My Story: Kid Kore Dolls

Written by my sister:

 

“Say cheese!” A snapshot. A moment captured in time. It was summer 2002 and my sister and I, her nearly 11 and myself 15 and a half, were asked to pose in our aunt and uncle’s hot tub. Bashful of our ill-fitting bathing suits, we crouched so that only our faces were showing over the edge of the tub and held our dolls, also in old swimsuits, so that they too were only showing their faces. My sister held her Sparkling Jasmine while I held my Poodle Katie, made by Kid Kore. I never actually found the photo. Not long before she passed away, our mom finished a computer course, for which she took the picture. I believe the candid was one of many that she took for a powerpoint. I went through all her books and binders from the class several times in the years after her death, and was unable to find the photo itself, nor a disk it may have been saved on. However, I see that picture, and many others, in my mind whenever I look at Poodle Katie.

 

The journey didn’t start or end with that Poodle Katie. Our interest in Kid Kore blossomed more than a year earlier, shortly before I started 7th grade. Our Kid Kore phase was at its peak during a few years when everything around us was constantly changing and I realized, years later, that part of why I clung desperately to Katie for so long is because she was my constant, bridging the gap between worlds.

 

When we bought our first My Big Sister set featuring Kelsey and Jodi, in which the dolls wore leopard print fashions, my Memere still lived in her own house, the one in which I stayed many nights with her and Pepere. She took us out shopping and said she couldn’t buy us each a doll and McDonalds, but we told her we were happy sharing the eight dollar set of Kelsey and Jodi. We took them back to her house and admired them. I still remember thinking their packaging smelled like McDonalds--a weird greasy sort of smell--and admiring how the company was thoughtful enough to give each doll a pair of panties under her skirt. I have a vague image in my mind of playing with them in Memere’s living room. We got another My Big Sister set, dressed as cowgirls, shortly thereafter. Here, the snapshot captured in my brain is of us with both sets of dolls, as well as a hand-me-down Jodi which Shelly had had for several years already, in our sandbox. Not long after that, I remember helping our parents set up a yard sale and Memere coming to stay with us.

 

During the 2000-2001 school year, we instated a Barbie boycott and told Mom we no longer played “Barbie'' but “Kid Kore dolls” and were interested in all things clone or, as we called it, “fakie.” Over the months, we acquired quite a few My Big Sisters sets and, one day, Shelly decided to try Katie. She picked a cute, redheaded Katie in bumblebee overalls. Shelly lost interest in Katie and gave her to me, but, during the beginning of our Kid Kore phase, my world centered around Jodi. I thought she was the cutest thing and I was obsessed with our first store-bought Jodi, the girl in the leopard print dress. Whenever I heard the song “Happy Together,” I thought of my Jodi doll and, I admit, she pops into my mind if I hear that song on the radio today.

 

That winter, we developed a fascination with a game we called “Boarding House,” in which all our Kid Kore dolls lived in Shelly’s old, wooden dollhouse. At the time, I had two Katies--our first in the bumblebee overalls and the Winter Wonderland Sisters at Home doll. They lived together on the top floor of the house and, I think, this is where my mind shifted from “Jodi” to “Katie.” I remember being so absorbed in the “Boarding House'' game that we barely reacted when Mom told us our guinea pig Tina had died.

 

Spring brought a new era--Kelsey (one of them anyway) got married to a Fashion Corner Wedding Day doll we named “Jonathan Luck.” We spent ages planning the wedding. I have many snapshots in my mind of us preparing for the event--making paper table settings and food, planning the wedding party and the wardrobe, spending hours making paper decorations on the deck--but no recollection of the actual wedding. A new era began with Jonathan and Kelsey (not sure which, probably varied) being a devoted couple. At some point during this era, they moved into our Real Friends dollhouse, purchased at Toys R Us. I still remember ogling it in the aisles. We had also purchased the Real Friends Deluxe Bath & Spa and Kelsey and Jonathan would help Jodi(s) take a bath and make sure all the kids went to bed before climbing into the hot tub themselves.

