Odds & Ends Around the Valley

Valley of the Dolls

When Misty Taggart was a little girl in east Texas, her grandmother took her to a doll tea in Dallas.

“I wasn’t sure what a doll tea was, or what happened at one, but I knew it was going to be a dress-up, special occasion,” she recalls.

And it was.

“My grandmother and I were met at the door of a beautiful old house by a lady in an old-fashioned dress. Then we were taken inside to see all the dolls and have tea and cookies.”

Taggart also remembers that it was around the holidays because there was a 10-foot tree in the living room, making the doll-filled house look like a wonderland. “It was a magical moment in a young girl’s life and something I will never forget,” she says now.

Taggart doesn’t know if doll teas--a personalized way for doll-makers to show and sell their products--were a phenomenon of the ‘50s, or of that part of Texas, but she thinks that it’s an idea whose time has come again.

Taggart, a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon show writer and playwright, has been making dolls for about three years, ever since she saw a magazine devoted to the craft while picking up the Hollywood trade publications at a newsstand.

“I saw this beautiful doll on the cover of the magazine and it brought back so many happy memories that I thought, ‘That’s something that I really ought to do.’ ”

So she did.

She buys an original mold from one of several artists whose sculptured work she admires, then re-creates the doll using liquid porcelain.

The dolls are all molded, cleaned, fired, hand-painted and fired again in Taggart’s studio, where she customizes each one’s hair, eyes and expression. Then they are dressed by a friend who is a clothes designer.

“It’s all sort of like Santa’s workshop,” she says.

Taggart makes a wide selection of dolls, ranging in price from $125 to $800, and what better way to introduce her work to the world than through a doll tea, she says.

So Friday through Sunday, about 125 girls and their mothers will, by appointment only, be attending their first doll tea at Taggart’s North Hills home, where she will meet them wearing an old-fashioned gown and invite them in for a look-see at the tree and the dolls, and to have tea and cookies.

She says she is making appointments from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. each day, and some appointments are still open. The response has been so positive that she may repeat it the next weekend if enough people want to come.

Taggart says the prices don’t seem to put parents off, and some order many dolls or have them customized.

“I have a friend who suggested I have birthday parties here and offer to make dolls for all the little girls attending. I thought $150 per child per doll might be a bit extravagant, but my friend didn’t seem to think so at all,” Taggart says.

Hello, Dolly

The Encino Village Antique Showcase, 16654 Ventura Blvd., is featuring the works of another San Fernando Valley doll-maker, Irina Lourier Dicterow of Sherman Oaks.

The Dicterow show is called “Snowmaiden,” featuring a scene from the Russian fairy tale, and will be on exhibit until Jan. 1.

Had it been autobiographical, it could have been called the “Show Maven” because we’re talking wonder woman here.

Dicterow has such an exotic past and relentless record of personal and familial overachieving that no matter what she chooses to create, it is just a small piece of a memorable mosaic.

The concert pianist, who is also a needlework portrait artist and fine-jewelry maker, was born in the Caucasus Mountains of southern Russia of a Viennese-Scottish mother who taught at the Moscow University of Journalism and spoke five languages. Her father, a Russian, was an engineering professor at Moscow University.

As a child, her life was a whirl of ballet performances and classes and the music of the European greats.

At the age of 10, when her parents divorced, she moved with her mother and sister to Toronto, where she studied piano, ballet, art and modeling.

Then, showing promise as a young pianist, she received a scholarship to study in New York with Josef and Rosina Lhevinne and was asked, once in New York, to accompany a young violinist in concert.

She shortly thereafter became Mrs. Harold Dicterow, wife of the man who would become the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s principal violinist, but resting on laurels was evidently not in her repertoire.

The couple raised two children in the Valley--the gifted violinist, Maurice, who is also a medical doctor, and the child prodigy, Glen, who went on to become the Philharmonic’s concertmaster.

While Irina Dicterow was the principal’s wife and the mother of two growing, fiddling children, she put her own concertizing on hold and picked up other creative pursuits.

Her portraits and drawings, of people such as former Los Angeles Philharmonic Musical Director Eduard van Beinum and ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, were frequently shown in local banks and other venues. Then came the drawing, jewelry and dolls.

One somewhat achievement-overloaded newspaper reporter once asked her what she did in her spare time.

Without missing a beat--but then in her family, how could she--she said she talked plants into growing.

Help Wanted

According to Los Angeles Toys for Tots coordinator Greg Plush, the unofficial motto for this year’s campaign is “Now More Than Ever.”

“It’s been a hard year financially for so many people that we have more children to give to this year, kids who will wake up Christmas morning without a present if we don’t reach our donation goal,” says Plush, a Marine Corps major.

Well, the folks at Magic Mountain are poised to do their part with their seventh annual toy drive Saturday and Sunday and Dec. 14 and 15.

Admission to the Valencia theme park will be free to anyone bringing a new, unwrapped toy valued at $10 or more.

Magic Mountain’s Bonnie Rabjohn says many local families turn out for this special event.

“It’s a real feel-good situation in that you are giving a toy to a child who wouldn’t otherwise get one, and you then get into the park free,” she says.

Mouse Trap

The new attraction at Universal Studios is a live version of the newly released film “An American Tail: Fievel Goes West.”

The first Fievel film made so much money that Universal couldn’t get the mouse up on the screen again fast enough. Universal figured that more of a good thing (meaning a second movie) was good, but that a new way to get more bucks was even better.

The newly designed attraction in the 2,500-seat American Tail Theatre has all sorts of interactive razzmatazz with which to interact.

James Stewart is heard doing the voice of Sheriff Wylie Burp, and Dom DeLuise is back playing Tiger.

Overheard

“I knew the party was doomed before it started when the baby pulled the champagne punch bowl off the table and the beagle ran off with the pate.”--North Hollywood woman to friend