Mannequin. Probably not really about what you think.

Miss Edith will cheerfully admit to having a little thing for Andrew McCarthy, star of one of the most under-rated movies of the 1980s (Heaven Help Us, which also starred Mary Stuart Masterson, John Heard, and Donald Sutherland, if memory serves; it also features very nice turns by Jennifer Dundas and Wallace Shawn – why don’t people talk about Jennifer Dundas’ film work more? She always played genuinely interesting kids – I admire her from afar, though I don’t follow her stage work much). Andrew McCarthy was the guy I liked best in St. Elmo’s Fire; he was the obvious choice if you were, like Miss Edith, one of those punk-goth-pretentious teenage girls who found Rob Lowe just boring, too pretty to take seriously.

One of the things I liked best about Andrew McCarthy was that he starred in a movie of a book I loved. The movie was called The Beniker Gang, and I’ve never seen it, actually – unfortunately for me – but the book it’s based on, Dear Lola, was one of my favorite YA books when I was a kid. I still re-read it fairly regularly. Its author, Judie Angell, was hands-down one of my favorite YA writers, and I have kept copies of her books all these years. I know it’s silly but I always thought Andrew McCarthy earned points for being in a movie based on one of her books. Had they ever made a movie of Ronnie and Rosey, he’d’ve made a good Rosey, too.

For all my affection for Andrew McCarthy, though, I’ve never been able to sit through one of his most popular movies, Mannequin. I just have never cared for this bit of fluff.

The reason I’m bringing up all this nostalgia is that I recently stumbled on a website that made me crow with joy – it made me wish I owned a clothing boutique and were a rich woman so that I could justify spending lots of money with these people. There’s a company called DecoEyes that makes replicas of early-to-mid-20th century mannequins, mostly busts. (As Auntie Mame says to a befuddled Patrick, “That’s the head, you know.”) If you go to their website, you’ll see something that may bore you or it may creep you out, I don’t know, but if you’re like me, you’ll just sort of sigh and sink into your chair and fall into a kind of daze… As I say, I wish I had a reason to do business with these people, but since I don’t, I just wanted to thank them for their work and their website, which has made me, for no good reason, very happy.