The Beautiful Bureaucrat

I was your average 5-year-old: obsessed with dolls and rules and order.

When I was five, all I wanted for Christmas was this overpriced Victorian dollhouse made by Playmobil:

Santa got me this reasonably priced, gauche-pink, off-brand dollhouse:

I was a good little girl.
It didn’t make any sense.
What was that Santa guy’s problem?

[I still torment my parents about this.
That Playmobil dollhouse would have changed my life.
I would have gone to Harvard if you got me that Playmobil dollhouse.]

Santa didn’t deem me worthy of my beloved Playmobil dollhouse, but he did get me a couple Playmobil dolls.

The prospect of making my Playmobil dolls live inside some not-Playmobil dollhouse caused me great anguish.
It was all wrong.
My life was spiraling out of control.

I reacted to this great tumult by developing a new game to play with my inferior dollhouse; a game that allowed me to regain control of the situation.

The game was called “Guest List.”

Here’s what you need to play “Guest List”:

• A notebook
• A pencil (it’s important you use a pencil, in case you want to make changes)
• An ink blotter
• Your favorite rubber stamps
• All of your dolls (including, but not limited to: Playmobil people, Barbies, and any other humanoid figures small enough to fit inside the dollhouse) dressed in their fanciest clothes

Here’s how you play “Guest List”:

• Line up all of your dolls
• With notebook and pencil in hand, approach each doll one by one
• Assign each doll a name and occupation, and record these things in your notebook
• Now you have your guest list
• Scramble up your line of dolls, shuffling them like a deck of cards
• Line them up (this time in a different order) like they are waiting in line to get into the dollhouse
• Using your notebook as reference, ask each doll for their name and occupation
• Once identified, put a stamp by their name and place them inside the dollhouse
• The game is over when all of the dolls have been identified, cross-checked and approved, and placed inside the dollhouse

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