grade in order to work in a straw hat factory so she could help support her family. (Straw hats were quite the fashion statement at the time.) Her family could only afford to send so many of their children to Catholic school at the same time so, one-by-one, the children dropped out of school once they reached their early teens. (My grandmother could’ve switched to a public school but back in those days Catholic families were strongly discouraged by the church from sending their children to any other school but a Catholic one. Besides jobs were easy to find without a high school diploma or college degree in those days.) She once wanted to be a nun but then my grandfather came into the picture. He originally dated one of her younger sisters and they were even engaged. Soon after the engagement that sister died of tuberculosis at the age of 18. After that death my grandfather continued to hang around my grandmother’s family and he began to see my grandmother. They quickly fell in love, got married (she quit factory work soon after she married since society expected a married woman like her to never work outside of the home), and had my mother and her older sister, my Aunt Linda. Like I wrote earlier, my grandmother endured being married to an alcoholic womanizer and, at the time, there were no support groups like Al-Anon that she could’ve turned to for help. She suffered in silence while she was a full-time housewife and mother.

When my grandfather died the family lost its main breadwinner. My mother and aunt ended up working part-time as store cashiers while collecting survivor benefits from their father’s Social Security (which ran out when each turned 18). I was told that my grandmother still remained a stay-at-home housewife during that time. I don’t know if she tried to find a job only to get turned away due to gender and age discrimination or if she didn’t try to find a job at all for some reason. When my mother and my aunt both graduated from high school then got married a few months apart in the same year so they moved away from home, my grandmother couldn’t afford to live at that home by herself despite the fact that she was collecting Social Security benefits. She initially moved in with my aunt and uncle but, for some reason, it didn’t work out so she moved in with my parents.

So I was raised in a family with two parents and one grandmother. My grandmother moved in with my parents just a few months after they were married and she ended up taking care of me after I was born and my mother decided to work full-time instead of being a stay-at-home mom like so many other women of her generation did. One day I’ll write in detail about what that was like but right now I really don’t feel ready to do anything like that. My grandmother died of cancer at the age of 75. It happened in early December during the first semester of my sophomore year at the University of Maryland. I was just a few weeks away from my 20th birthday and it was also a few weeks away from final exams. It was a whirlwind where I came home, sat at the funeral home for a couple of nights while people came by to pay their respects, attended the funeral, went to a reception that my parents held in their home, went back to campus, then proceeded to celebrate my 20th birthday and study for the final exams.

My grandmother had an ethnic German father who immigrated from the Alscae-Lorraine region when it was part of Germany. (It is now part of France.) He was originally named Wilhelm Carle but he later anglicized his first name to William. Her mother (my great-grandmother) had parents who were ethnic Czechs who immigrated from the state of Bohemia, which was then-located inside of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. (Today Bohemia is part of the Czech Republic.) My grandmother grew up in poverty and the fact that my great-grandfather was an alcoholic didn’t help. His alcoholism was so bad that my great-grandmother had to send one of her nine children to my great-grandfather’s workplace each Friday in order to pick up his paycheck for him because I was told that if he received it directly, he would blow all of it at the local bar. My grandmother used to frequently tell me while I was growing up, “My father drank and my husband drank.”

Another thing that plagued my grandmother’s family besides the alcoholism was tuberculosis. My grandmother was one of nine children. Of those children, she and her sister, Celeste, were the only children who lived past the age of 25. All of the other children died young from tuberculosis, including one sister named Maggie who died of that disease when she was not yet two. (Only one tiny photograph exists of my Great-Aunt Maggie, which I last saw years ago when I was in high school. I remember that it was a black and white photo of a cute little light-haired toddler girl with curls in her hair and a slight smile on her face. My grandmother once told me that the photo was taken shortly before her death.) A few years ago I wrote a post about my grandmother’s older brother, Buzz, who served in the army in Europe towards the end of World War I who survived that war only to die of tuberculosis soon after he returned to Baltimore.