 

One night in spring 2001, Shelly and I were interrupted during a fight over an American Girl catalog to have a family meeting. Mom had been diagnosed with cancer. We both vividly remember taking a couple of our Kid Kore dolls and our Camp-N-Go Tent (which was compact when folded) to one of Mom’s appointments and playing with it in the waiting room. Most of my dolly memories from that spring and summer, however, are of Molly and Bitty Baby, so the mental images of Kid Kore dolls sort of fade in and out when I look back on that time.

 

Shelly began to drift away from Kid Kore and veer back to Barbie at some point when I was in eighth grade. We both did. However, for some reason, it was Katie, not Jodi, that I held onto, even after the Kid Kore phase ended. I remember this clearly because of Christmas 2001. Shelly and I were bent on using our own money to buy gifts for our family members, including each other, that year. We pooled our money to buy Dad a hammer and Mom a bench to put her ceramic mice on. We bought Memere some angel figurines. I bought Shelly a Kid Kore Kelsey that came with a lot of outfits, as well as a few books on Egyptian mummies. She bought me the Winter Wonderland Riding Fun Katie and Jodi set and a separate Katie, a Katie’s World doll in an orange dress and pink jacket. Another mental image of that holiday is the Katie’s World doll, who has dark skin and, at the time, crimped hair, wearing the other Katie doll’s red winter jacket. Because I associate her with this memory, I named her “Holly” as an adult. In my memory of that time, I was, for some reason, still really enjoying Katie even though I had little that actually fit her (compared to Jodi’s more extensive wardrobe). Katie was my main character in some games in which the other players were Barbies.

 

That winter, Shelly and I began a game in which Shelly was playing with her Disney Jane doll and I was playing with my Christmas Katie (aka Holly) as her little sister. For some reason, the game went from Jane being a beautician, working out of her home, to--gasp!--they had to flee for their lives in Jane’s friend Ariel’s camper. The infamous “Camping Game” went on for MONTHS, we even played it for a number of days when we were both home sick from school (I was actually sick, but having too much fun playing dolls to really want to go back to school and poor Shelly was mostly staying home because she had a scary teacher). In the end, all the players got switched out. I started playing with Shelly’s School Photographer Becky doll and got bored of Holly (I had her decide to seek refuge in an imaginary country called “Fakia”). However, one night, partway through this never-ending doll game, we went with our parents to Home Depot for bathroom supplies (Dad intended to build a bathroom downstairs) and to Walmart, where I bought my first Poodle Katie and Shelly bought a Pretty Princess Barbie, whom she named Crystal. I vividly remember putting Katie and Crystal in the new, clean, and waterless toilet when we got home. I also remember adding them to the “Camping Game.” When the “Camping Game” finally ended, I kept playing with, not only Becky, but the Poodle Katie as well. I became obsessed with the new Katies, all of which came with dogs and dog supplies. I bought a couple more over the next few months.

 

The day Mom asked us to pose in our aunt and uncle’s hot tub was probably only a few weeks before Mom passed away. We went with Mom and Auntie Kim to the beach and Dad and Uncle Ray went out on the boat. Shelly and I went into the hot tub and, I imagine, that night went like many others that summer--us having dinner on Auntie Kim and Uncle Ray’s deck before taking the long drive home.

 

It’s weird the things you remember and the things you don’t. If you asked me to describe summer 2002 and what we did, I remember a lot of random things. We spent a lot of that summer with that aunt and uncle (not related by blood, it was Mom’s best friend and her husband). I remember Shelly carrying around her Sparkling Jasmine doll and her Hello Kitty purse (which we used to bring Katie and Jasmine into the movies). The last few weeks, I remember spending a lot of time at the Wendy's drive thru or in Wendy’s because, after visiting Mom in the hospital, Dad didn’t feel like cooking. And for some reason, I remember him kicking aside our Kelly Playground to get into the laundry room. Honestly, that summer was a blur. It went from Mom being in remission at the beginning of the summer, to her going back to the hospital on July 5th, to her being home again, to her being back in the hospital…then, she was gone. It was over, in the blink of an eye.

