the doll games
shelley and pamela jackson

Yes. And so I’ve had to realize other parts of myself.

You don’t want to be Good B*****, that’s clear. So it’s between Bad B***** and Ken as your role model!

And I think I’ve somehow formed into the combination of the two: Lola Pound.

Lola Pound?

Lola Pound came out when I was visiting that girl in San Francisco, and I was just like [stupid Ken voice] "Uuuh" and then all of a sudden–

[Stupid Ken voice] "Hello, my legs will only move in two dimensions."

[Stupid ken voice] "It’s OK, it’s all right."– And then I had this tiny little phone book and all of a sudden I said, Oh, it needs a name. It said: Name. And I put "Lola... Pound". And I was like, Strange. So I was there in San Francisco going through this kind of horrible encounter and I keep looking at Lola Pound when I bring out my phone book and I’m just like, Lola Pound, Lola Pound. And I start realizing that Lola Pound has this incredible personality that wants to, like Lola Pound's already THERE somewhere, and I’m like, Oh, Lola Pound! And then I was talking to this girl, and I was being Ken, you know, standing in the middle of her room staring at the wall, with kind of a half smile on my face not knowing what to do, and she walks by and she’s like, "Are you OK," and I say, [small meek voice] "Oh yeah." [Laughs.] Poor Ken is stunned.

[Stupid Ken voice] "Yeah, I’m fine."

And then I’m–

[Stupid Ken voice] "Sure B*****, I’m OK."

Totally! And she’s like, "I am Bad B***** and you are a bore, get out of my house." I mean she didn’t actually say that, but... And then we’re talking later, I was lying on her floor, and I was being very nice and she was being kind of mean or distant or just saying the negative to everything I said positive, and all of a sudden Lola Pound says, [disgusted tone] Go to bed. She’s like, I’m sick of this, go to bed. And I said, "I’m going to bed." And that girl was like "Oh," [sweet mollifying noises]–and it just changed the energy entirely in the room. And I was like, Lola Pound is on my side, I like this! And that’s actually when I started this band with Serge and Mark; Lola Pound was up, she was singing–I mean, when I say "she" I’m making myself sound–

Sound like an insane person.

No, not insane! But I’m a great fan of multiplicity and I’ve done my own exploration of it–but I don’t think the word is multiplicity. I think there’s many parts to everybody, or at least there’s many parts to me, and Lola Pound was like inspiration in that, so we decided to call ourselves Lola Pound and the Loose Boys. So that’s a success story from what we were talking about!

That's great.Now earlier you were saying that the actual physical bodies of the dolls really affected how you felt about them. How did you feel about the weird B***** shape, the weird boobs, and the feet that couldn’t go flat...?

Definitely it was fun to stick B*****s in dirt, so their feet would disappear, they were the perfect little pointer things.

Yeah, that’s one thing I always thought about B*****, that she was like a weird tool. Like a scepter, or something to prod with.

The breasts–you know, the breasts were definitely weird, they were more like something you knocked on things.

They were hard and sort of one thing.

But I think I was kind of interested in them. Like, What are they? What do they represent? Not that I had that word at the time.

We didn’t have B*****s, because my parents thought that they were sexist, so we had these flat-chested dolls, but at a certain point we made these breasts out of clay and stuck them on the dolls, so that they could be sexualized.

That’s better!

It was also funny, because when they had sex, the breasts would get all misshapen, or they would come off, or they would get little bits of rug and cat hair in them, so we were constantly having to rebuild the breasts, there was this great attention to the shape of the breast, although they never looked right, because I don’t think we quite got the idea of the breast. They were too round and symmetrical, they didn’t actually–

They didn’t hang.

–come to a point or hang or anything. We didn’t understand anything about breasts until we had some.

Maybe that’s why men, who make fake breasts, make them look very unnatural.

Yeah, like drag queens, their breasts are always like under their chin.

I know. "Higher the better, higher the better, higher the better."