trips

By Miki de Goodaboom

Stage 4 of “The Tour Of Teddies” leads me to teddy “Comtessine Tivolie De Lafontaine”, originally called “Happy Ziggy Chicky”.

I adopted her during my painting trip to Copenhagen in May 2017, while I was visiting the famous attraction park ‘Tivoli Gardens”. I was immensely happy to meet her there, as I had not seen many teddies in Copenhagen.

She was born in Sweden, at Barbara Bukowski’s house.

She is a birthday present from my Mom.

She looks like an aristocratic Teddy, hence the name “Comtessine”. The family name “De Lafontaine” is the name which have all the Teddies given to me by My Mom. Her own family name (my too) is “Fonvielle”, which means something like “Old Source”. A “fontaine” is a source… So, ‘De Lafontaine” is the “aristocratisation” of Fonvielle, somehow… and a wink to our famous fabulist and poet “Jean De La Fontaine”, who wrote these wonderful animal fables.

Comtessine Tivolie wears a chicken costume. She wanted to take a “chicken bath”, to know how it is to be a real chicken, so she asked me to bring her to a poultry yard. It was not the best idea ever, I felt that poor Contessine was a bit scared there by all the noisy clucking and weird looks she got. Chicken are not silly, you know, and despite her disguise, they did get that she was not really one of theirs!

Comtessine was glad then to be back home among all her brothers and sisters!

Comtessine Tivolie S

By Truffle McFurry

(Illustration by Miki de Goodaboom)

Hi everybody, I hope you are well and still love us, Teddy Bears!

I was just in holidays with my Mom Miki, the French painter, and my Dad, the English rocker. Well, my Mom was not in holiday because it was a painting trip. She was working.

It was our first holiday together again, for a long time, and it was so nice! We were in Malta, an island far away in the middle of the big blue sea. 2 weeks!

We took the plane in a new place, it is a city in Spain, it is called Valencia. I had never been there before. As always I was quite scared to go through the security, sitting in my tray and going into the tunnel, where they check if I have a bomb inside!

Look on the painting, we are waiting to go into the plane under the sign of the police. I tried to look cool, but the police is always scary. Even when you are innocent, you always feel that you have done something wrong and you think they will arrest you!

But they did not arrest us, and we could go on the plane! It was beautiful then, and sure I will tell you about Malta soon. We have saved some lovely Teddy Bears in Malta, and I have even found my Grand-Da again. I will ask Miki to paint them all and we will show you.

Take care!

Love you all

Truffle

valencia-airport-truffle-s