To Barbie, with love

I got my first Barbie on November 21, 1977. It is a date that I will always remember, mostly because it was my eighth birthday. The further away from my childhood that the sands of time have shifted, I can’t recall every gift from every birthday. However, this year was particularly fortuitous when I received a couple of presents that would alter the course of my entire life, and 1977 Ginger was absolutely clueless at the time.

These two gifts in question: 1977 Superstar Barbie and the LP for Debby Boone’s You Light Up My Life.

Yes, it was ridiculously 70s and yes, it was teeth-achingly wholesome. But it was about to do something astonishing.

It was about to give birth to a storyteller.

This combination of the two gifts was important. My new friend already came with a backstory: she was a Superstar. All I had to do was put on the album and let her do her thing.  She was prepared for any opportunity to belt out a star-making solo. I began playing with both gifts at the same time that very evening, courtesy of the console stereo in the woodgrain cabinet in our living room.

I should clarify that I wasn’t what you would call a dolly girl. I had already gotten over baby dolls (of which I had two,) by the time I was six. Don’t even get me started on porcelain dolls, which had creeped me out way before I saw any horror movie with them as the subject. Still, my new Glamazon fascinated me. I liked adult things. I felt comfortable with adult things. All my siblings were adults. My extended family, adults. Even my beloved Fisher Price Little People Village offered opportunities to pretend my toys could hold jobs and live in a studio apartment.

Barbie took it to a whole other level. She was a celebrity. This was about to open up a whole new world of glitz and glamor that prepped me more for the decadent 80s than anything else could have done. I was ready for Extra.

Within the next year, I received Ballerina Barbie, a dame so accomplished she came with a permanent crown atop her head. And for Christmas 1978, I got Deluxe Quick Curl Barbie as well as some wicker doll furniture for my growing population of glamor dolls.

I didn’t have a Barbie Dreamhouse, no matter how many catalogs I circled. But I cared not. For a few hours a day, I could be a Superstar, I could be a ballerina, I could be a glamorous adult, and live – literally – the life I imagined.

Things really kicked into gear in 1979, when I got my first Ken doll, Sun Lovin’ Malibu Ken to be precise, the kind that came with the tan. (Sun Lovin’ Skipper would come later.)

I had campaigned hard for a Ken doll, one I think my super conservative Christian mother was hesitant to buy me. His clothes came off, after all. Despite the lack of anatomical correctness, I think my mom (correctly) worried what kind of shenanigans my growing collection of Barbies might get into when introducing a man into the mix.

By 1980, I was heavily addicted to General Hospital, specifically Luke and Laura, so she was right to be worried.

Laura Webber was, in fact, my first girl crush from about 1978. One guess as to why.

Add first husband Scotty to the mix, and I felt like I was watching Barbie and Ken come to life.

Needless to say, Malibu Ken was keen to move into the neighborhood, which now consisted of my Superstar and Ballerina Barbies, Deluxe Quick Curl Barbie and a TG&Y bargain knockoff glamor doll. It was enough to get me started. Superstar became Laura, because obviously, and Ken became David (the name of my imaginary boyfriend back in the day, or so they tell me.) They were a fabulously famous and wealthy power couple that had to move into my three-tier pink corner shelf “mansion” since I never did get that damn Dreamhouse.

My bestie, also a Barbie aficionado, always envied that shelf. We still talk about it to this day.

I envied his Barbie jet. The only big-ticket item that I was ever gifted was the Barbie Camper, which was pretty damn cool looking back at it, just because my parents didn’t typically spend that kind of dough on my gifts.

Instead, Laura’s pink Corvette was another surprise find at the TG&Y. It wasn’t made for Barbies but she fit. Sorta. That’s just how we rolled back in the day. My parents had lived through the Depression, and my Dad only bought houses on credit. Everything else was cash only. If you didn’t have the cash on hand, you didn’t get the thing. Periodt. I can only guess how much the Camper set my parents back. I don’t even remember the event where I got it, so it may have been a garage sale find.

It was the 1970 model, after all. One day it was just there, kind of like my Marie Osmond doll, who showed up in time to bear the brunt of my play with the bestie, as the only thing we really could agree with was that she had to be routinely tossed from the highest mantle on a regular basis.

No disrespect intended for the *actual* Marie Osmond, who I’m sure is a lovely person. FWIW, any stories told when playing with others wasn’t canon anyway, so no harm, no foul – except maybe to my mother’s potted plants.

We made do. That was the beauty of pretend. Anything was possible if you just believed hard enough. And you just never knew where the winding road would lead, which was part of the fun. Ironically, so was finding ways to make do. This was a good thing because despite how many commercials I watched or catalogs I circled, I couldn’t keep up with the Barbie machine no matter how much I may have wanted to. Eventually, I would even sew my Barbie clothes.