Even my grandmother wasn’t able to entirely avoid getting that contagious and deadly disease. A few months before her own death from cancer, the doctors did a series of x-rays on my grandmother and they found scarring on her lungs that suggested that she previously had tuberculosis. Since my grandmother never told anyone that she once had it herself, the doctors theorized that she may have caught it as a very young child but had managed to recover from it despite the fact that she was never sent to a sanitarium (which was an option that only tuberculosis patients from middle and upper class families could afford). It’s highly likely that she caught that disease at such a very young age that she didn’t remember ever having it.

The Carle family plot only has this simple stone marker with the name CARLE engraved on it. It is where both of my great-grandparents and seven of their nine children are buried. Like I wrote earlier, my great-grandparents were so poor that they could only afford that tiny marker. It would’ve been nice had there been the names of the individuals who were buried there but that’s the way it goes. It just seems like America has always been the country where poor immigrants are looked down upon and they are ultimately destined to be forgotten by society, especially if they die young. At least my grandparents and parents managed to scrape together enough money to purchase better quality headstones for their graves that had their individual names and the dates of birth and death.

Yet that simple stone marker was enough to affect my Great-Aunt Celeste when she visited my family from her home in Harrod, Ohio (where she had moved after she got married because her husband wanted to live in the same small town where he grew up so he could be closer to his family and childhood friends). I was a teenager back then. My mother and grandmother came up with the idea of taking Celeste to Loudon Park to see the Carle family plot. I remember my great-aunt burst into tears when she saw the Carle stone marker. She hadn’t been to the grave in a number of years due to the fact that she lived in Ohio and I think her seeing it in person for the first time in a very long time really affected her emotionally. It was the only time that I remember my family ever took Great-Aunt Celeste to visit that grave. She would visit my family a few other times but she never asked to visit Loudon Park again. I think seeing that gravesite had stirred up all kinds of horrible memories for her that really upset her and it’s likely that she didn’t want to revisit her past since it wasn’t such a good one for her.

I noticed that the marker is starting to become swallowed by the surrounding grass. While I was still able to make out the name, the grass had clearly hidden part of it. If I ever go to Loudon Park again I think I will bring a hand shovel with me and see if I could at least dig up enough of the ground so the CARLE name would be visible again.

After my visit to London Park I decided to check out the varying places where my mother’s family used to go. When I was a child I constantly heard stories from my mother, grandmother, and (to a lesser extent) Aunt Linda about living in the house on South Stricker Street in Baltimore and what the neighborhood was like. The majority of people in that neighborhood were working class and poor yet whenever my mother’s family told stories about living in that area it felt like they had a better time growing up in that neighborhood than I did growing up in Glen Burnie. They didn’t have much money but it seemed like they tended to judge someone based more on their personality or how they behaved in public than on what clothes they wore or what kind of possessions they had. (In contrast the other kids in Glen Burnie used to judge me based on what clothes I wore, which sucked because they were incredibly picky. As a teen I was once derided for wearing a pair of jeans with back pockets these kids deemed as “too small.”) In recent years I’ve seen this slogan that arose out of the Simplicity Circles movement (that has also seeped into my Unitarian Universalist faith) that said “Less Stuff, More Fun.” I think my mother’s Baltimore childhood was an example of that because the kids there didn’t have a lot of toys or fancy clothes but they had more camaraderie among each other, which softened the blow of living in poverty to some extent.

I got the general impression that the kids in that Baltimore neighborhood were far less cruel towards each other than the kids in my Glen Burnie neighborhood, where I was labeled as “retarded” from elementary school all the way to high school. Even during my freshman year at Anne Arundel Community College some of my former high school classmates still looked down at me like I was some kind of an inferior freak whenever I passed them in the hallway while the students who attended other high schools treated me like I was a human. (That was one of the reasons why I decided to transfer to the University of Maryland at College Park a year earlier than I originally planned. I finally found nirvana there as the majority of students didn’t know about my Glen Burnie past and they treated me pretty well.)

