Essays That Worked!

Dana Guterman '08
Princeton High School, Princeton, New Jersey

Paper Cuts

The woman standing before me had high, arched brows, doe-like eyes, and, lest I forget, pale green skin and hair. She threaded her locks with flowers and tattooed her arms with trees right before my eyes. I was enraptured. My mom leaned forward and retraced the woman's slight form in black ink. No Barbie doll ever compared to this.

Paper dolls are the one toy that seems to transcend time. I used to cut them out of glossy pages and watch as they came alive, each with quirks and faults and an endlessly fascinating wardrobe. But the ones in the stores were all so sterile and flat. I never understood the platinum blonde with the business suits in varying tones of gray, when there could be the blue skinned child from the stars. Where was the fun in normalcy? I didn't need an imagination to recreate reality.

And so it was on a two-by-three sheet of oak tag that I found everything. My mom, dad and I would sit down and divide it into three pieces, pick up a pencil, and make the illusory tangible. My lines were shaky and my proportions completely implausible, so I would dictate my thoughts to my mom and watch as she flawlessly created life. Even my dad, swearing that he wouldn't play paper dolls, ended up with an army of two-legged dragons, bug-eyed Martians, and the occasional grinning nymph.

I suppose the first creations were the fairies: delicate antennae, silken ballet slippers, and butterfly wings stenciled with a myriad of colors. Each was poised for a pirouette, standing on her toes. Each had her own quirks, her own predicaments-her own life. With them I could fly and dance without ever falling down. The limitations on my own life were gone, and I felt my imagination flourishing. These dolls soon befriended "the Holidays" - a series of women who epitomized everything from Hanukkah to Arbor Day. I liked to think that they spent all year planning for that one day, when they would unleash their souls and fill the entire world with the spirit of the holiday. They lived in a world that was so close to ours but never touching. My games were intricate and I would braid together their individual lives, tossing in shocking twists of fate and stunning conclusions. These celestial figures soon gave way to girls from foreign lands. I had a Japanese girl with yukatas and kimonos, an Indian girl with saris, an African girl who wore animal prints and had tiny braids woven close to her scalp. I knew their cultures by heart, and the fact that I might someday experience their lives firsthand captivated me.

The dolls moved closer and closer to my world, but never echoed my experience. I didn't want to be a pop princess or a dancer- I wanted to be a seraph, a mermaid, an elfin goddess with pointed ears and billowing cloaks. Through my paper dolls I could achieve anything and be anyone. I don't know when the last doll was made, or when I stacked them upon each other until all 127 resided in a cardboard shoebox instead of a magical forest. But I can still open the lid and be inundated with their versatile personalities, their individual cultures, and their fantastic passions. It's not memories that flood my mind, but new stories, new characters, new creations. From the fairies come my drawings and paintings of life and fantasy, of the lucid and the obscure. From the foreign girls comes a zeal for other cultures, a passion for the diversity of life that I constantly crave. Everything that I've gathered from a few sheets of poster board is still so far away- whether it's in miles, in years, or in blinks of the eye. Yet it's out of pure impossibilities that I beget myself.

Last Modified: Wednesday, September 05, 2007 16:09