Thank you, Ruth.

Happy birthday, Barbie.

Barbie was 13 going on 14 when I was born in February of 1972, just old enough (in those days) to be my babysitter. Now, Skipper is the babysitter, Walmart tells me. The new Skipper has a dynamic life and more dynamic features. Skipper in my day was flat as a board figuratively and literally, made as a stand-in for girls playing with voluptuous Barbies, the Little Sister Who Couldn’t. My one Skipper was so flat and stiff that you could hammer a nail in a pinch with her. Follow me for more 1970’s household tips.

Insert raunchy pun from equally raunchy movie from the corresponding era. I just can’t do it. Oh, they’re in my head, but I can’t look into that wide-eyed kid face and translate them from my brain to the keyboard.

I’ve talked about my Barbies before, about how Mom LIED at Christmas that Santa hadn’t come yet because she and Dad stayed up until the wee hours putting together my Barbie Dream House. Looked into my little cute face and LIED. 😃 (Episode 31: Christmas Cupcakes/Episode 31: Resources to see a photo of Mom and tiny me playing Barbies). About Dad and my camper. 💕 I had the original townhouse with the pinkish-purple elevator, not the yellow one you see online (because I am vintage-old), the yellow Corvette rather than the pink one (old, so old), Dusty the horse, and the original Dream House, and I would get lost in storytelling with my little Barbie World.

But you know me. I am quirky and have a weird, dark sense of humor, and am also autistic. Things were not all as they seemed in my Little Pink Shoe Land.

I had one Ken with rooted hair, and I loved him, for he was normal, and didn’t look like he was wearing a bike helmet. He was Shaving Fun Ken. Normal girls were supposed to use the included marker to draw a beard and mustache, then use the included foam-bladed “razor” to shave him. What did this peculiar child do?

I carefully drew curly chest hair, arm hair, and leg hair…then Ken was accepted on the swim team! Yay! And had to shave his entire body for better aerodynamics.

Yep.

This is not the one I owned (he had a big poof of dark hair, looked kinda like a mashup of Ben Horne and Leland Palmer from Twin Peaks) but I could not pass up this hilarious photo. He’s wearing his shaving towel.

I still have my Barbies. I am going to bring them up from the basement and go through them. I’m keeping my favorites—including Shaving Ken, Kenner’s Starr (Barbie adjacent, but she had curls and was fully jointed, so could do cartwheels and splits), and my gorgeous Latina Barbie amongst them—

Isn’t she gorgeous?

Starr. High school student (came complete with homework), singer in a band. Yes, her eyes are blue and brown. Given that they are also super wide and that she was expected to be very busy, I blame Adderall misuse.

and the ones with chewed feet. When my little brother (Episode 9: Family Trees/Family Trees: Resources/Family Trees: Redux for a fabulous photo of him) would insist on being near me when I played in Little Pink Shoe Land, first all the little pink shoes would have to be put away: choking hazards. Then I would have to keep one eye on him because chewing on the rubber that 70’s and early 80’s Barbies were molded from had such a soothing bounce-back that he would get lost in it. A couple of my girls look like they swam with sharks or had unfortunate farming equipment accidents—and I treasure them for it.

So. I share all that to share this. Today is Barbie’s 65th birthday. 65 years ago, that iconic soapstone ponytailed and striped bathing suited doll was unleashed unto the world, and little girls didn’t just have to play with baby dolls ever again.

The very first Barbie looked like the femme fatale from a noir—and had side-eye to boot. She looks like she knows what you did in the dark. I love her, rough hair and all.

My first beloved doll was a baby doll, funny enough. I named her Cynthia (we have no idea where a toddler got that name) and thanks to some Pinterest sleuthing, I found her!

My loves were her, Fisher Price’s Mandy and Jenny, and Barbie. They helped me make sense of my world when it didn’t make sense, when Eric was sick, when he had seizures, when he died. And they taught me how to tell elaborate stories, and how to be okay with being alone, and how I wasn’t alone even when I was.

Mandy is in the pink, Jenny in the brown. The hats are more vintage boating and picnicking hats than the cowboy hats they appear here. I like how Scooter appears to be protecting Mandy for some reason—oe holding her back from getting feisty.

Since today is Barbie’s birthday, this is Women’s History Month, and yesterday was the International Day of the Woman, this is what I came to ultimately share (after this autistic special interest rabbit hole): the iconic monologue from the Barbie movie. If you haven’t seen it yet, this isn’t a spoiler per se; Barbie is just having a hard time. Everyone in this scene is a Barbie Doll except the speaker; she’s human. The one doing the outrageous split with the marker on her face in the background is Weird Barbie; you get a Weird Barbie by playing too hard with her. She smells like basement. 😃 I guess my Eric-chewed Barbies are Weird Barbies.

I now have a Barbie mini-me, wheelchair and all, but I will save her for another post. I have infodumped quite enough.

I saw Barbie twice in the theater, and both times, when America Ferrera gave this monologue, the room went silent. Not courtesy silent, but like the air had been sucked out of the room. Someone finally said the quiet part out loud, and very unexpectedly. Then, a few sobs were heard, both times.

So, thank you, Ruth Handler, for lifting up your daughter, Barbara Ruth Handler, so she would go and see farther than you did, in the figure of a doll, and in doing so, making sure everyone else’s daughters knew through her that they could be anything, not just someone’s boyfriend or wife.

[No vintage nor modern Skippers were harmed in the writing of this post.]