| Madame Alexander Doll Club Convention | |
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Well, I'm back from my first doll convention, Madame Alexander Doll Club's 2001 convention in Boston. I was terrified on my way out to it, and wrote to Chris and Denise from the About.com Doll Collecting Forum the night before asking for advice on dressing for dinner (since I was commuting, I didn't see how I could without carrying an extra outfit with me) and on carting stuff around. Mostly, I was looking for encouragement that everything would be all right, and I got it.
I did keep a convention diary, which I wrote in in spare minutes. But that linear account would go on forever, and not everything is interesting to everybody. So I've divided this into sections that might interest you. Some information, like the dinners and the people, will come through in the narrative.
The Special Events and The Loot (aka: Souvenir Dolls)
I went to most of the special event dinners. The following tells a bit about these events and the dolls and other Madame Alexander souvenirs that were given out or sold at those dinners.
Louisa May Alcott Lunch
The centerpiece dolls at the lunch were the Little Women, 8" dolls dressed for Meg's wedding: Meg (dark hair) in a pink organza gown, Amy (blonde), Beth (tosca), and Jo (brunette) in dove grey dresses trimmed with pink. These were sold to the table raffle winners for $65, which was also the case for all the 8" centerpiece dolls. At the luncheon, the one-of-a-kind doll, a dark haired Cissy suffragette, dressed in blue, with an elaborate hat, black boots, and carrying a Votes For Women sign, was shown. Also shown at the luncheon was the companion doll for the convention, Louisa May Alcott, 8", dark hair, dressed in green. The favor from the MADC was a little cape with hood and black lace gloves to go with the Louisa May Alcott doll.Jan Turnquist, an actress who portrays Louisa May Alcott professionally, entertained at the luncheon, and she was very good!
The Cissy Dinner
The Cissy tickets were not
printed correctly, so people were given temporary tickets, and everyone's name
had to be checked at the 
door. As a result, the banquet started and ended nearly
an hour late, which left all the people who had not been at the banquet waiting
an hour for the sales room to open for the first time.
The centerpiece was a Tosca Cissy with lots and lots of curls! I really wanted those curls, but, fortunately, did not win the table raffle, or I would have had to come up with $350 to pay for them! Her dress is light blue evening dress, and she has a "fur" stole, but, although the doll is gorgeous, I'm not totally fond of the outfit. Mary, a very nice woman who was also commuting in, won the doll, and we somehow managed to get all the Cissy boxes and all our other stuff down to where our husbands were due to pick us up. Those boxes are gigantic!
I really like my dinner doll. She has long dark red hair, worn in a 1940s style roll in the front. Her dress is also classic "New Look", lavender silk with darker lavender velvet trim, sleeveless, cocktail length, dropped waist, belting at natural waistline, with a matching bolero jacket and strappy silver slippers. Her only jewelry is pearl studs. The table favor, a matching pillbox hat and white gloves, completes the outfit. And the dress has a zipper in the back!
There was an anomaly doll, which someone returned. She has one green eye and one blue one. They auctioned her off at the closing banquet and she fetched $925!
Morning in the Park Breakfast
The centerpiece doll here was a dark-haired 8" doll in a print romper with a matching skirt over it. She is holding a doughnut and a takeaway cup. The table favor was a Madame Alexander porcelain hatbox with a little clock inside.
Isabella Stewart Gardner Tea
The dolls were 8" dolls dressed in Victorian suits and hats. The table favor from Madame Alexander was a Victorian apron and napkin set for an 8" doll.
The Wendy Travel Dinner
I didn't go to this one, but talked to another attendee, who told me that the doll was an 8" Wendy doll (of course) dressed as an aviator, with a tiny leather jacket. The centerpiece dolls were African-American with blonde hair, which, says Mary, is much more attractive than you'd think. The dinner dolls were the same, but with Caucasian skin tones.
The Fashion Doll Luncheon
This was the big Alex lunch that everyone was so excited about. The centerpiece doll was gorgeous: the prettiest special Alex I've seen. She was a brunette with an upswept hairdo, wearing a sweeping dark blue gown, trimmed at the hem with rhinestones. It zips up the back. The top of the dress has white pleated trim, and is just gorgeous. She is wearing silver slippers. She was a table raffle doll, and the winner paid $140 for her.
