Woodstock
Well, better to say that the three mannequins who have been inspiring double-takes and selfies from their perch on the porch at Vermont Flannel Co. on Central Street for almost a quarter century are not missing. The lifelike girl and two boys have, however, seen better days, which is why passers-by in downtown Woodstock haven’t seen them lately.
On April 22, they went in for, for lack of a better word, rehab.
“The mannequins all need a general clean-up, and repair to dings and scratches,” Barnard sculptor Edythe Wright said the day before collecting them and chauffeuring them to her Woodstock studio. “The girl figure is missing a hand, so I’ve made a mold of one of the other kids’ hands, which come apart from the arms easily, so I can cast a new hand.”
Wright learned of the girl’s missing hand, and of the trio’s other injuries — among them a skull fracture — from store manager and fellow Barnard resident Joann Ference, during a conversation about the way the mannequins, dressed in flannel according to the season, invariably surprise newcomers to downtown. Often they even startle residents who have seen them there since they were retrieved from a dumpster at a JC Penney store in the early 1990s.
“There’s a whole generation that’s enjoyed them,” Ference said recently. “Most people are bowled over the first time they see them. Once they realize they’re not children, they do a double-take. Sometimes when we bring them in, we have to carry them by the chin, and people don’t realize we’re handling a mannequin. They think we’re grabbing them by the neck.”
Once the work is done (Wright estimated around the third week in May), the kids won’t be in their familiar post for long: The store will relocate to 13 Elm St., between Bentley’s and TD Bank.
In addition to casting a new hand for the girl — she’s the one who sits nearest the sidewalk, with her right knee crossing her left, and holding two balloons — and returning the hand to one of the boys, Wright expects “the most challenging part of the restoration to be color and surface matching with weatherproof paints and coatings.”
None of which Wright pictured herself doing, at least in quite this form, while earning her bachelor’s degree in fine arts at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and her master’s from Tufts Univerity’s museum school, nor during her ensuing career.
“I’ve worked in sculptural mold-making and casting for many years in my own art practice, and up until a couple years ago taught sculpture at RISD and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston,” Wright said. “I have never repaired mannequins before, and I don’t know if anyone else is doing that work.”
Wright added that she still doesn’t know how much the project will ultimately cost, except that it will probably come to more than just buying three new mannequins, which her research put “in the range of $400” for all three.
“I asked Joann to pass that info along,” Wright said, “but the Vermont Flannel Store owners were committed to restoring their iconic ‘kids.’ ”
The day before Wright collected them, the kids were basking in the noonday sun — all wearing plaid flannel caps and capri-length plaid pants, the girl and the boy in the middle sporting plaid shirts and the smaller boy (nearest the alley) a Vermont T-shirt showing a stick-figure man milking a cow.
Inside the store, Ference said that if the kids had to go on hiatus, this period between ski season and early summer makes the most sense.
“This is sort of a shut-down time for us, and Woodstock’s a little slower right now,” Ference said. “Still, I’m sure we’ll have people stopping in and asking, ‘Where are the kids?’ ”
David Corriveau can be reached at dcorriveau@vnews.com and at 603-727-3304.