Mall Tigers and Crying Pageant Queens in Molly Wurwand’s Dreamland
Full editorial disclosure: Molly Wurwand and I had the sort of thrilling sugar-rush of a phone call that can only mean BIG things are going to happen now that we’ve met. Werewolf reborn baby dolls, JonBenét’s bedroom, the animatronic whales in Free Willy, pregnant Hooters waiters, The Bunny Museum, breastfeeding in Disney theme parks, and that was just a taste, you know?
Molly is an artist born and raised in Los Angeles whose work, as their site describes, “blurs the intersection of the dreamy and the deranged.” That might mean paintings of crying Miss Universe pageant queens or people excitedly posing with tigers. “Tiger at Mall Opening” introduced me to Molly’s art through THNK1994, those curators and connectors of like-minded, obsessive pop culture associates. An interplanetary business meeting ensued! See Molly’s fantasy world and work on their site Dreamland, and be on the lookout for their upcoming art book milfs featuring paintings of (and ruminations on) bodacious, middle-aged bikini babes.
When I finally got around to asking interview questions, they was telling me about the pulpy, out-of-print JonBenét books they recently procured. This seems like a fitting moment to enter the Very Famous World of 1-900-Molly-Wurwand!
Molly: I ordered all of these out-of-print books about JonBenét Ramsey. It happens every couple of years, I get really interested again in JonBenét. These books were literally rushed to print in, you know, 1996, and they are so bad, they’re so awful. They’re not even spell-checked, a lot of them. But they are the best, I love them. All of the evidence is incorrect, I mean, even for the time. It’s like we knew even then that that’s not true. But they’ve gotta get that salacious interview with the Santa at the party the night before.
Very Famous: I feel like the JonBenét books are a really good jumping-off point for our first interview question. What are some rabbit holes you’ve been enjoying disappearing down lately?
Molly: Definitely the JonBenét books. I’m grinning because this is the stuff I avoid telling people because I don’t want them to be worried about me, but you’re actually asking. I have a thing that I love to learn more about which are those reborn baby dolls. Do you know about those?
VF: I do, yes!
Molly: So then there are the subsects. This one specific artist, she creates werewolf reborn baby dolls. They are so demanded that I think she actually had to move because people were showing up at her house. I reached out to interview her, and she was like, “To be honest, I have no time but send me the questions.” She was so frazzled because she has to pump out these one-of-a-kind reborn werewolf baby dolls and people are mad at her, they’re furious with her. They’re like, “I need my werewolf baby doll, I’ve been on the list for two years. Where is my werewolf?”
I just loved that people would pay so much money for these beautiful silicone baby werewolves with the umbilical cords still attached.
VF: I’ve seen little glimpses into the reborn community, but I had no idea they were also into fantasy creatures. I don’t even know how to articulate this, but in a way it makes sense. It’s almost just like, “Why not?”
Molly: Yeah, why the hell not! I loved the idea that someone’s thing that people might say would never have worked for her to start this business is now almost the bane of her existence because it worked too well. That captured me because it’s like, whoa, be careful what you wish for as a small business owner.
VF: She was probably expecting to make one or two a year!
Molly: Exaaactly. I, of course, signed up for the waitlist because I was like, “Well, I guess I’m going to spend all my money on this.” But I think I’ve got another eight years before I reach the top 10 of the waitlist. That’s another rabbit hole that comes to mind, there are so many. Another thing would be pregnant sex dolls. They weigh a lot more, I found out, so sometimes they’re shipped in parts.
VF: You get just the tummy.
Molly: Yep, mmmhmm. Because of the weight restrictions on mail. That, of course, really enthralled me for a sec a couple weeks ago. A lot of it definitely is in what I end up drawing for ages at a time. As soon as I found out that people can still — I mean, clearly this would be illegal if you were fired from Hooters as soon as you got pregnant. I knew legally that couldn’t be a thing, but I never thought there could be a pregnant Hooters waiter.
I started reading these Tripadvisor reviews with the keyword search “pregnant Hooters,” and I ended up pulling a couple of the quotes — the more tame quotes — for my website. People were furious. They were like, “I didn’t come all the way to Hooters to be served by this fat lady. Are you kidding me?” That just really captured me that someone’s taking the time to Tripadvisor Hooters locations in the middle of nowhere.
VF: Those reviews! They’re awful, but they made me laugh so hard.
Molly: And they are so furious about it! Some people attached photos with their reviews, which is just so mean to be like “Smile, honey!” Meanwhile, you’re going to write this awful review. But I took those photos, and I kept thinking about them. There was another thing on Reddit where someone was like, yes, I worked at Hooters while I was pregnant and there is an expanded version of the uniform.
VF: Wow, so they’re taking it into account.
Molly: Yes, they’re taking it into account as an occupational hazard maybe, I don’t know. They definitely maybe think of it as like, ok, people might get pregnant while they’re working here which is really considerate of them because it’s true. That really captured me for a bit. Definitely the paper trail is what I end up painting a lot of, but there are things like the werewolf babies where I’ve never told anyone that until right now.
VF: With the pregnant Hooters waiters or the Miss Universe pageant winners, it feels like a theme in your work is femme taken to the extreme. I was curious to know what draws you to these — I think you describe it on your site — performances of gender and the most extreme femme-ness.
