When I was eight, I used to prepare my Oscar speech, and deliver it for my parents’ amusement. In it, I made sure to thank all the “little people.”
My parents asked who I was referring to, but I didn’t want to reveal my secret.
Until now.
The Little People were born of Fisher-Price toys and they came as sets in great diversity — animal figures (mostly dogs and cats), a play family, a fully serviced airport, camper, children’s hospital, farm, fire station, garage, school house, and lots more.
Something about their vibrant colors and simple painted-on faces, so smooth and shiny, became my obsession. I polished and arranged them in cohorts. I mixed and matched them — like fire station people could also be farmers if they wanted and children’s hospital people could visit the garage and school house people could take a trip from the airport to visit their friends in Peru.
I soon realized the Little People could actually grow themselves in my imagination, like mushrooms in the dark.
They took on the shapes of my day: school bus driver, librarian, hall monitor, piano teacher, babysitter, or our building superintendent who had an outsized wife and a tiny dog named Fluffy, a white poodle mix whose fur had turned sickly yellow because Mr. and Mrs. Superintendent smoked all of the time.
The more Little People I accumulated, the more I noticed that factions and nonsensical rules broke out, some that excluded, for instance, Gay Parisienne Barbie, who wore a (what would now be considered very cancelled) white fur stole, and my prized spring-mounted Wonder Horse, probably because she towered over them and I always covered her waxy plastic saddle with a “real” blanket at night, to make sure she didn’t catch cold.
Meanwhile, in hindsight, I fear the Little People were treated rather harshly. They were stuffed into their “village,” a cardboard box my mom lined with egg cartons so that they didn’t rub together. Stacked in egg cartons like a cattle in a car, they must have felt less special, and they weren’t having it.
Inside the stuffy confines of their cardboard container, they started mounting a rebellion.
The Little People wanted to be recognized and they were prepared to cast out all the other toys in favor of their right to existence, without consideration, without insight or context, without end goals … Fueled only by a molded plastic mind and sightless eyes that were set on achieving one thing.
Call it a conspiracy, if you will — that night I woke to the unmistakable smell of the Easy-Bake Oven and the incandescent sound of chanting — a funeral march? Yes. The Little People had encircled my bed, holding aloft Gay Parisienne Barbie in effigy. Some had little handmade signs that spelled out their displeasure in no uncertain terms, signs like “Give a Damn!”, “Stop the Stole!” and “Better Toys for Better Kids!” I quickly reached for my prime color markers and set about writing signage of my own; it was clear that our gap in understanding was wide, so this appeared to be the only way to deescalate the situation. “Why Are You So Angry?” I started with, followed by, “A Better End of the World is Possible” The Little People swarmed the bed, I could hear the gnashing of their invisible teeth. I leapt up and onto the back of my trusted Wonder Horse (whose name was Jane), her springs gyrating wildly as I bounced up and down, up and down, up and down …
To be clear: to this day, I can only assume their motives, and ultimately did put aside my differences with the Little People. I stored them away carefully in their cardboard village and my dad placed them high up on a shelf. There would be no further collusion. I’d outgrown The Little People and that, as they say, was that.
But still, I mourned them and my Oscar speech was meant as a solemn nod in Their Memory.
