Teacher Trinket: Bird Head Barbie

Every year, teachers at Granite Bay High School find new ways to personalize their desks, but art teacher Myron Stephens has taken a step out of the ordinary with one of his decorations.
Stephens is infamous around campus for his crazy antics that include riding around on a small pink tricycle and blasting loud music.
These antics don’t just pertain to classroom manner, however, as Stevens’ desk is a work of art in itself.
Five years ago, a student of Stephens’, Maggie Morris, was eating lunch next to a tree when a “bird head fell and landed next to her” without any other part of the body attached. The student, unsure what else to do with it, then brought it to Stephens.
“It becomes this chain where people bring me this weird stuff because they’d seen something else weird of mine,” Stephens said. “It gets to a point where people just start brining me weird things because they think I’ll like it.”
By combining this bird head with a Barbie doll, Stephens created Bird Head Barbie, who from the neck down looks like a normal doll with clothes inked on to it, and from the neck up becomes a bird.
Despite people knowing that Stephens has a flair for the unusual, many people have not commented on the unusual nature of this trinket as “most people (don’t) know it’s a (real) bird head” and can’t believe even Stevens would have something as strange as to have a random bird head. not just some random plastic item he has collected over the years, Stephens said.
Bird Head Barbie currently resides on Stephens’ desk, among an assortment of other unusual decorations.
It has become “part of (this) collection. People give me things because they think I collect them, which (in turn) makes it into a collection (on its own)”, Stephens said.
Stephens, well known among art students for his sense of humor, joked that he had attempted to market Bird Head Barbie because he felt that many children would enjoy having such a unique toy. However, he was not taken up on his offer by a single company.
Along the lines of laying plans for a new Barbie line, what about a Bird Head Ken? When asked this, Stephens said “Bird Head Barbie is more into G.I. Joe”.