This Modern Writer: Notes on Teddy Ruxpin by Feliz Molina

The Greek verb –sis expresses an activity, a movement, a carousel in perpetual motion, though the movement is divided by its non-potential to do so.

The Greek verb –sis is an exhaustion of the carousel in movement, while it rests on its own potential to remain exhausted.

The Teddy Ruxpin doll was designed and assembled in a toy designer’s garage in a suburb of 1980s Los Angeles. Originally a puppet for the theater, Teddy Ruxpin’s identity consolidated into a furry bear with a mechanical talking mouth—a distant relative of ventriloquy (ventre meaning belly, loqui meaning speak) and it’s known that voices of the non-living took up residence in the stomach.

In Kindergarten my older brother shoved an MC Hammer tape into my Teddy Ruxpin. I cried. I think he asked if he could do it but my reaction was to cry. His insistence to play MC Hammer in Teddy Ruxpin made me feel powerless. I felt dominated. Perhaps I identified too closely with Teddy. Perhaps I didn’t want a foreigner in his furry body, wanted to keep him pure for a reason I knew not. I cried and then stopped crying once I heard him rap “Turn This Mutha Out” from the Let’s Get It Started album.  It was still the Teddy I knew, except he sounded like a black rap artist. At that age I knew what a black rapper was. But I didn’t want MC Hammer to be inside Teddy for too long.

It was hard to fall asleep next to him while he rapped and rapped. I might’ve not known how to replace the tape so that’s why I left it in. That’s when I heard about cities like Oakland, Miami, New York, etc. and people working hard. The voice sounded like it was on a mission.

I wasn’t sure what it really meant to ‘turn this mutha out’. I might’ve not even understood that that’s what it said. The sentence only sounded like a circle. I’m not sure how, but that’s what it felt like; a real loud circle that grew and emerged from a dark place, a damp street maybe. I’m not sure what the wetness implied or why it was there.

By then I must have been masturbating. I was masturbating to an MC Hammer song blaring from my Teddy Ruxpin. I had to fall asleep somehow. I had to wake up the next morning to go to Catholic school.

Feliz Lucia Molina is originally from Los Angeles, CA., but currently resides in the state of New York. She has published in ELO Vol.2, continent., Dark Sky Magazine, Titular Journal, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a few book projects and likes to letterpress things. She received an MFA in Poetry from Brown University and is writer-in-residence at The MacDowell Colony in 2011. You can find her blog Notes From the Undercastle Radio at 818bebe.blogspot.com and drawing blog The Museum Of Expensive Things at houseofdrawings.tumblr.com.