Rosita Boland: Heads roll over a shared love of kitsch

Marie Antoinette resides permanently under my roof. She has a long red frock that comes off to reveal petticoats underneath, a garb in which I understand she was dressed when led to the guillotine. There is a tiny button on her back that you press and then – pop! – her head flies away from her little Made-In-China body.

I bought Marie Antoinette several years ago in a shop called Delirum in Ontario, Canada. I was visiting my friend Eileen, who was with me when I made this exquisitely kitsch purchase. Back then, Marie was sealed in a box, and there she remained for some years. I made a vow not to release her from her see-through plastic coffin and pop her head off until Eileen and her family came to visit me in Dublin.

Eileen and I had initially bonded over a shared love of kitsch. We met more than half our lifetimes ago. We had each been invited to the same party, and each of us turned up wearing fantastically hideous 1970s maxi dresses comprised of so much polyester they actually sparked electricity. “Not a natural fibre between us,” Eileen noted approvingly.

When Eileen moved to France, I often went to visit. Each trip revealed a new treasure she had found in one of the many braderies – flea markets – of Lille. For years, one of her most prized possessions was the trophy-like head of a plastic cow, which bore a close resemblance to the Laughing Cow of the famous processed cheese. It was a dig at the self-aggrandisement of the deer, stag, and elk trophy heads routinely displayed in big fancy houses. I continually coveted it myself, and envied her luck at this marvellous discovery.

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Cow head trophy

By then Eileen had met her life partner, Todo. She hung the cow head trophy on the front door of their apartment, where it greeted bemused visitors for years, until one day it mysteriously vanished. We both blame Todo, who was vocal about loving the cow’s head a whole lot less than we did, although to this day, he continues to protest his innocence.

The kitsch we treasure the most is the stuff we find “trawling” together, as we call our peregrinations of charity shops, and flea markets. There is literally nobody else with whom I can enjoy the hilarity of these hunts; outings which inevitably end up in a bar, where we admire our haul, to the frank astonishment of nearby curious onlookers. There is nobody else I can laugh with in the same way. We are the only people who speak this singular language: the smallest tribe in the world.

There was a vintage patchwork quilt of acrylic fabric found in a Toronto shop called Courage My Love, which we hauled around together for an entire day and then carried back in triumph on a Greyhound bus to the city where Eileen lives. There were many snow domes. There was a ceramic cheese dish, with a mouse on the lid. There were coasters of Benidorm. There is always strange china: offbeat commemorative plates being a particular favourite. “The exquisite survivors of someone else’s life,” as Eileen once put it.

There were weird demonic-looking little dolls, their stiff crinoline skirts made of beads. We found two together in the same market, one dressed in red, one in green, both with beaded bonnets, only one with hair. Eileen has the green one; I have the red, bald one. Later, she did some research and discovered they were from an American craft kit series in the 1970s, called “Lil’ Missy”. We call them our sisters; our mascots. If my house was burning down, that’s what I’d save. It represents the quintessence of our long friendship.

‘You fool’

In the times when we have been laid low while separated by an ocean, we have sent each other random parcels of kitsch to raise our spirits. I treasure a tiny jaunty reclining figurine of a boy, arm propped up on a pile of books, talking into a red analog telephone. It makes me laugh every time I look at it. I visited once, when my friend was having a rough time, and brought with me the treasure of a silver plush-textured money box in the shape of Jesus with a slot in his head to receive coins. It cheered my friend immediately, but I have regretted parting with it ever since. “How could you have let go of it?” Eileen wrote to me in an email not long ago. “You fool.”

Marie Antoinette was finally released from the box she came in, when Eileen’s family all came to visit me in Dublin some years ago. Her small children stood back and gawked as their mother and her friend fell around laughing as a long-dead French queen once more lost her head. That head could travel quite far through a room, depending on how hard you pressed the button. Todo proved an excellent executioner.

Since then, Eileen and I have performed a ritual each time we meet in Ireland. Marie Antoinette’s head must be popped on our first evening together, and land in a glass of bubbles. I haven’t seen my beloved friend for some years now, due to You Know What. But Marie Antoinette is patiently waiting, and her head will most definitely roll again some day.