I’ll admit that not everything in that Baltimore neighborhood was idyllic. Jim Crow dominated Baltimore back then so that particular neighborhood where my mom grew up was all white and there was a general unwritten rule that no African Americans should ever step foot in that neighborhood or else there would be unpleasant consequences. Plus the families had to deal with the poverty that sometimes affected what they would eat for dinner or whether they could afford to pay rent or other bills. (My mother used to tell me that she knew when the family money was running low because some nights my grandmother would fix apple fritters for dinner since it was a cheap meal. As an adult my mother refused to cook apple fritters because it was too much of a reminder of her impoverished past.) All that I know is that my mother wasn’t that concerned about my lack of friends when I was growing up because she felt that having good grades and nice things were more important than having friends. (Yet my mother sent me to a Catholic church when I was growing up that preached that materialism was bad while my mom was telling me that having material things were the best thing in life and far superior to having friends, which really messed with my head. I’ve since converted to Unitarian Universalism, which takes an even stronger stand against materialism on the basis of its commitment to environmentalism.)

So I decided to travel from the cemetery to the places where my mother’s family have been decades ago. I first drove past the former location of the Catholic high school where my Aunt Linda attended since it was the building that was located closest to the cemetery. It was originally known as Seton High School and, at the time, it was an all-girls college preparatory school. My aunt opted to go to that school because her big dream was to go to college and become a schoolteacher. Unfortunately my grandfather died while she was a senior in high school. While my grandmother managed to scrape together enough money for my aunt to finish high school (and for my mother to stay in her high school), my grandmother couldn’t afford to send Aunt Linda to college since my grandfather’s death caused a major loss of income. I don’t know if my aunt ever attempted to get any scholarships but, if she did, they probably didn’t provide enough money for her to attend. Basically my aunt ended up working as a cashier in a department store (along with my mother) after she graduated from Seton until she got married a few years later, then she became a full-time housewife. (At one point, after her youngest child started elementary school, she ran a daycare in her home where she cared for other people’s children for a few years until she was diagnosed with breast cancer, which killed her when she was only 48.)

Years after my aunt’s high school graduation, Seton High School merged with another Catholic school in 1988 and it became known as Seton Keough High School. The school was closed in 2017 due largely to declining enrollments. Here are a couple of photos of my aunt’s former high school as it still stands at 1201 Caton Avenue.

According to the Wikipedia, Seton High School was the subject of a scandal when it was revealed that some of the students were sexually abused by a priest who served as a counselor at the school from 1967-1975. At one point some of the abused students had confided about their abuse to a nun who was a popular English and drama teacher. That nun was found murdered in 1970 on the outskirts of Baltimore and her murder was never solved. There was a Netflix documentary series about the nun’s murder and the sexual abuse scandal called The Keepers and it speculated on whether the two were related.

My aunt had graduated from that school ten years before that priest started working there so I don’t think she ever met him. I don’t recall my aunt talking much about her years at Seton High when I was growing up so I have no idea what her school years were like or if she had encountered something similarly sleazy during her time there.

Since the school was closed I didn’t bother with exploring the place aside from the two photos I took. I decided to drive further into Baltimore to my mother’s old neighborhood on South Stricker Street. On my last visit with my mother before her death she mentioned the exact street address of her family’s old home. I managed to find it and I visited it on a previous trip to Baltimore.

Since that trip I managed to find the location of the Catholic school that my mother and aunt attended along with the church where the family attended mass on Sundays. My mother and grandmother used to talk about being able to walk to church and school. Driving to the area from that house on South Stricker Street took less than five minutes.

The name of the church was St. Martins Church but that parish has long since been disbanded. The church building is still standing at the intersection of Fulton and Fayette Streets.

This cornerstone from 1865 shows how historic the former St. Martins building is.

Here’s a plaque that commemorates those parishioners who lost their lives while serving in the military during World War I. (There was another plaque that commemorated those who died during World War II but I didn’t photograph that one.)

The building looked really nice on the outside with its stone walls and heavy wooden doors. I would’ve loved to have taken a look on the inside but the doors were locked. I noticed the purple banners on the outside that said “COMING SOON.” I later did a Google search and I found that in 2015 Bon Secours Hospital had purchased the church and it will ultimately be converted into a health and wellness center that serves the local community. Five years has passed since that announcement and the building still has the “COMING SOON” banners on it. That same link also mentioned that St. Martins Church had permanently stopped holding Catholic mass in 2008 and, for a time, an evangelical Protestant church had rented the building for its worship services.