The luncheon doll is considerably less exciting, I think, although she has a lot of nifty features. She's blonde (my mantra throughout the convention was "I don't do 8" dolls." Right behind, though, is "I don't do blondes."), which pleased all the blonde lovers, since most of the dolls up to then had been dark haired. Her hair is long and straight, pulled back into a pony tail, and she is wearing a white, wrap around blouse, dark blue pants -- with zipper! -- and dark blue and white sandals. She comes with a white straw boater hat, trimmed in dark blue, and sunglasses. She is the first Alex convention doll to come with bendy knees.
Beyond the pretty dolls, things got ugly. When we got to our table (assigned) there was a woman waiting there to say that she would buy any table doll that anyone didn't want. The person who won the doll at our table was an Madame Alexander employee, who had paid to come to the luncheon. Later, somebody told me that Madame Alexander had sent 25 staff members up to the convention with instructions not to participate in the table raffles, as they were not full convention members. She was entitled to her table doll, because she had paid for it herself, and theoretically was entitled to enter her raffle ticket for the same reason. But she had not paid her own way to the convention, as all the club members had, and, supposedly, had been instructed not to enter the table raffles. So I don't know what to make of this.
But things were uglier at another table. A woman there had won the table doll, then mentioned that she thought she'd sell her. Another woman offered her $200 for the doll, and the woman refused, saying she expected to sell her for nothing less than $400 in her shop. I can understand the conflict there -- this collector just loved the doll, which the winner obviously didn't. But the winner wanted to maximize her profit, which could be viewed as business survival in one sense, or greed in another. It all sounds badly handled, and was obviously upsetting to people at that table.
And I was not the only one disappointed by the luncheon doll. The outfit was a big comedown, especially after the centerpiece doll. Someone who has come to many conventions told me she was very disappointed because so few of the dolls were dressed glamorously. She thought that a major reason people came to these conventions was to get special dolls in gorgeous gowns, and that, if the gowns weren't going to be there, there wasn't much point in coming.
I want to sell my doll: I much prefer the two I've ordered from the regular collection. Trouble is, everyone else may want to sell the doll, too!
The Banquet Dolls
The centerpiece dolls were
8" dolls dressed as one of 10 Revolutionary era women. There was a lot of
jockeying for those dolls, since 
not everybody liked every doll equally, with
swapping and some chaos resulting. The dinner doll is a sweetie and a keeper: a
dark-eyed, dark haired 10" Cissette, dressed as Abigail Adams in a pale
green overgown, trimmed with lavender embroidered flowers, cream colored lace,
and lavender bows, over a white underskirt, shot through with silver, and with
all the lacy undies you could want. Her hair is pulled up, and curls piled on
the top of her head.
Paper Dolls and other Madame Alexander Favors
Everyone received a little hat, made on the premises. The program book contains a set of paper dolls of the banquet centerpiece dolls. There was a Cissy paper doll, and a paper doll of the Abigail Adams convention doll. The convention pin is a scroll with the words "Remember the Ladies" on it: it came tied to a scroll with excerpts from Abigail Adams letter to John on the subject. The Cissy pin is a black and white hatbox, and the Alex pin is Alex in her regatta outfit.
Programs
There were dinner programs, but with the exception of the Louisa May Alcott program and a video, Remember the Ladies, which is about the First Lady dolls and was shown at the banquet, most were not very impressive. The project programs were not interesting to me as described, and cost money, so I didn't sign up. Most of those who did sign up did so to find projects to do with their doll clubs, and discussion afterwards indicates that, for the most part, they found the projects disappointingly simple. Most of the seminars received good reviews: Tim Alberts discussed doll fashion, there was a program on identifying Alexanderkins, one on rewigging Cissy, and one on the future of the company. They tended to be scheduled at odd times, opposite other things, and moved around, all of which made it impossible for me to attend any of them. The rewigging Cissy seminar was particularly popular, with many people afterwards describing the positively terrifying-sounding things they intended to do to their Cissys.
The convention was held in August, 2001.
Don't Miss Part II of Rene's Article: The Raffles, The Special Exhibit, The Competitions, the Alex Outfit Contest, Shopping and Much More!!
Part III: Photos From The Convention--See The Dolls!
Copyright Rene S. Mandel, 2001. All Rights Reserved.
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Denise Van Patten, © 2000. All rights reserved.