Molly: Thank you for asking. I think performances of gender are definitely one part of it. I think that part I’ve thought more about over the years because I started to know as a kid, probably around fourth grade, which I feel like was maybe the first year that we had a talk with just the girls in the class about periods. And I just started thinking, “I’m not a girl.” I had this feeling, but I didn’t know what to do with that so I tried to be as much as I thought of a girl for a lot of years. At NYU, meeting more people who identified as trans and non-binary, I thought, “Ok, this is the word that I’ve been so anxiously trying to not feel.”
This has been a lot of years of trying to accept myself. For a period of time, I would think, well I’m not a girl so I must be a boy because I was still operating under the idea of the binary. But then a couple years back, having gone to NYU and met a lot of my close friends there, I was like, “Oh ok, there aren’t just two options.” There are infinite ways that you can identify that are true to you. The more that I started to embrace myself, I had a lot of real fascination looking back on certain things that felt so heightened as, like, this is gender. I like to see where the binary really just starts to crack.
I think of, ok, we’re going to have this restaurant Hooters, and this is how the waiters are going to look. Then, what if one of them gets pregnant? I like the idea of having to keep it together, like “Nope, that’s fine, that’s fine, we’re going to make an extended tank top and that’s ok.” You know, I like that everything’s falling apart a little bit. Or Miss Universe, when they’re really crying hard. That maybe breaks out of what it was supposed to be, which is like, well you can cry, but the snot is now a problem because we’ve got an extreme HD close-up on your face. We’ve got to cut away to the audience. Those moments where it’s just getting a little deranged. I like those moments.
Molly: Maybe even expanding beyond the performances of gender, I think just societally or in public when we make up these rules, then we have to keep a straight face and maintain them. Like when Disneyland and Disney World had these official breastfeeding policies for people who are going to breastfeed in their parks. It’s such an organized policy, but this is a fake — wonderfully fake — world that has been manufactured. But people are really going to be lactating in it. We gotta keep that organized so that it doesn’t get too human. We’re gonna make these little pods that you can go into and these separate spots in the bathroom that are going to be more spacious and closed-off. Also, you can definitely just do it in public. But I like that thing where it’s like the rules of the game don’t end up working, but everyone’s trying really hard to make them work.
VF: It’s like the cracks in the fantasy.
Molly: Yes! Or people who are like, “I want to have tigers at my wedding.” But to have a tiger at your wedding, you’re going to need a lot of handlers to have that magical — quote-unquote — moment of you being walked down the aisle by a tiger. That might look kind of amazing in the moment, but I like seeing that image in my head of handlers waiting, probably wearing khaki shorts, ready to grab that tiger and whisk them backstage. That moment of fantasy is not real at all, it’s a wild animal.
VF: And if you’re there in-person at this wedding, then as a wedding guest, you are probably seeing part of the fantasy and also the part where these handlers are looking kind of concerned and annoyed in the background.
Molly: The walkie-talkie conversations that are happening behind-the-scenes or you hear their walkie-talkie beeping while someone’s reading a poem at the altar. I think that’s it, too, right, we all sort of agree to play along or we agree to filter those parts out.
Molly: The Macy’s Day Parade captures this feeling where it’s like we make up this rule that we’re going to have news anchors narrating these unhinged floats. Of course there’s the spirit of fun, but it’s also taken extremely seriously and given a big slot of time on network television. I like that we’re all like, “This is very normal and good!” and it’s like, no, this is insane, this is deranged.
VF: And it’s so juicy and useful to examine! That’s exactly what you’re doing. I didn’t even realize until we started talking, but that’s totally the theme.
Molly: Thank you! I haven’t found a way to articulate it, this is really straight out of my head to you. Performances of gender definitely chapter one, but there is this other aspect that is performances of everything going according to plan when there’s no way it could because the human of it all gets in the way.
VF: There’s always going to be some bizarre turn of events that is unaccounted for — or it is accounted for and that’s even stranger.
Molly: Yes! Exactly. I think I love it even more when it has been accounted for. SeaWorld fascinates me so much because there was already protocol put in place if a guest were to have fallen into a tank. That someone had to really decide that protocol not only legally, but then had to be trained on that protocol, like yes, if a guest falls into the tank, what?! First of all, to get back to the rules aspect, why are we keeping orcas in tanks? That’s already crazy, but we have to take that as a given in order for us to then be able to make the rules. I love how demented that is.
VF: Someone must have fallen into the tank at some point in order to…
Molly: Right, right!
VF: These things don’t necessarily come out of nowhere because people do crazy things, but also they might have just simply taken that into account. Like, “We are here at SeaWorld, people do get a little overzealous.”
Molly: People do get overzealous, yes, yes. If someone dies at a Disney park, I actually don’t know how that’s handled. I think it’s pretty hush-hush about how it’s handled but, again, when sort of a human thing interrupts what’s going on. Those [examples] are a bit dark, I don’t think it always has to be dark necessarily but definitely just…If someone who’s a stripper gets their period, there all of these amazing YouTube videos about what to do. It’s so interesting that we still have to do something about it. I don’t know, maybe there are specific clubs where you would be able to free bleed as a dancer. Maybe that would take on its own world for that specifically. All of that gets me overstimulated, I guess.
VF: I like the way you worded it on your site, I think it was like “the hypnotic discomfort of being a human in a body.”
Molly: If you get it, you get it.
~*The Very Famous Quiz*~
And now, channeling Twist’s 1999 interview with Britney Spears…
