BY KRISTA RAMSEY
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Hundreds of Barbies will be in town Sunday at the Queen City Barbie Doll Club's Barbie show and sale. A spectacular number, although those of us with small daughters suspect we live with that many all the time.
I admit it would be interesting to go to the Holiday Inn North in Sharonville to see this small city of Barbies. All that hair. All those shoes. My heart still throbs with greedy excitement. But I will not be attending, for there is only one Barbie for me. She lives in my basement now, retired to a small, shiny black case stuffed with most of her worldly belongings. The movie date dress. The silk sheath. Long black gloves, short white gloves. Ah, such a life it was. A thousand evenings of glamour must dance through her empty little vinyl head. She was a diva, a doll with a past.
Early ones were better
Mine was an early one, the 1962 Barbie. Back when, like Corvettes, they still made them right. The aquiline nose, sphinx-like smile. The heavily lined, blue-shadowed eyes frozen in a smugly confident smile. She puts to shame those giddy, goggle-eyed imitators of today.
The world was her toy box. She could go anywhere, fit in with anyone, at the popping of a snap and tying of a bow. She was Catherine Deneuve with flame-retardant hair.
She first appeared at my bedside as I suffered through a particularly miserable case of measles. There was I, bed-ridden, blotchy skinned, puffy eyed. There was she, long of limb and smooth of complexion. It was a miracle. She arrived, and I survived. I would walk again, would live again, if only to act as maidservant and stylist for this fabulous creature.
From such a beginning there evolved a good and sustaining relationship between us.
We knew our parts. Barbie was the star, but I was the director. She brought the clothes, but I built the set, wrote the dialogue, determined the action (in addition, of course, to serving as her personal dresser).
Therein lies my answer to those who criticize her as a limiting, stereotypical, sexist toy: She came without wires, batteries or instructions. She ran purely on my imagination. She was, in fact, the Lincoln Logs of the Sputnik generation.
Little is said of her physiological and social benefits. Surely some wise toy designer had fine motor skills in mind when he created those fiendishly small snaps and tiny hooks. One hand to pull things securely over those womanly curves, the other to batten things down.
And more than one conflict management lesson was learned at her slender fingertips. My friend Janey's Midge doll would choose the Enchanted Evening gown -- which everyone knows only Barbie is entitled to wear -- and off the two beauties would go, with the turning of a chilly shoulder and casting of a frosty stare.
They would have remained parted forever. It was up to us, their human friends, to patch things up, set the rules, enforce what was fair. One day some female Nobel Peace Prize winner will attribute it all to her Barbie, and the world will finally understand.
Much has been made of her outlandishly endowed physique. Did it cause impressionable girls to grow up with impossible body standards? I think not. We knew real women did not look like that. Most of us had no desire for -- would not have known what to do with -- all of that. She was a fantasy creature, and her proportions were as unrealistic as her ability to shop endlessly for clothes and accessories with no visible evidence of a job.
Which leads us to another of the ultimate questions. What did Barbie actually do with her time? Was she an heiress, a debutante, a socialite? We always wondered. Still, it was quite clear that Barbie was no bimbo. She was a graceful and obviously prominent person, the sun around whom all the other dolls orbited.
This weekend, I intend to enjoy her dimming light once more, fetched up from the reaches of my basement. I'll invite my daughter to join me. But only if I get to choose the clothes.
Krista Ramsey's column appears on Saturdays. Write her at the Enquirer, 312 Elm St. Cincinnati 45202.
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