Dealing with Barbies

How can one deal with the primpious (word?) pink girl and the dramatic, violent genius whose dream or compassion or just flat passion to create the bomb that would destroy anyone or anything in its path - while the critics got a charge out of the two sets - the delight of the pink girl. Most everything was pink including her boyfriend, so Barbie probably won the toss up.
 
I grew up realizing blondes had more fun. I was black haired like my Yankee Mom (She was beautiful, though). Somehow blondes were always thinner than us dark haired girls. That was shot at us from many angles - blonde hair could be artificial somehow, and it would go with blue eyes and then there was the blonde wardrobe which covered something thin and hardly curving which turned into a tall thin doll with fancy-fun skills with her wardrobe. I remember the early blonde Barbies. They were somehow created and celebrated after I had passed in and out of university - and was more interested in learning about Africa and traveling and exploring the world and challenging and being adventurous than being in girls’ Greek groups, and possessing the latest attire, often influenced by the Barbie craze. These things weren’t there when I rolled out of 21 to entertain and enjoy “life.”
 
Oh yes, I have purchased a mass of Barbies to give to kids who have no barbies and was thankful that my two daughters were way past that phase when Barbie leaped into the scene of fashionable dolls. But there was a drop in fat baby dolls unless a child wanted to have a comfortable relationship with a baby doll to learn how to be a mom. Barbie was not a “mom” moment. She was a sharp, intelligent, especially well-dressed possibility girl friend who might have a boyfriend to make her cool  (I have written this blog prior to seeing the movie.) And the basis of her life somehow was the color pink, even her convertible.
 
In other words, back in the early days of Elvis Presley, who lived in a house right behind my brother’s best friend, the thing that mattered with the bump and grind was who had the best convertible car. It was a show of who had style and I guess funds and if driven by girls, a flirt and a smile and a wink could mean a whole lot in those days. That period was Elvis’ period. That was when we dared to go to his concert in Russwood Park (July 4 1956) because our parents would jump out of the bedclothes if they knew it. At least in my neck of the woods.  Most people feared Elvis’s concerts - often outdoors - for his wild hip movements and smiles and sexuality. We didn’t really know what that was as a mid-teenage in the 1950.
 
It was a day when I drove by Elvis’ then smallish house. I was with a girlfriend in my yellow Chevrolet convertible with the top down. That was chic in those days. But who would have ever though that Elvis would be backing out of his driveway in his baby blue Cadillac car also with top down, and he stopped me and asked if I wanted to trade cars with him. I was with a girlfriend, and we giggled and swooned, I guess, like we should have, and I said, as I would always do, nope. (My brother and Elvis’ wealthy neighbor son and I had played pool in his house the previous night.) I shouted out: “My dad gave it to me for my 15th birthday.” No one could beat that. It was, as I think back, sort of a Barbie moment even though we didn’t have the Barbies yet in 1957s.
 
Barbie wasn’t a religious think thing. She had too many clothes and I never saw a poor Barbie, especially in her early days. But somehow, a Barbie doll would animate and give joy and laughter to every kind of child, who, if had the means, would collect them until they had enough to fill a school room, well a small doll house school room. Somehow, later on, I and my two daughters were too early for the extravaganza that suggested each girl must have everything and so many Barbies, thank God. There were so many different breeds and makes and personalities and colors, but my daughters had sort of crept into the Barbie craze in their young teens before they became almost a whole world of girls with different characteristics, I think. My oldest daughter Mary had a Barbie glance with the first Barbies.  She remembers having two or three, that they had moveable arms and bendable knees and her hair always got matted and frizzed from hard playing. And my girls didn’t have blonde hair.
 
I don’t have any Barbie memories. Her blonde look - so pink so yellow so white just knocked out any possibility that she was spiritual - not that dolls have spirituality. And to boot, Barbie with her happy singalong kind of boyfriend had no emphasis on church, the Bible, or God, at least not the original people who birthed Barbie, and this is not a criticism of the fascinating creators who really found out for a reasonable way to create something girls would love.
 
One good thing about Barbie, she didn’t take up much room. Larger than a figure in a doll house, but smaller than just about anything else on the doll shelf which was usually loaded with large babies (really baby size) and things that weren’t necessarily pretty or stylish or with some sort of personality. Most dolls were baby dolls that a young girl could learn how to take care of and rock and fake feed and talk to her and learn which end was up and what one did when there was baby crisis. That was a far haul from Barbie, who was some smart woman with a taste for fashion, activities, and intelligence. She swung with the swinging set. She could look only sharp and fashionable and fun.
 
Ironically, I was fashion editor of the Press Scimitar about the time Barbie burst into popularity. I spent weeks watching parades of outstanding models walking with some sort of gig that helped them make the clothes look even better than they were, but then they had bodies that no one else has or had. And they knew how to walk with extreme movement and the bazar. Models, thin as they were, moved down catwalks like cats. Supermodel Naomi Campbell was famous for her strut for 30 years in the industry. There was Sara Kapp, Bethann Hardison (who is still the beautiful black lady who often stole the show), and Tasha (who became an assistant to Ralph Lauren) and Twiggy, among so many who befriended me. These were the beginners, back when and I had the privilege of spending weeks in New York or even with the supermodels, males, and females, who became my friends. But it still didn’t turn me into a skinny, over-made-up Barbie.

~ Rev

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audrey@audreytaylorgonzalez.com
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