My Life in Barbie

Barbie made her debut in this world like a commercialized Botticelli Venus in 1959, her friend Midge, in 1963. While this was before I was born, this was the perfect time for my sister, thirteen years older than me, to have these two dolls, and for them to become my hand-me-down playmates in 1969 when I was about four years old.

I don’t think this was consensual on my sister’s part, and, in fact, she was very upset when I lost Barbie’s head one day while I was performing a flying stunt with her by hanging her out the car window on Magnolia Street in Riverside, California. We never found her head, but my mom was able to go to Sears & Roebuck and by a replacement head, but this original Barbie, with her hard brownish plastic body, was never quite the same with her new pale pink plastic, squeezable head. Still, this altered Barbie continued to have adventures, although she never lost her head again.

I’m trying to remember if Ken even made an appearance at our house, but I think my younger brother had a GI Joe doll instead.

We were lucky, because our mom was an expert seamstress, so our original Barbie sans head got to dress very sharply in Jaclyn Kennedy dresses from the Simplicity Barbie patterns Mom bought at Woolworth’s. (For some reason, Mom did not like Butterick patterns).

In the 1960s’, our Barbie had a smart plaid suit that matched my mom’s red, purple and pink plaid suit – the hand-me-down suit that I wore to work in my first years at Deloitte (in those days Deloitte & Haskins & Sells) in the late 1980s. And Barbie had taffeta party dresses that had to be ironed very carefully by my mom on the ironing board placed before the plate glass window that overlooked the backyard where my brother and I played. Midge was also the beneficiary of this clothing bonanza.

My preference, though, was not to actually play with Barbie. I liked to build multi-story houses for her out of big cardboard boxes. These boxes took hours for me and my friends to build, complete with oval carpets cut out of leftover scraps of fabric from the clothes my mom sewed for us, or couches and other furniture painstakingly designed from empty shoeboxes. By the time the doll house was done, her clothes hung up in the cardboard closets wrapped in kitchen drawer contact paper, I was done, and ready to go back to reading a Nancy Drew book – come to think of it – Nancy Drew was the original free-wheeling independent teenager that the generations before us looked to as examples of what they could be and do – leaving a very annoyed friend to play dolls by herself.

Barbie before Astronaut Barbie and Nurse Barbie, Veterinarian Barbie and all the other Barbies, was a fashionable teenager, and I grew up wanting to dress just like her, especially since she dressed like American royalty. Even though these other Barbies may have existed when I was growing up, we did not have money for toys, and my leisure time was spent in the library where the “toys” were free.

I don’t know what happened to my sister’s Barbie and Midge, whether they got passed down to a younger second cousin, or whether they went to Goodwill, but they are gone and only retrievable in my mind’s eye. I can still feel the hard plastic of her unbendable legs, her pointed feet ready to slip into red plastic high heels bought with quarters, dimes and nickels received at birthday parties.

My daughter was born in 1996. Barbie by this time was an array (to me) of bimbo Barbies and I worried about the meaning and messaging behind her impossible body shape. Beach Barbie, Paris Barbie, and all the other Barbies lined up in clear plastic boxes with little plastic accoutrements – a bucket with toys, books, beach towels, stethoscopes, and so on. I said publicly, “I will not buy my daughter a Barbie.”

Well, I did not buy the first 17 Barbies she got for birthday parties. I even felt defeated by Cat-Lady Barbie (not the real name of course) that came with a small cat, a bottle, a brush and a cat box with bags of sand. You fed the cat from the bottle, squeezed its sides while holding it over the cat box, and voila – cat poop to scoop out with the tiny pooper scooper.

Secretly, it was kind of evil genius – “Well, Aimelie, you don’t need a real cat, you have Barbie kitty.” And I disliked the little piles of sand poop dribbled all over the apartment carpet almost as much as I would have hated the trails of real cat poop rolled in sand spread outside the cat box when the cat jumps out.

I suppose that it was inevitable that for Aimelie’s preschool birthday party, I baked her a birthday cake covered in pink fondant with a Barbie car and a brand-new Barbie and Kelly seated inside perched on top of the cake. I had totally caved. And I confess I bought the next twenty Barbies she owned. Barbie had become a disposable commodity, purchased only for the extra stuff that came in the box – the combs, plates, napkins, baskets, purses, the whatevers that Aimelie just had to have. The dolls themselves had become irrelevant. And we won’t even talk about all the Kelly dolls filling landfills now that were brought home in McDonalds Happy Meals.

My son finally brought the Barbie phase to a close. Eight years older than Aimelie, when he came into the household, he routinely despised the dolls and teased her for playing with them. Secretly, however, he was also fascinated by them. One day, I got home early from work. Through the sliding glass door of our townhouse, I could see my son crouching on the back step, flames rising from something on the ground before him. Anthony was using WD-40 and a lighter to burn a Barbie – while videotaping the scene. So, this was how our overpopulated herd of Barbies was being culled!

For a brief, horrified moment, I froze, wondering if I had to worry about what this meant for Anthony’s future, then I rushed outside and told him he better hide this evidence of this Barbieric crime from Aimelie before she got home from her dad’s or there would probably be hell to pay.

Eventually, Aimelie turned to a virtual post Barbie world – world building with the Sims programs and Nancy Drew online mystery solving, which I think she does to this day at the age of 27.

But don’t we all graduate from dolls to world-building of our own? And Barbie (and Nancy Drew) helped usher in a new world of possibilities for what women could be beyond mother and housewife.

I realize that Barbie has followed me from Montana to California to Florida and back again, from parental homes to the house my husband and I bought, from apartment post-divorce, to townhouse, and then to my own home. And now, she has found me in a post-child-based life.

Last year, I rode my neon green and black road bike through the Barbie movie set quite by accident when I was doing my Biking-up-the-California-coast-by-myself Tour. I came almost within touching distance of Ryan Gosling and Margot Robbie. They were standing just off the bike path in the grass, wearing neon green helmets, elbow and knee pads and rollerblades. Not unlike the neon green, yellow and orange helmet strapped on my own head, or the bright orange, yellow and black bike shorts and shirt I was wearing.

At first, I thought I had stumbled upon a comedy in progress. I will admit, I didn’t know who the two actors were, but they were standing next to their director chairs, so that night in my hotel room I googled them. Ever since then, I’ve been waiting for Barbie the movie to come out.

I haven’t seen the movie yet, because Aimelie is out of the country, and I am waiting for her to get home so we can share this experience together (and trying to get my sister to join us), but true to her roots, on Saturday, Aimelie dressed head to toe in pink to honor this icon of our generations.

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