How to Make Bubbles for
A Thousand Clowns
Here is how we made a Bubbles doll for the play A Thousand Clowns.
One the play's more interesting props is Bubbles, a doll whose chest lights up with blinking lights. There was a theater group on the internet who rented out a Bubbles at the time, but the rental with shipping both ways was too expensive for our group.
We bought a Hawaiian hula doll from Oriental Trading Company. We didn't realize it was porcelain and fragile until it got here. It was about 18 inches, so we put a base on it to bring it up to the 24 inches specified in the stage directions. Then we wired the doll with LED lights, a battery, and a switch underneath her top, so that when she was switched on, her chest blinked on and off. (instructions below) It really worked out well and got a big reaction from the audience. One caveat: our community house theater is very small and we don't know how visible our Bubbles would be in a big theater.
Our doll came from the Oriental Trading Company website. Last we checked they were still selling the doll. We paid $17.95 plus shipping, but as of September 2008 it is on sale at $12.97, a steal. They shipped it with a tremendous amount of packing materials in a well-designed box about twice the size of the doll.
You are most of the way there just getting the doll. The rest is easy according to our Technical Director and Best Boy:
I looked around for a base and found some old ceramic flowerpots in our storage shed. Picked out the one in the photo because it has nice rounded lines. Cleaned the dirt clods off. It already had a hole in the bottom. I was going to paint it, but the producer and cast said that was not necessary, and on stage it looked fine. The script says Nick bought it used anyway.
I took a long 1/2" bolt from my junk box and threaded a nut on it. Then put on a big steel washer to spread the load on the ceramic and a round piece of bicycle inner tube with a hole in the middle for cushioning. Put the bolt in the hole in the flower pot, then reached up inside the pot to put on another piece of inner tube, a big steel washer and a nut. Tightened the nut with my fingers as much as I dared, not enough to break the pot. I probably used blue Loc-Tite on the nuts, but that's not really necessary.
I stood bubbles up in front of the bolt and zip tied her legs to the bolt. The skirt hides the zip ties nicely. The head of the bolt was about her waist level if I recall correctly, since she is 16 inches high and I probably used a 12 inch bolt.
I added little blinky LED lights that were in my flashlight junk box, two triangle-shaped units with three LED's each. You can find something equivalent at a bike store, Kmart, Wal-Mart, etc or from one of the cheap Hong Kong electronics sites like DealExtreme or Kaidomain. They even come in white if you don't like red. Depending on the size of your theater, you may need the more powerful LED's to have the lights show up well, and the script calls for the blinking to be distracting to one of the characters. (Or maybe he is reacting to the location of the lights...) We left the bra on the doll for our family-oriented neighborhood theater, making it easy to mount the LED's. I made slits in the bra to poke the lights through, and ran little wires under the bra from the lights to a battery holder (from Radio Shack) under the skirt in the back with a switch on it, zip tied to the support bolt.
I solder all my connections for reliability, but you could probably just wrap them very tightly since most productions will be over before they can corrode. If you can't handle wiring two LED units to a single switch, the actor playing Nick can probably flip one on each side, although Nick is a kid and has plenty to handle in that role without more complications. If you take the bra off for the bare effect you will need to work out some other way to mount the lights. The doll has minimal anatomy under the bra to do that.
The flower pot is reasonably strong, but obviously the ceramic can be broken by a blow to the bolt if it's dropped. I figured that if that happened during rehearsal a new flower pot and zip ties would be an easy restoration. If it happened during a performance (break a leg!) our clever actors would just incorporate that into the dialogue as if it were part of the script. There are many other possibilities for a base, but the pot is heavy enough to keep the doll upright and it was easy to do. The doll is porcelain anyway, so if you drop it you will probably need at a minimum a lot of glue to put it back together. Our producer babied Bubbles and put her carefully away after rehearsals and performances.
Bubbles is a kick, a great hit with both the cast and the audience. When the play was first performed, the blinking lights would have been much more difficult to add than they are now. The big trick now is getting the doll from Oriental Trading Company.
Our Bubbles was presented to the actor who played Nick. We don't lend or rent it because it would be unlikely to survive a trip by mail.