LIFE LESSONS
All Dolled Up?
Neon, a naked Ken Doll and delivering discipline when Barbie mouths off
A short lesson about real life, told from a pint-sized perspective, left me alternately giggling and quite a little bit alarmed.
I was just trying to squeeze in the last rays of summer on Sunday. As the temps climbed, I decided to journey to the neighborhood pool to splash a bit and read my novel.
(If you’d like a rec, I’ve been spending time this past week with The Most Fun I Ever Had, the freshman effort of social worker-turned-New York Times Bestseller author Claire Lombardo. Unclear about Lombardo’s writing process, but props to her for crafting a 544-page story that not only keeps me riveted, but also wondering what the 32-year-old writer has in store — both in subsequent chapters, since I’m about halfway through, and when she launches her next novel.)
Back to the pool. In between dips and time spent with my nose in a book, my attention swung to the Barbie Doll Drama poolside.
Two little girls in neon colors crafted a familial scene of their own, with three Barbie dolls, a naked Ken, a couple of trolls and a random assortment of plastic accessories.
The two appeared to be imaginative tykes. Ken and the trolls didn’t say much, but maybe that’s because all three were embarrassed by their lack of couture. The three Barbies, though, not only were fully dressed but had opinions about everything, and no fear of expressing them.
Out in the open like this, the Barbies didn’t use their “inside voices”. So, to absolve me from being some kind of creeper or something, let’s just say the little girls were several feet beyond where I was sitting, and their various attempts at “mom and daughter” type banter were not exactly demure.
Yes, I could hear every word.
In fact, before I looked up the first time, I’d actually thought a mom and her progeny were conversing nearby.
Yes, my girls had Barbies. We even hung on to them for years after everyone lost interest, thinking we could eventually sell them as “vintage”. But like the oodles of Beanie Babies that came after the Barbies, I eventually got tired of the charade and gave these odd creations away.
We (yes, as every parent — especially you moms out there — knows, this is a collective effort) even, for a time, had a Barbie Jeep. A little plastic one, not one of those motorized monstrosities. And no, I didn’t purchase every single solitary accessory. The kids had to — as these young ladies did on Sunday — make do with their imaginations, and then occasionally pull a chapter from real life.
How else would two trolls and Ken — sans everything, including cute accessories — worm their way into the story?
Poolside on Sunday, Naked Ken and the trolls were hanging out. The drama unfolded when the little girls — 5 or 6, I‘d wager — invented a story that didn’t seem too far from the truth.
The Barbie Drama centered around she who was attired in some kind of (only in Mattel’s imagination) “Dress for Success” business-wear, complete with tiny plastic stilettos on her not quite proportioned feet. I’ve always wondered why Barbie’s feet were automatically designed for high heels. No Birkies for this babe.
But that — along with Barbie’s oddly shaped, never-in-any-real world figure — is a discussion for another time, I guess.
This well-dressed doll certainly had a forceful nature about her. She spoke in melodramatic “Mom Boss” sentences. Whenever the little girl voicing Mom Boss Barbie (and they switched off the role — sharing is caring, after all) spoke to what I can only reckon were her two “Daughter Barbies”, the tone was sometimes modulated, sometimes clipped, often loud and quite a bit deeper than her “children’s” elocution.
It seems that Mom Boss Barbie had caught her two Daughter Barbies doing something real wrong. In her eyes, at least.
That much I garnered, having come late to the party. And MBB wasn’t going to settle for some little ol’ “Sorry, Mom” from her two brats. That much was apparent.
MBB: “What do you two think you’re doing, anyway?”
DB #1: “We’re playing with Ken and the trolls, Mom.”
MBB: “It looks like more than that, young lady. Where are his pants?”
DB #2: “We couldn’t find any in the toy basket, Mom. And you need to buy him a swimsuit.”
MBB: “I don’t need to buy him anything! Don’t you have some capris he can wear?”
DB #1: “Boys don’t wear capris, Mom. Duh.”
At this juncture in the conversation, the little girl controlling Mom Boss Barbie picked DB #1 up by her blond ponytail and flung her a good 10 feet down the deck.
Daughter Barbie’s legs, knocked askew by the toss (get that kid an MLB contract, stat!), seemed to be teetering on the edge. A little boy who’d been observing the drama walked over and kicked DB #1 into the pool.
MBB: “And you stay there in solitary til I tell you to come down to eat. No one speaks to me that way! The next time you get to skip dinner, too.”
For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what DB #1 had done wrong.
I went back to my book. Wondering, of course, why the Sorenson parents in The Most Fun I Ever Had never exacted any punishments on their kids. Except that one time. Or if the four girls featured in Claire Lombardo’s masterpiece ever played with Barbies.
Oh, and how these Munchkins in front of me knew anything about “solitary”.
The naked guys — Ken and the trolls (aren’t all such hobgoblins of the male persuasion?) had no comment. Figures.
