Good help is hard to find. April 16,2025
Dressing Tookie is a full-contact sport. Her arms must be removed and reattached for every outfit change. Sometimes I remember where I put them. Sometimes I find an arm an hour later behind a chair. Her hands fall off constantly and have a special talent for rolling into places only accessible with yoga-level flexibility or a broom handle.
Pants? Don’t even get me started. Changing her pants requires full body disassembly, the patience of a saint, and some Cirque du Soleil-style limb weaving to get everything back where it belongs.
And then there’s the light. It shifts minute by minute, changing the fabric colour that the camera captures. Just when I think I’ve nailed the shot, the sun hits a new angle and suddenly Tookie ls wearing something that is unrecognizable.
But eventually I get the photo, isolate the image in Photoshop, and voilà—a small victory in the ongoing saga of mannequin wrangling.
It’s a slow, oddly acrobatic, occasionally frustrating process… but it’s also kind of wonderful. And frankly, it beats watching the news.
Grateful for the chaos and for Tookie, who’s held together by love, tape, and the will to model on.