Shakira's Doll Not Quite Hip Enough

By Rachel F. Elson And Elizabeth Cobb

Friday November 22, 2002 01:00 AM EST

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Crossover pop sensation Shakira wishes she'd thought of telling Mattel to loosen the joints of her new action figure, so the doll could mimic her hip-shaking performance style.

"That would be a great idea," the singer-songwriter joked with a PEOPLE reporter while en route to an after-party following her show Wednesday night at New York's Madison Square Garden.

The new doll (due in stores early next year) wasn't her idea, she confessed, but she's happy with the way it turned out. "I think that it is cuter than me," she said. "I never had ... an ambition to have a doll, but the people from Mattel just approached me and they wanted it so bad. They say that the little girls had been requesting it, that they wanted a Shakira doll. And I said, 'Well, why not?' I thought it would be fun to see me in miniature."

The gold-locked songstress took her post-party to the hip Manhattan nightspot Suede -- drawing revelers like Eve, Joey Fatone and Ivana Trump to celebrate one of the first stops on Shakira's Tour of the Mongoose, which will visit 30 countries over the next few months.

The multicultural 25-year-old -- her mom is Colombian, her father is of Lebanese descent -- has been a Latin music mainstay since she recorded her first album, "Magia," at the age of 14. Still, she said, the Garden gig was the culmination of a 17-year-old dream. "It was my dream since I was eight years old to perform at Madison Square Garden. It was more than I had ever dreamed about."