Here’s the side of the church which includes a side building with the same stone walls, a white building, and a red brick building. I assume that the side building with the stone walls might have been used as a rectory for the priests. Or maybe it was a convent for the nuns who taught at the school. I can’t say for sure since I wasn’t able to tour the inside of the building.

Today that side stone building houses Recovery in Community, which is a joint project of the Abell Foundation, Baltimore City Healthy Start Project, and St. James Memorial United Methodist Church. Recovery in Community focuses on substance abuse intervention and outreach to individuals, families, and communities.

As for the white building next door, I wasn’t able to figure out what it was used for or whether anyone is occupying that building today. I guess it might have served as either a rectory for the priests or a convent for the nuns who taught at the school next door.

As for the red brick building, it is the former location of St. Martins Catholic School.

That school had two sections. The elementary school section was from grades 1-8. (The school didn’t have kindergarten. My grandmother once mentioned that she sent my mom to a public school for kindergarten in the hopes of helping my mother overcome her shyness. She transferred to St. Martins the following year.) The high school section covered grades 9-12. My mom and Aunt Linda attended the same school from 1st through 8th. After 8th grade my aunt transferred to Seton High School because she originally wanted to go to college and become a schoolteacher. (Like I wrote earlier, my aunt ended up not going to college due to financial problems that arose as a result of my grandfather’s death during her senior year.) My mom opted to stay at St. Martins for high school because she was more interested in finding a job immediately following high school than in going to college. (While Seton High had an academic college prep curriculum, St. Martins High was more oriented towards helping students learn a trade so they can find work immediately after high school graduation. My mother went through the business track at St. Martins that trained students for office work.) During the school year my mom and aunt walked to and from that area six days a week (school from Monday-Friday and mass on Sunday) with Saturday being the only day they had off.

My mom used to tell about how strict the nuns were and how they were eager to crack students on the knuckles with a ruler for any infractions during class time. My mom mentioned that when she was in the first or second grade she made a series of clucking sounds during class and the nun made her sit under the nun’s desk for the rest of class that day. A large part of the lessons were devoted to memorizing facts then regurgitating them in class when called upon by one of the nuns who taught at the school. My mom said that she really hated the constant memorization but she had to do it. She ended up memorizing the Gettysburg Address, the preamble to the U.S. Constitution, poems, Bible verses, Catholic teachings, and other famous writings and speeches while having to recite them when she was called upon to do so.

At this point I’m going to relay a story that my mother used to tell me many times while I was growing up. My Aunt Linda was two years older than my mother and she was such a stellar student that most of the faculty and fellow students weren’t surprised at her decision to attend Seton High.

In contrast, when one of my mother’s teachers asked her what her high school plans were when she was in the 8th grade, my mom told that nun that her plans were to go to the high school part of St. Martins, learn business skills, graduate, and get a job so she can earn money and buy nice things for herself. I think my mom might have told the nun that she was willing to take any job so she can make money and buy stuff. That nun was appalled by my mom’s plans because she felt that my mother was just as intelligent as my aunt and she really wanted my mother to follow her sister to Seton and then move on to college. At one point that nun actually visited my grandparents’ home on South Stricker Street and spoke to my grandmother in an effort to pressure my mom to transfer to Seton. My grandmother felt that it was my mom’s decision on what school she wanted to go to as long as it was a Catholic school so she didn’t force my mom to transfer to Seton.

Anyway my mom stuck to her guns and transferred to the high school section of St. Martins. The elementary school part had a special graduating ceremony for its eighth graders and the kids who got a B average or higher in the last semester were considered to graduate with honors and they got a special certificate at that ceremony. That nun teacher was so angry at my mom’s decision to not transfer to Seton that she decided to retaliate against my mother by marking her grade with a C for that class so my mom wasn’t able to graduate with honors. My mom used to say that during the ceremony she smiled at that teacher in order to let her know that her sudden grade change wasn’t going to get under my mom’s skin.

