Recently, to feed my Gosling-film quota, I saw Lars and the Real Girl, in which a 27 year-old man presents a blow-up doll as his girlfriend. In the film, to curb moral turpitude, the doll is provided her own, separate room and board. Which recalls Charlie McCarthy, the famous Edgar Bergan’s doll, who was similarly equipped with such friendly accoutrements. A Slate article from last year discusses the intrinsic creepiness–or not?–of ventriloquism:

“While the ventriloquist’s dummy merely embodies the extension or expression of the ventriloquist’s own personality,” writes Valentine Vox, author of I Can See Your Lips Moving, a history of ventriloquism, “it is evident that many artists develop a certain attachment to their figures.” For the world-famous Charlie McCarthy, Edgar Bergen maintained a separate room in his house, with a bed, writing desk, and wardrobe. British ventriloquist Arthur Prince was buried alongside his favorite puppet, Jim, in 1948. When Sally Osman, a singer, filed for divorce from ventriloquist Herbert Dexter, she named his puppet, Charlie, as a co-respondent—charging in court that Charlie had shrieked cutting insults during her stage act and even physically abused her.

I know I’ve already gone into the deep weirdness of my childhood, including my “backwards phase,” but I haven’t yet mentioned those certain months in my early double digits when I thought I was a young, female Mr. Bergan. If I didn’t suffer this ambition, I probably would have been aphasic anyway, but I truly lived a monastic life for the purposes of developing what the Greeks called gastromancy. I didn’t have a homunculus picked out, exactly, because to me the real thrill of it lay in the ability to throw one’s voice and look innocently around. I could never make eggs disappear into kerchiefs or make the nine of spades appear in someone’s hand, but still I longed for some kind of legerdemain. Did any of you ever meet success as a ventriloquist, or otherwise have an infatuation with a doll?