Art Doll

From Plastic Tub

He comes in pumping pedals on a midsummer nights eve, screaming "Geronimo" and smashing the China. He receives a pair of golden spurs.

Doll was an eccentric inventor-explorer who became enamored of Accidental Associationalism late in life and devoted the better part of his adult years to founding a communal encampment based upon Wee-Wee. TerraWee lasted five scant years before being levelled by the BATF in 1995. Not to be beaten, Doll decided to construct a giant blimp and sail it to Africa. He died somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean in June, 2003.

Having spent a promising academic career at Cornell University, Doll advanced quickly through the ranks of NASA, the agency's wunderkind until he became obsessed with the planet Saturn. He called it a "pancake interrupted." Until he started claiming that visitors from the stars presented him a platter of pancakes one summer night, his colleagues found it merely an amusing pecadillo. After he came out in favor of extraterrestrial life, however, he was avoided, then shunned, then fired.

Only a little bitter, Doll set out to found a commune based upon space observation and the communal models communicated to him by his frequent pancake-weilding visitors. Dismissed by armchair sociologists--of which there are many--as another simplistic Choco Cult, TerraWee was in fact much more complex. Inspired by one part Frank Herbert's Bene Gesserit and five parts whimsy, TerraWee was both a laugh riot and serious domain for astronomical and later, psychic research.

The commune boasted a state of the art research facilty in chemistry and biology, a canteen, a bar, a theater and of course, a magnificent set of telescopes. Money was earned through tours and informal educational sessions by donation only. Unfortunately, a lot of this money was spent on chemical and rocket-building materials the Clinton administration found threatening. It was infiltrated by the BATF and ultimately raided on July 16, 1995.

No one was killed, but TerraWee was levelled and burned to the ground. Doll was tried but found not guilty, although severe restrictions were placed on his liberty. Confined to his farm outside of Dayton, Ohio, Doll spent the rest of his days constructing the blimp that would carry him to his death, many would argue the happiest man alive.

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Non Canonical Text

"..somewhere between the zeitgeist and the fleeting floats the likes of that unflappable Art Doll, neither here nor there, yet forever rising in that grand, unsinkable blimp..." -- Aerospace Today. Sign O' the Times. November 27, 2094.

"Art Doll Lives!" -- graffitti scrawled on a stall door in the Denver Airport.

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