When I travel for work, a portion of my onsite business involves the use of bald mannequin heads for educational purposes.  We have a supply of 50 of these heads that get shipped from location to location as needed. The bald mannequin heads were last used in Las Vegas then shipped to Florida for use last weekend.

As we set up the meeting room in which the heads would be used, I cut open one of the boxes and pulled out a mannequin….with a full head of hair. Hair that looked as if it had been styled with an egg beater.  All 50 of them had hair.  Not a baldy in the shipment.

How on earth did these bald mannequin heads grow hair on a simple trip from Las Vegas to Florida?  I’ll bet a pharmaceutical company would pay big bucks to find out.

I wanted to find out too.  I needed bald heads. So I tucked the hairy mannequin under my arm and set off to find the operations manager who might know the answer. I finally located him and the instant he saw me walk into the room, he looked at me and said, “Hey, that’s Viola. What’s she doing here?”

We never really discovered what happened with the shipment (or, for that matter, why the operations manager christened her Viola.)  We all had a new friend named Viola.

I did feel as if I had two heads when I woke up that morning

After someone braided her nest of hair, she became my assistant and went to work.

Freshly coiffed, Viola promptly attracted the attention of a man.

Once the workday was over, she had dinner.

Viola's carnage

The next morning, Viola refused to leave the hotel room for work.  She insisted on lounging in bed all day.

I returned to my room after dinner at 9:00pm to begin packing for a 6am departure from the hotel the next morning. Before I could place even one item in my suitcase, a text came in:  “Party in suite #301…please bring Viola.”

Viola quickly bellied up to the bar. No. Necked up to the bar?

I get the sense that the only reason I was invited was to transport Viola.

She was really trying to kidnap Viola

Sue tried to shield Viola from the ensuing debauchery. My best intentions to pack and get to bed early were shot to hell. We didn’t get back to the room to begin packing until 1:30am, just three short hours before the wake up call.  As a result, trying to pack in an organized fashion was impossible. I had intended to pack Viola in my checked bag – a colleague explained that a ventriloquist friend of his regularly encountered TSA problems when trying to carry on his dummies.

I just couldn’t manage to jam her into the suitcase to be checked. In the end, she had to travel in my carry on bag and eventually made it through TSA screening without a hitch!

No ticket required for her

So, Viola has become a resident of the Bubble. She broke from the pack of the other 49 heads and has retired from having complete strangers massage her face several times a year and travel among destinations via truck while shrink wrapped to a pallet.

Viola meets the wiener dog

But that doesn’t mean her party days are over. Viola has big plans for the neighbors on Halloween.