C'mon 'n' play! - wooden toys

PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND, 1972

THIS IS RIDICULOUS. I'm standing on the corner of Thayer and Angell streets, up the hill by the college, a boxful of toys spread along the top of a wall.

"Wooden toys!" I'm shouting "C'mon and play!" I feel sort of naked, like an exhibitionist, showing off my playthings, smiling like an idiot. OK, here come some kids.

"Hey guys, c'mon and play." I've got some kid toys in the kit, good masses-in-motion stuff.

"Can you do this?" I ask, nicking my wrist so a small tethered ball jumps in and out of a hoop.

"Neat! Let me try." There. I've snagged some kids. Now I'm not some weirdo soliciting on a corner. Now this spot is a playground.

"So what's this, mister?" This kid's got an oh-yeah-show-me kind of look. He's pointing at a carved lizard about three inches long. Its head and tail are cantilevered over short legs.

"That's a LEAPING LIZARD," I tell him, as I smack down on the end of its tail with the edge of my hand. The lizard jumps up in the air about a foot, somersaults, and lands on its feet.

"All right!" The kids applaud. Passersby give us curious glances.

"Join the fun!" I beckon. "There's something here for everyone." A guy in a tweed jacket slows to check us out.

"Such as?" he asks. Leather elbow patches, probably Brown faculty

"How about this item, professor?" I hand him a wooden leaf, hinged to a board.

"What is it?" He gives me a quizzical look. I shrug. "Play with it. See what it does." He shakes the board and the leaf turns over.

"There. You've TURNED OVER A NEW LEAF. He groans.

"Yeah, and this is a LEAPING LIZARD," the Missouri kid chimes in. He's caught the spirit.

"What's this then?" the professor asks, picking up a carved man about four inches tall, wearing what looks to be a red beanie. The hat jiggles.

"No." He gestures me to wait. "Let me guess." He turns the man upside down and the hat slides out of a hole. It is actually a sausage-shaped object.

"Bologna," he pronounces. "FULL OF BOLOGNA!" I nod sagaciously. Now I'm whirling another device over his head, enticing others to join us.

"What's that thing?" A lady with a twinkle asks.

"This?" I look at it uncertainly. "Perhaps this gentleman can tell us." The professor looks up from his musing.

"Hmmm." He squints thoughtfully. The kids giggle. The gizmo in question has what looks like a six-inch baseball bat set at ninety degrees to the handle. As I rotate my wrist, the bat swings round in a circle. Once every revolution the bat hits a small bell hanging from a bracket.

"Ding. Ding. Ding." I'm cranking and grinning, starting to relax. The crowd is thickening up nicely.

"My God!" blurts the professor. "It's a DINGBAT!" Everyone laughs.

Laughter is infectious. Get a few folks laughing on a sunny corner, and you'll soon draw a crowd.

The gentle jostling along my wall has driven me to the periphery. The kids are explaining things to newcomers, A bystander beards me.

"Got any pigs?"

"You mean do I go HOGWILD?" He smiles.

"Actually," he nods toward the crowd, "I was thinking of HOGWASH." I stick my tongue out at him.

"As it happens," I squeeze through the press and come out waving a toy, "there's this." I hand it to him. Sitting on a track is a wheeled pig with tusks. At the end of the track is a wall.

"I don't get it," he says.

"Tip it," I suggest. He does so. The pig races down the track and slams into the wall.

"It's a CRASHING BOAR," I whisper.

"Oh, Jesus. I've got to have it. How much?"

"Eight bucks?"

"Done." He digs for his wallet. Onlookers are rubbernecking. What did we miss?

"It's a CRASHING BOAR," the new owner proudly demonstrates, to a chorus of groans.

I've been scanning the mob. Today's circus must look especially innocent. There are two little old ladies watching from the outskirts. Old ladies are the most timid about street peddlers.

"May I show you something, ladies?" I ask politely.

"Why, yes. Is that a giraffe I see there?"

"Sure is." I dodge into the fray. "Excuse me, gang. These ladies would like to play with a giraffe." The old girls are grinning when I hand it to them.

"Oh. He's lovely." The lady holding it swings its legs. "Look, he runs."

"Yes, but he's young, and he tends to fall down," I point out.

Now the other lady is stroking the giraffes neck.

"Could I take him home with me?"

"Only if you give him a good home," I chaffer.

"Oh, yes. I promise." She tells me her name is Mrs. Conant, and she lives alone, but now she will have a giraffe for company.

What can I say? I played with wood in my shop, trying to capture the lope of a giraffe, and this lady has brought my work to life in a very different way.

OUR CAPACITY to project private material onto a toy in our hands continues to amaze me. It starts in infancy. A child shakes a rattle, learns what it does and how to do it, then plays at it, for the mere pleasure of mastery. Jean Piaget, the Swiss child psychologist, tells us the child acquires thereby "a feeling of virtuosity or power." In the world of child's play, ego dominates the universe, and it feels good. Thus empowered, the child begins to transform things in this play universe. A block of wood becomes a truck. "VAROOM!" We encourage this symbolic play, this free manipulation of objects and ideas, by giving the child a toy truck. What magic! The child knows that anything can be a truck in make-believe, but here is a little bit of pretend that looks just like the real thing. By this act of reduction we conspire with the child's makebelieve. We put the world in her hands.