I think that nun may have had good intentions in encouraging my mom to think more about her future than just getting a job so she can afford to buy nice things but it was a boneheaded thing for that nun to mark my mom’s final grade one letter lower as a punishment for my mother’s refusal to transfer to Seton. Especially since my mother had done B-level work in that class all along so she really did deserve a B on her final report card. Because St. Martins was a parochial school that was ruled by priests and nuns who ruled with iron fists and strongly discouraged the students from ever questioning any of them or their actions, my mom had no way of appealing that teacher’s final grade. That nun’s punitive action certainly didn’t get my mother to rethink her future plans and enroll in Seton. Instead it made her stick to her guns on her only ambition to become an office secretary in order to make money and buy nice things. But that was how the Catholic clergy in parochial schools rolled, especially in those days. (I’m sure there are plenty of priests and nuns who are just as harsh and punitive today as that nun was back in the 1950s.)

St. Martins School closed its doors for good back in the mid-1970s. I remember it was a big deal in the local news at the time. I remember my mom feeling briefly sad at the news but she moved on from it quickly and didn’t dwell on it. At the time I remember that the reason why the school closed was due to declining enrollments. St. Martins was originally established as a Catholic school for white Catholic people only. My mom mentioned that at some point in the early 1950s while she was a student, St. Martins briefly thought about integrating but the outcry from the white families were so great that the school decided against this. (I think that brief flirtation came about as a result of the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown vs. the Board of Education decision. As a private parochial school, St. Martins was exempt from being forced to integrate.) When the white Catholic families started moving out to the suburbs in droves in the 1950s and 1960s, there were fewer white Catholics who were enrolling at St. Martins so the school finally opened its doors to African Americans and other people of color in an effort to deal with declining enrollments. When that wasn’t enough, St. Martins then allowed non-Catholics to enroll. Unfortunately that still wasn’t enough and St. Martins was history.

Getting back to the present, I was amazed at how small that building actually is in person. The public high school I attended was five times the size of St. Martins. Here’s the front door that my mom and many other students entered through back when the school was still in operation.

The building is now an apartment complex that also houses the St. Ambrose Housing Aid Center. It’s too bad I didn’t make an effort to try to find her old school’s former location when my mother was still alive because I would’ve loved to have seen her reaction to the fact that her former school is now an apartment building.

I found something interesting across the street from St. Martins’s former location—an urban farm.

One end of this urban farm had a mobile home that was very colorfully painted on the outside. There were a few workers around. All of them were wearing masks as they worked the land.

The other end of this urban farm had this nice mural that depicts an African American man and white girl working the land together. It seems to promote this nice ideal where people of all ages and races can gather together and work on a common cause one day without discrimination of any kind.

As I was visiting my mother’s family’s old stomping grounds in southwest Baltimore I found myself wishing that I had actually taken my mother to this area when she was still alive. I couldn’t do it during the years when my father was ailing and my mother was his main caretaker. But there were a few years after he died in 2000 and before she got very ill herself in 2008 when she and I could’ve visited that area together. It would’ve been nice to hear her recollections of the area. I regret not thinking of this until after she passed. If I could do it all over again, I would’ve made some kind of a day when she and I (and maybe my then-husband since we were still married in the days before my mother grew sick) would tour the area and then we could’ve gone out to dinner somewhere either at Harborplace or Little Italy.

Oh well, it’s too late for me to do anything about this now.

Marvel Rising Ghost-Spider Doll

I purchased this Marvel Rising Ghost-Spider doll (aka Spider-Gwen and Gwen Stacy) from Five Below for only $5. It was definitely a bargain since I remember that same doll was once on sale at Target for around $15 a year or two ago.

I shot a short video of this doll the uploaded it on to TikTok and YouTube (which you can see below).

Cave Club Dolls at Walmart, October 25, 2020

Last month I was at Walmart when I saw this new doll line that really intrigued me. It’s called Cave Club and they consist of dolls who are dressed in caveman-era clothes and they have dinosaur and other prehistoric animal companions. They reminded me of The Flintstones.

I ended not buying any of them because I was purchasing other things at Walmart at the time and I had recently purchased a bunch of dolls for only $5 each from Five Below. At that time I was too overwhelmed with the other Walmart purchases and the doll buying spree to even consider adding the Cave Club dolls to my doll collection. I might buy one or two at some other time because they definitely look like they could pass as extras on The Flintstones.

Target, October 8, 2020

A few weeks ago I wrote about how I made a video for both TikTok and YouTube about some 65th anniversary Disneyland stuff that had arrived at the Target that’s located near my home. I took a few still photos of them.

