Tim Gunn's bobblehead - make it work!

I’m gonna get worked for this one but I don’t give a damn. I’ve started a new hobby and, as I usually do with any new endeavor, I’ve gone overboard already.

It all begin when one of my best friends shot me a link to the Dwight Schrute bobblehead. Talk about an impulse purchase. I think I had decided to order it before the graphics had even fully loaded on the page. Once Dwight arrived, he sat here on my desk staring out at the world. About two months later I stumbled across the next addition to my collection, the Tim Gunn bobblehead. From here, it was just all downhill.

I’ve been “officially” collecting bobblheads for about a month now. Looking around my office you can see my ever-growing group of wacky wobblers, head nodders, bobbleheads, and whatever else they go by these days. I think I’m sitting at about twenty at this point. Sheesh. I’m gonna need to build a shelving system to properly display ‘em all.

Current members of my collection include: cartoon characters The Snow Miser and The Heat Miser; TV and movie characters Napoleon Dynamite, Ralphie and The Old Man from “A Christmas Story”, Little Rascals Darla and Buckwheat, and Dwight Schrutte; historical figures Harry Houdini, Benjamin Franklin, and Sigmund Freud; NBA players Dirk Nowitzki & Steve Nash, Larry Bird, Bob Cousy, Ben Wallace and Peja Stojakovic; pop culture icons Bettie Page (hubba hubba!), Mr. T, a Sea Monkey, Redd Foxx, Tom Cruise (jumping on Oprah’s couch, no less), and a Tim Gunn very soon.

When will it end? Who the hell knows. I keep finding more and more figures that I want to acquire. For instance, I’d still like to get my hands on a slew of bobbleheads from Michael Jordan to Bob Hope. Hell, I even saw one of Chuck Woolery for sale on Ebay a little bit ago.

I’ve always been a collector of “things” (translated: items that sit around and collect dust). It started as a child when I got into the whole Star Wars action figure craze. I just HAD to be that kid that had all the toys. I couldn’t tell you how many lawns I mowed — hold it, I need a second…ahhhh…okay, better now — to get the money so that I could head up to Wal-Mart and buy a couple more action figures back in the late ’70s. When Lucas released the “enhanced” versions (eh heh heh, yeah right) of the original three films I dragged my son Alex all over the greater Kansas City area in search of every last newly released Star Wars figures. Big shock, he didn’t get into them and I was left with a pile of muscular chumps from Obi Wan Kenobi to Jawas.

Several years later Alex became caught up in the Pokemon craze that swept the nation. I decided that I would embrace his obsession and bought a Nintendo Game Boy so that we could play it together. What started as a cute way to bond with my son became an all-consuming mania as I just had to collect all 150 Pokemons in the game. To this day Alex still chides me for being the only person he knows that managed to acquire all 150 as you couldn’t do it without connecting to other players’ Game Boys and trading/winning other Pokemons. What can I say? I’m just slightly competitive.

So bobbleheads have now worked their way into the exclusive list of “things” with which I’ve gone nuts while collecting — Star Wars figures, ’80s CDs, DVDs, celebrity autographs, signed cards of the NBA’s top 50 players of all time, and now bobbleheads. Welcome, bobblers. Welcome to my obsessive world.