But a child's life is not all playtime. Her ego doesn't rule the real world. We don't lose the gift of makebelieve as adults. Not only do we continue to symbolically manipulate the universe in the mind's eye, we also continue to invest objects with symbolic identities. It still startles me, though, when someone takes up a carving of mine and it becomes a numinous symbol in their world. I merely made a plaything, but Mrs. Conant found a friend.

PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND, 1974

Another sunny day on the corner. I've been working this pitch for three years now, whenever I have a boxful. It takes a critical mass of toys to get people playing. Thirty is my ambition: not too much to lug, enough to make a show, you can sell some without looking empty, and that's about as many toys as I can conjure up in a good week. A fair amount of my production is orders, or targeted shots. I'm driving the pig man about nuts. He can't resist a pig pun, and has taken to slipping by across the street lest I empty his pockets. Today it's A PIG IN A POKE: being a fist with extended index finger on a long arm. In the hand is a piglet. I'll spot him today.

Other folk have other fancies. I've got a new magic wand for Karl, our resident occultist. To open locks, this time: it looks like an elegant key. Soliciting make-believe from passing strangers rarely stops being fun. Oh oh, here comes the lovely Lucy.

Did I say soliciting? Lucy fancies herself SENSUOUS ROMANCE INCARNATE. She's fun to play with. She never visits when there's a crowd. Our consultations must be private.

"You happy today, Lucy?"

"Ohhh." A lilting sigh. "I don't know." She idly pokes at an EGG ON YOUR FACE, and the egg rolls around on the face.

"I've got something in the box for you," I tell her. Her eyes play hide-and-seek. Now I'm teasing, pretending interest in a NOSE TO THE GRINDSTONE.

"Will you show me?" she whispers. Silently I slide back the wooden top of the toybox, and bring out a cherry mermaid.

"O my!" Lucy gushes. She fondles the oiled wood. "But I don't have any money today." Her eyelids flutter.

And so it goes. I'll keep the lovely's mermaid for show, until some loverboy wants to charm her. Meanwhile we both had a bit of melodramatic fun.

There are all sorts of players. The street people have dramatic flair. Jimmy Flowers always makes a great scene about me stealing his pitch. I try to have a wooden flower to punctuate these encounters with. Musicians know all about play, and enjoy trading fantasies. I usually have a noisemaker as a come-on, and the musicians turn them into instruments: cook up a tune. Today's noise is a QUACK. It's a duck with a stethoscope who squawks when you blow up his tail.

Other passersby are playing at being serious. The BIG DEALS like to haggle. If I see them coming, my asking price doubles.

"What do you mean? Five bucks!" Outraged "I'll give you a buck and a half."

"Four dollars. Where else you gonna get one?" These guys travel in groups and perform for each other.

"I'll pay two, and it's too much."

"Wait a minute now. Maybe I have a better toy for you." I dig in the box. "Here." I hand him a carved ice skate.

"What's this?" He asks. I wink at his buddies.

"A CHEAP SKATE. One buck."

Then there are the moralists. My favorite is the Christian Brother who herds a flock of schoolchildren past me. His game is HOLIER-THAN-THOU.

"Children! Don't pay any attention to that filthy hippie. Come, children." He's a wonderful source of inspiration. I made a bent-over nun who gets booted by a great foot and falls on her face. I was ready the next time Brother Holy came by.

"Look, kids! KICK THE HABIT!" I've been carting around a little monk in a cage (BE YOUR BROTHER'S KEEPER) for weeks, waiting for the flock, but I think he's changed their route.

"There you are!" That booming voice has to be Stanley "I've been looking for you all week."

"Hi Mr. Blitz. Got some new ones?" S. Blitz has a new young wife, and their joy is insulting each other. He brings me lists of rude puns, and usually convinces me to make one.

"Yeah. Some good ones, but this I gotta have." He's made a sketch. It's a donkey in an elevator.

"What's that?" I puzzle.

"UP YOUR ASS!" he booms.

I DIDN'T SET OUT to make wooden puns. My first toys were the usual: trucks and trains and planes, puzzles and blocks, pulltoys and pushtoys, yo-yo's and hoop-tosses, little play figures (Goldilocks and the Three Bears, with a table and bowls). But my own make-believe kept injecting adult material into the work. Then these street games of "what if?" showed me other worlds of adult pretend.

Designing playthings is a game everyone is expert at. Engineers from the college, full of mechanical whimsy, stopped to play. So I started tinkering with devices--cams, linkages, geartrains--breaking the toys down into mechanical elements, then constructing new combinations. Other people began to tell me what their dream toy might be. Just in fun. It could be a small scene or figure out of a private tale: a little floating island with a cottage and trees and a boat, for musing in the bath, perhaps; or a pipe, where the bowl is a campfire surrounded by a ring of elves. Alfresco players offered me bits and pieces of their imaginings, and I cobbled them together in wooden combinations. This corner game is full of wordplay, so it was inevitable that the words ended up in the toys.