There were some non-Disneyland stuff that I also noticed in that store but I didn’t include in that video since they weren’t even Disney related. There were a couple of Funko Pop commemorative Bugs Bunny figurines because this year is the 80th anniversary of that rabbit.

I also saw a Bob Ross action figure, which I thought was pretty cute.

I also took this shot of these Zuru Smashers Dino Ice Age surprise eggs. They are yet another line of toys inside of blind boxes that have become all the rage over the last few years. (Basically you don’t know what you get until after you’ve purchased the blind box and take it home.) I thought these blind box packages were pretty cute because they show a dinosaur claw emerging from out of each egg. I shot this photo and uploaded it on to Facebook for a friend of mine who is really into dinosaurs.

A Black Panther Action Figure That I Only Purchased For $5

I recently found this Black Panther action figure on sale at Five Below for only $5. This action figure is part of a line of Avengers action figures that have come out in recent years as tie-ins to the films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU).

I’ve only seen two films in the MCU in recent years mainly because of tight finances. One was the first Guardians of the Galaxy film. The other was The Black Panther. I really loved the latter because the story showed an interesting scenario of what if there had been an African country that somehow escaped being a European colony. Wakanda was portrayed as being a very advanced society that had the latest in technology yet the people still maintained their cultural heritage.

Chadwick Boseman was especially awesome in the lead role. Which was why I was so shocked and saddened when I learned about Boseman’s death three months ago. His death inspired me to buy the action figure when I saw it on sale for only $5 at Five Below.

When I removed the Black Panther from his box I was disappointed that the action figure only has four points of articulation. (Two at the shoulders and two at the thighs.) It would’ve been cool to put this action figure in a variety of different poses just like in the movie. If I had paid more than $5, I definitely would’ve been pissed off at the lack of articulation for what is supposed to be a superhero action figure. The Black Figure does have some interesting details in his costume, which I tried to capture in this video that I uploaded on to TikTok and YouTube.

Two Star Wars Dolls That I Got for $5 Each

I remember about a year or two ago there were a line of these dolls on sale in Target that were based on some of the memorable female characters from Star Wars. Each of them were packaged with a robot character and they looked like they were well-articulated. I wanted to buy a couple but my financial situation had grown dire and I felt that I literally could not afford to spend $25-30 for each doll.

A couple of months ago these same dolls arrived at Five Below for $5 each so I purchased two of them. One was Princess Leia and she was boxed with R2-D2. The other is Rey and she was boxed with BB-8. I really liked the quality of those dolls and their robot companions look nice as well. (No, they can’t move or make noises.) I shot a short video of these dolls that I uploaded on to TikTok and YouTube so you can see them for yourself.

Alice in Wonderland Doll

I purchased this doll at the Disney Store when I was at Tysons Corner Center in Tysons Corner, Virginia back in September. I really wanted this doll because I’ve always loved reading the original Lewis Carroll books and I loved watching the Disney version as a child. I was also thrilled because in recent years Disney seemed to be focused on releasing the Disney Princesses dolls and I think it’s pretty cool that the company has released a character who is not a princess at all.

Alice is about the same 1/6 scale as Barbie and she has many points of articulation. I think she is lovely. I made a short video of this doll that I uploaded on to TikTok and YouTube.

My New Snow White Doll

Here’s a doll that I purchased from the Disney Store at Tysons Corner Center in Tysons Corner, Virginia back in September. She is Snow White and she’s the same size as Barbie. She was on sale.

I purchased her because the doll brought back memories of the year that I dressed as Snow White for Halloween as a child. I’ve always loved the movie and I once even own the soundtrack album. My mother purchased the cheap Ben Cooper Snow White costume from Kresge’s in the old Harundale Mall. It consisted of a smock that had a print of Snow White’s dress on the front and a plastic Snow White mask. I remember sweating in that mask while I went out trick or treating but I still loved being Snow White for a night.

The doll comes with a plastic ring with a fake red diamond but the ring didn’t fit me at all. (It was definitely made for young children.) But the doll is pretty nice to look at and she has several points of articulation. I made a video slideshow of the doll that I uploaded on to TikTok and YouTube.