About 30 stuffed animals sit in crates at a petting zoo down a driveway on the first night of 37th Street Lights. The annual holiday tradition features over-the-top decorations and quirky displays that capture Austin's weirdness.
A panda, a snake and a turtle wait for new owners under a tent with green string lights. Price tags attached to the animals don't have dollar amounts. Instead, they outline a task.
"People are basically gonna be able to purchase a stuffed animal, but not with money," says Wendy Mitchell, the founder and chief operating surgeon of the Stuffed Animal Rescue Foundation, an organization that repairs injured stuffies. "If you take the stuffed animal, you have to do the task associated with it."
Ila is rescuing a dolphin in exchange for drawing a picture of a cloud. Nina gets to keep a pink crocodile if she draws what she imagines her Amazon driver had for breakfast. (Eggs and bacon.) To take home an octopus, Gus will be asking a veteran where they were stationed when they first enlisted.
Karis is concerned because in order to keep a stuffed bear, she needs to find someone who is 10 years younger than her and ask them their best friend's name.
"My friend has a friend who's a little baby," the grade-schooler says, trying to work it out. "Maybe her best friend could be a teddy bear?"
Once the recipient has performed the task, they have to describe what they did on a postcard and mail it to Mitchell as proof. She’ll then send out adoption papers, including a certificate saying the purchaser rescued an animal from a no-kill shelter.
In less than an hour Friday, all the crates are cleared. Mitchell goes to restock.
A fixer of things
Mitchell's father performed surgery on her teddy bear when she was little, and like him, she considers herself a fixer of things.
Initially, she picked up the injured stuffed animals from thrift stores.
"Missing eyeballs is a common one because of dog attacks," she says, describing their conditions. "Cats often go for noses. We have a lot of neck injuries, particularly with stuffed animals whose living companions are younger."
After a while, people heard she was making repairs and started bringing them to her.
"People would just leave them in bags on the doorstep," she says. "Like a firehouse — you know how you can leave babies?"
When she first moved to 37th Street over 10 years ago, Mitchell knew she had to get involved in the street's annual holiday tradition. She started her petting zoo in 2010, writing first-person bios for each of the stuffed animals she repaired that didn't have homes.
People could fill out applications to adopt them, and a team helped her read over the intake forms to decide where the animals would go. But this year, Mitchell decided to switch things up and give them away in exchange for a deed.
Mitchell isn’t sure people will comply with her stipulations.
"It could be that they all just disappear and I never hear from anyone again," she says. "But usually people are really good at doing what ... I ask them to do because it's fun."
Regardless, Mitchell says, she feels the stuffed animal population has gotten out of control and she needs to thin the herd.
Population control
Inside the Stuffed Animal Rescue Foundation’s headquarters, shelves and lockers are filled with supplies — fabric and noses and every size of eyeball, both goggly and static. There are sewing machines, different types of paint and lots of products designed to get gum and dried candy out of fur.
"This is the box of random colored pantyhose," Mitchell says, adding that she never knows when she might need a blue piece of knee-high stockings.
Mitchell just moved HQ to this shed, and she’s trying to organize the chaos.
She’s had to stop accepting new "patients."
"It wasn't my intention to do a bunch of repairs, but then it started happening, and then I just did that for a long time and then my brain exploded," she says. "So I'm getting back to being able to maybe do some of that."
One operation currently underway is uniting a pair of conjoined koalas who were separated.
"They were actually being used as slippers, so they had a padded growth on the back," she says. "I removed that and did reconstructive surgery, so now they have butts."
Mitchell works with clients to figure out what solutions they’re after. Some humans care about whether the fur matches or how that fur feels. Others might not care if a new eye is a different color as long as the animal’s head is stuffed the same way.
"My personal tendency is to make it perfect," she says. "But it's up to the person."
Mitchell says the quality of stuffed animals has gone downhill, and prices have gone down, too. Now you can find stuffies in just about every drugstore. That’s created an overpopulation problem, she says.
"I think people need to stop buying them and people need to stop making them," she says, quoting Bob Barker's old line at the end of The Price Is Right: "You have to spay and neuter [them]."
Mitchell says she started off just wanting to do weird things with stuffed animals. But now she has a goal: to stop them from being purchased and just forgotten about.
She wants to make them special again.