Taking up something of the real world, abstracting it into a word, is the trick of language. By naming it we raise it to the level of spirit. That's what imagination is: the transformation of reality into images we can manipulate in our minds. A very useful sort of make-believe. We can play "what if?" with abstractions without getting tangled in the limits of material reality.

Heady stuff for a toymaker. Tinkering with the bits and pieces, I get it backward, of course. I take an abstract image, realize it in wood, and it turns into a bad joke. MAKING ENDS MEET becomes a bent-over couple who bump backsides. Turning the trick of language inside-out, realizing our verbal images, makes us laugh--and a few bucks for the gypsy toymaker.

ST. JOHN'S, NEWFOUNDLAND, 1977

I'm futzing in the toyshop with Seth, our one-year-old, playing at my feet. Every toyshop should have a resident free spirit. In theory I'm constructing a CUTTING RED TAPE for our local MP. Actually I'm watching an uninhibited toy designer at work. Seth has taken a wooden dumptruck and is VAROOming it around. Already I've added big knobbly wheels to the truck, in my head, so the clatter will echo Seth's VAROOMS. Now he upends the truck and begins to plow a pile of blocks. Eureka: a dump body which flips over the cab to become a plow and front-end loader!

It's OK for kids to do this stuff, but grown-ups? Last month I had a show at the provincial art gallery. The curator wanted "kids' toys," and I devised 50 good-sized playthings, enough to turn a gallery space into a playroom. When I was setting up, Seth was playing with some of the toys. A guard came up and said, "No, no, little boy. You mustn't touch," Seth looked puzzled. I had to explain that these were really Seth's toys, and we wanted everyone to play with them. The next time I saw that guard, he was down on his knees with a mob of kids around him. He was showing them two dalmatians driving a fire engine

The local ART critic was outraged. This sort of thing has no place in an ART gallery. The ART game has very strict rules. When adults play with abstract visual concepts and images, it must be in a hushed space with solemn ritual: cucumber sandwiches and the incantation of critics.

BOWDOINHAM, MAINE, 1987

Still making toys. Virtually all my playthings are commission pieces now. The toy design game is a ritual dialogue, Someone will contact me and we verbally play with images and concepts. As we bat an idea back and forth, the shape of the message begins to clarify. At a certain instant we both see it. Then it's my job to realize our play image.

Many players come back for more fun. One couple bought symbolic toys for each other during their courtship. For a wedding present for him, she had me caricature her early self. She had been a nun. I carved a very devout Sister in wimple and habit, with her hands together in prayer. When you pulled a string in back, she threw open the habit and was stark naked, except for rather kinky boots. Her tickled husband, a lawyer, was not content to let her have the last laugh. He soon commissioned a barrister in robes, showing off his (legal) briefs.

Last Christmas these playful lovers envisioned an image of themselves on their dream boat. The barrister has had a lifelong ambition to own a Concordia yawl (a line of yachts begun with the Java fifty years ago). They decided on THE OWL AND THE PUSSYCAT. I made a pea-green Concordia on which a very stuffy owl, in a loud vest, is strumming a . small guitar. He makes furtive glances at Ms. Puss. She's in a decollete gown, and idly licks her breasts while giving him the eye. The whole thing works by twitching the pussycat's tail. White magic is not dead. The owl called excitedly in March. He'd just found an old painting that he owned was worth a lot of money. He sold the painting and immediately bought Java, which was up for sale. SHAZAM!

But is it still play? One of our nephews came to visit last summer. With the devastating frankness of a 17-year-old he said, "Uncle Bryce, your toys aren't as playful as they used to be. I mean they're beautiful and clever and all, but they're not as much fun."

He's quite right in one sense. The crude carvings and primitive devices he remembers from the early seventies gave the imagination more leeway. You had to imagine what the object was. Just as a block of wood can be any truck in child's play, so can the crudest image symbolize the heart's desire. My caricatures now look more like the people and things they symbolize But there is more play within each piece, I hope. My toolkit of whimsical details is immeasurably bigger, and spills over into the work. The arch of an eyebrow, or a back, is imagery at play. The finished toy may embody a private joke, which is less accessible than a broad pun, but it's still just in fun. When a piece works, it still carries you away to make-believe. And the process of composing the piece is still a matter of playful tinkering with bits and pieces in the hand, and in the mind's eye. The game's the same, it's just that the product has grown up.

The child's play in each of us matures, turns to subtle details: a wink and a nod. We learn to perform adult roles without giggling, and call our playfulness "art," or "design," or "invention," or "creative thought." There is certainly a danger of smothering play in a rigmarole of style, or formal limits. Too many rules can crush the joy in any game. When we are adamant that there is only one way to do something, one way to think, we've lost our adaptibility. That's where play saves us. There's always a child at our knee asking the imponderable question, an Einstein out there juggling the basic concepts, or a child's voice in us whispering "what is it?"

COPYRIGHT 1987 Point Foundation
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