My ingenuity knew no bounds. (Still doesn’t.)

Thanks to the Barbie movie coming out, I’ve seen some wax poetic on Barbie and express their thoughts about the folks who had them. One such piece contended that only the affluent children had Barbies, the kind with trust funds, or who took yearly vacations. The suggestion made me laugh, cuz that wasn’t me. Immediately, it made me think back to how I repurposed that pink shelf, that cheap Corvette, my Easy Bake Oven, making the things I had work for the stories I wanted to tell and the lives I wanted my Barbies to have. My Fisher Price Little People became the babies that would fill the pink crocheted bassinet purse I got as a gift, because my poor mom’s pocketbook couldn’t keep up with the demands of the fabulous world I was building. Sure, I wanted all the pretty pink packaging with the jet, the horses, the pets, the babies, the houses, the cars, the clothes, the accessories… who wouldn’t?

The only accessory I did get was the Barbie makeover bust, mostly because I think my mother wanted me to have a way to get my makeup fix without actually wearing it myself - something she decided I couldn’t do until I was sixteen.

For everything else, I made what I had work. This forced me to be even more creative. I used my imagination to fill in the blanks. My creativity flexed harder because of what I didn’t have than because of what I did.

And, ironically, these skills led to an affluence strikingly absent from my youth.

Life, go figure.

The Golden Era began in 1981, when I got the aptly named Golden Dream Barbie.

I fell in love with her at first sight. Her outfit glittered like gold, and so did actual strands in her hair. She became my model, and best friends with Laura and David. Jenny Gold, however, was single and ready to mingle.

In 1981, I needed a few happy endings, and some happy beginnings, too. I had lost my Dad December 1980, which threw my childhood right into the crapper. My mom worked second shift at Levi Strauss, so I was barely 11 and already a latchkey kid. I came home to an empty house after school and was responsible for taking care of all my needs until bedtime, which I also had to manage because my mom wouldn’t be home yet.

I learned how to prepare food for myself. I learned how to entertain myself, back before smart phones, computers, streaming services, VHS, even cable. My new bestie and I would chat nightly on the phone, but my true constant companions were made of plastic. I believe Laura got pregnant for the first time around this point, simply because I needed something to look forward to.

Plus, I had that pink crocheted bassinet purse. What else was I going to do with it?

This may have been where I decided to tell my story of this blessed event in real time. Laura’s pregnancy lasted nine months because I needed it to last for nine months. I wanted to milk every second of hope for that new beginning. Every month I would add tissue paper taped to her tiny waist in increasing increments to fully appreciate her progress.

I became an expert working with what I had to will happy shit into existence. Not just with the dolls, but that was where it likely started.

It was easy to throw myself into these stories. Like I said, my care was my own responsibility. As a grief-stricken eleven-year-old child, I had no idea how to comfort/heal/console a grief-stricken eleven-year-old kid. All I knew how to do was keep her preoccupied. Hidden. Safe. This would become my comfort of choice as my life got even more chaotic, often by my own choice.

Spring of 1981 was my first experience with depression. My dad’s death got me into it. My love of Barbies got me out.

My mother had switched jobs from that second shift at a factory to a 9-5 office job. This sounded like a great solution on paper but leaving me on my own to get off to school every morning turned out to be a Herculean task. I had changed schools for the umpteenth time, only this time it was easier to hear all the negative voices after my dad’s positive reinforcement was silenced.

And it sucked. I already felt like shit. Bullies smelled that vulnerability like blood in the water, to the point I dreaded going to face them every day.

This included my fifth grade PE teacher, who had zero compassion for the chubby girl who just lost her dad. He thought pointed humiliation was the answer. It was all very 70s. Chin up and move forward. Periodt.

So, I realized when I’d get into the tub every morning that was where I would rather stay, in a nice warm bath, with the harsh realities of life locked just outside that private sanctuary.

I dragged my B&W 13” TV into the bathroom, along with food and my Barbies, and did just that.

After missing two straight weeks of school, hiding in my house, watching my General Hospital during the day and creating my own stories with my Barbies at night, I ended up flunking the 5^th sixth week period. I was an impressive student who had never flunked anything. My mom was as livid as she had been when she found out I was playing hooky. Using my powers of persuasion, something I thought for sure would make me a fine lawyer one day (because at the time, that was the dream,) I wagered that if I managed to turn that final sixth week period around to straight As, I wanted the Western Barbie AND Ken, along with Rod Stewart’s Passion album.

My mom probably didn’t think I could do it, because she agreed to these lofty terms. I found out decades later my bestie didn’t think I could do it at the time, either. When I achieved the impossible, he told me that was when he knew I could do anything if I put my mind to it.