 

Shelly and I dove further into the dolls and became more clingy to one another than ever. We had already gotten to the point where we didn’t like inviting other people over or going to other people’s houses. We already had a secret language--literally--and a thousand inside jokes, made up people and places, and memories that no one else would understand. However, being that only a few kids in our school had lost a parent and middle school kids aren’t really equipped to deal with it, most of our friends didn’t act appropriately and Shelly and I withdrew further into ourselves. Dad’s way of dealing with it was to spend most of our time on the go. He’d come home from work and find some excuse to get out of the house. He was into what he admitted was “monetary compensation” and we spent a lot of time, over the next decade, toy shopping and eating out. Memere had trouble dealing with it too and there were a lot of arguments, which led to her moving into her own apartment.

 

In those years when Dad took us toy shopping, I became more into Katie. Kid Kore Katie was my “go to” for several years anytime we were at a department store. Dad must have bought me close to fifty! My favorite, Poodle Katie, broke shortly after Mom died and I dragged poor Dad to many stores looking for a replacement. (I didn’t know how easy it was to rebody her back then.) Fittingly, I opened my second Poodle Katie at Auntie Kim and Uncle Ray’s house and still remember that vividly. I also remember putting Katie in Collie Katie’s outfit and taking her to a movie with Dad while Shelly went to a friend’s house. Dad didn’t know much about dolls, but he knew I loved Katie. I remember him telling me “I’m happy for you” when I unearthed a couple Kid Kore Katies in a bin from a yardsale in 2011. We spent a lot of time thrifting with Dad in the last few months of his life. It was like we ended our days of just the three of us the same way we began them, always looking for a reason to venture out and hunting for bargains.

 

Most of the Kid Kore dolls we had in my teen years are long gone. Their hair was poor quality and Shelly didn’t know nearly as much about hair restoration in 2011 as she does now. However, I could not help but want to rebuild our collection, buying, not just Katie, but Kelsey and Jodi and even characters we didn’t have before as well. Every time I've gotten something new--whether it's as substantial as a real Kid Kore guy doll or as small as an accessory that goes to one of the dolls--I feel like I'm fourteen again, building our Kid Kore world. I’m looking, not only to replace some of our old dolls, but to get some new ones too and have new adventures, new memories. These dolls are too much part of who I am as a collector for me not to actively seek more.

 

The images flicker past, ever changing--Memere’s old house, us living as a family of four, then a family of five, then a family of four again, to a family of three. Seventh grade, eighth grade, ninth grade, tenth grade, eleventh grade, twelfth grade…Here the dolls stop being part of the show for a while, but they resurface. My earlier images of the Kid Kore dolls are of us with Memere. Then, there are a lot of moments with Mom. Then, it’s just us and Dad…I think Katie originally comforted me because she was that part of my old life that I kept carrying over, but when I come across a Kid Kore Katie in the wild now, my first thought is always of Dad and thinking that, if he were here, he would say, “I’m happy for you” again.

 

Even though my first thought when I see Katie now is, oddly, of Dad and sort of bittersweet, it never takes long for me to form new memories with the Kid Kore dolls. Filming As Told By Dollies for the first time and realizing that, having gone more than a decade without doing Katie’s voice, I was rusty. Two sisters living very much alone during the pandemic and trying to keep busy. Finding out, days before my 35th birthday, that I was moving schools and coming home to open our new Winter Wonderland Sisters at Home sets cheered me up. Kid Kore dolls have been a part of my journey, not just as a doll collector--and I would not be the same doll collector if we hadn’t picked up that My Big Sister set in 2000--but through my life. Each doll is like a photo in a scrapbook, glance at another and a different moment comes to mind. A snapshot. A memory.

 

 

Done