The acting manager and a board member of the nonprofit Merrymeeting Arts Center is selling much of her doll collection at the center to help provide scholarships for children to take classes at the center.

On Sunday from 2 to 4 p.m., MAC will host its Wonderland Doll Tea Party and Sale. The dolls will be on sale throughout the event, which includes Wonderlandthemed games such as pin the smile on the Cheshire cat, hat making for dolls and small people, a human-sized chess game, Bryce’s Alice in Wonderland chess set outside, and high tea. Cost is $5 per person.

Lee Parker, the acting manager and a board member for MAC, has always loved dolls, a passion she shared with her mother, who died last year. Both collected dolls as children. Her mother’s father had divorced her mother and Parker believes she loved dolls because her father would send her dolls when traveling. Parker has some of her mother’s dolls, now nearly 100 years old.

Her grandmother worked as a secretary at Radcliffe College before it became part of Harvard University, where faculty who traveled would bring dolls back for her, Parker said. She has been researching to find out how much some of the dolls are worth and will be taking some items to antique auctioneer James Julia Inc. in Fairfield.

One doll on display in the art center was one Parker had already that her aunt made a bridal gown for as a gift to Parker when she was about 12. Up on a shelf were two original Ginny Dolls, very popular in the 1950s and one that came with a Brownie Scout outfit.

“This is the original Shirley Temple doll,” Parker said, holding up another doll from the burgeoning display. “She’s in her original dress. I think I just found her shoes.”

Parker has one of the Saucy Walkers made by Ideal Doll Co., dolls with legs that move and when they walk, the heads turn. Another doll in the collection was called Poor Pitiful Pearl.

As a child, Parker said she would take her allowance to the store and for probably $2 or $3 would come home with a little doll, “and you could comb their hair and feed them and could get them wet, and they were just my buds.”

In total, there are probably nearly 100 dolls that will be available for sale for low prices, ranging from 50 cents to $50. There will also be tea sets for sale.

Parker has collected furniture and dolls over the years, and had thought she might open a store at some point which at this point will not happen, “so this is a way for me to sell all this stuff, hopefully, and the money will go to the art center and I’m going to funnel it into a scholarship fund for classes for kids, because we’ve got a lot of kids in this area — a lot of kids from Bowdoinham — who simply cannot afford them,” Parker said. “And it would make my mother thrilled to know that that’s where the money was going, as well as both of my sisters. And it makes it a lot easier for me to part with these guys because I’m doing it on my own terms.”

The prices are being set low, Parker said. The sale starts with the tea party and the dolls will stay at the center, be posted on Facebook and as they are depleted she plans to bring more from home. She also loves doll houses and has quite a collection of doll houses which she plans to set up this winter during MAC’s Ice and Smelt Festival, which has a theme of tiny spaces.

For her mother, Parker believes dolls filled a hole she never filled her entire life.

“I think for me, I loved making things for them,” Parker said. “I learned how to make furniture for them. I sewed clothes for them, so they just became a way I guess that I expressed myself creatively.

“I also really liked bossing them and being in charge of them. You can make dolls do what you want them to,” she added. They were playmates, and so real for her, Parker took one doll and hung her upside down because she was convinced if she could hang by her knees from the jungle gym bars so could the doll; she, of course, crashed to the ground and broke.

It was hours of imaginary play for her. The best part of her job right now is engineering social services systems and “I love to see things and be able to put them together and I think that’s a lot of what that all did for me.”

These are dolls that children will hopefully bring to the tea party Sunday and all of them need to go home with children who will play with them.

Parker said, “it’s just kind of a fun chance to dress up, come and enjoy and buy a doll in or buy a doll on the way out.”