We were in our 40s when he confessed this to me. I’m 53 now, and still not as convinced of this as he is.

After my mom changed jobs so she could be home with me at night, she met a divorcee with two kids who were brand new to the area. They were two single moms just starting over, so they had a lot in common. They decided to rent a house together, which gave me a sixteen-year-old roommate whether I wanted one or not.

It didn’t take me long to realize that I, in fact, did not want one. Least of all, not that one.

I disappeared even further into my stories, particularly when I ended up with an abandoned action figure from my roomie’s younger brother. In his former life he had been Superman but came to me missing one leg and no costume. He became Bobby, and Jenny’s one true love.

Unlike Ken and Barbie, who were literally made for each other, my new couple started from Date One. He was a gentleman. She was a lady. They hit it off from the start. Chemistry was off the charts. By the time our roommates moved out, Bobby and Jenny had moved in together in the sixteen-year-old’s recently vacated closet.

By then, I had twelve of the thirteen dolls that would complete my childhood collection. (Dream Date PJ was last, an effort to diversify my population with a non-blonde doll that would come to represent Future Ginger. Her husband, in a grand wedding, was a dark-headed man named Steve. He didn’t have long hair, so I got to pretend. Again. *It was fabulous.*)

The characters these 13 dolls represented outnumbered them by a mile. I made do with what I had, remember. If I needed twenty-five characters, my dolls did double duty. The only limits I had were material, and I could work with that. I had no choice. The stories drove me.

Thanks to my steady diet of General Hospital, Knots Landing, and stacks and stacks of Harlequin romance novels, there was no plot I would not pursue. Baby Mama drama, check. Illicit affairs, check. Soaps had nothing on me. Malibu Ken-slash David ended up as Kevin Sherwood, a photographer who became obsessed with the beautiful, but happily married, Jenny Gold. When he learned she was pregnant, he kidnapped her, taking her to a deserted island where he would finally convince her to fall in love with him while the world – including her husband, Bobby – mourned her death.

She finally won ol Kevin over with her kindness, and he returned her home in time for Bobby to deliver their first child, a daughter named Mindy.

(I was twelve at the time of this grand saga.)

This was a story I told in real time, daily, over many months in 1982, and was as real to me as Luke and Laura’s adventures saving the world from Cassadine’s evil weather machine.

Unlike General Hospital, my stories continued every single day of the week. I couldn’t wait to see where they all were going.

My bestie got an Atari. I played with imaginary people. I painstakingly and heartbreakingly told their stories. I told what I hoped would be my story. The love, the passion, the happily ever after. Friends. Family. A place to belong.

Barbie gave me all of it, right when I was in short supply.

It would take them years to diversify their cast of dolls to look more like I wanted my world to look like once upon a time. Now they have the Fashionista Dolls that make the world of Barbie so much fuller and so much richer than it was with the same face sold in pretty new dresses. Different races, different body types, differently abled. There are even long-haired Ken dolls at long last.

I don’t have that original thirteen anymore, but years ago when I beat cancer and wanted a “rebirth” of sorts, I asked for, and got, some of these new Barbies to fill my world once more. My husband splurged with the holiday Barbie for 2018, and my daughter-in-law even created a birthday cake inspired by Queer Eye’s Jonathan Van Ness, recreating a moment when my sister made me a Barbie cake for my thirteenth birthday. A lifelong passion that came full circle.

 Since then, my husband, my daughter-in-law and other friends have filled in the canvas, with dolls as unique and special as they are. Every year I’ve gotten new ones, including Rosa Parks and Eleanor Roosevelt, the 13^th Doctor and Captain Marvel. All those dolls I wanted but never got, I get them now, including a Ken with long, black hair.

He’ll go so nicely with my full-figured redhead. I may even write a book about them.

Or have I already?

And you know what? I still feel the excitement of holding a Barbie box shaped gift in my hands, wondering what new friend I’m going to find inside. A blank slate with a familiar face.

On November 21, 2022, I even bought the 1977 Superstar Reproduction Barbie for my own damn self. Laura returned home at long last.

One day, when I have an office in my home like I want, I’ll get that Dreamhouse where they can live happily ever after, like they deserve.

I’m a writer now because of the stories they taught me how to tell. I was over being a lawyer before I hit high school. I wanted to immerse myself in the creative process, the ultimate sandbox, where anything can (and does) happen. I can go as far as I dare. They give me courage to explore the perils of dreams realized, and the timeless appeal of unrelenting hope. It’s extra. It takes its time. And it’s fabulous. It laid the groundwork for Vanni, Andy and Graham, Rachel, Drew and Alex, Peaches and her Duke. And somehow, all my pretend people gave me the life 1977 Ginger used to dream was possible.

So, thank you, Barbie.

You really did light up my life.