For your literary pleasure, we offer you several takes on our favorite blue-eyed, blonde doll. Make sure to click on the Barbie gif. at the end of Mars Tokyo's story. BARBIE SPEAKING IN TONGUES! Then return here for the other Barbie offerings.
November 11, 1960. I remember it well. I'm sitting on the floor in the living room. I've got the present in my hands. I know what it is. I can tell by the shape of the box. I know my Mom has gotten me the one thing I wanted more than anything. The paper comes off. The 12" long box is covered with small images of fashion outfits. I lift the lid and with the updraft wafts the most incredible smell of virgin vinyl. And there she is. This tiny little woman perfect in every detail. Her blue eyes even have tiny white highlights painted into the pupil. Her seashell pink fingernails are as tiny as poppyseeds. I take her out of the box and press her to my face so I can smell the heady scent of vinyl.
She's wearing a black and white striped knit swimsuit that keeps popping off of her pointed breasts. I keep stretching it up but it wants to pop off. She's wearing teeny little black plastic mules on her feet. They stay in place. Her feet, I discover, are cleverly molded into a permanent tip toe arch. Also in the box is a wire stand attached to a round plastic base. I assemble the stand and prop her against the backrest but her weight tips the stand over and the wire falls out of the base. Clearly, this kind of display takes some practice.
I set her aside and open her outfits. Her clothes are even more wonderful than she is. They are meticulously fashioned and seemed to have been made by tiny elves. Who else could sew on buttons as small as the head of a pin? And zippers, some no more than an inch long. They come with accessories like tiny pearl necklaces, and white gloves, hats, purses, boots. One by one I try on all her outfits. And then I try them on again. Dressing and undressing her again and again.
Her naked form is entertaining too. Her legs rotate at the hip and her arms at the shoulder. The only other moving part is her head which can rotate 360 degrees. I bend her legs till she assumes a right angle, lift her arms up and then tip her forward so she rests on her fingers and toes, her butt up in the air. And this is one strange butt, too. It has a crease down the back but the fact that the legs pop into the sides of the hips means that the butt itself is stationary. Her name is embossed on the butt, too.
For the next two years I save every penny of my allowance until I can purchase another outfit. I supplement her wardrobe with some homemade numbers but they never really stand up against the store bought fashions. I don't have teeny zippers and even if I had I couldn't have sewn them in right. How could I set sleeves into shoulders less than two inches across?
And today, a ghastly forty years later, I still have my little treasure and her three identical sisters who came after her and all their hoardes of miniature clothes. If I press her body close to my face I can even still smell that virgin vinyl.
(c) 1999, Mars Tokyo
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BARBIE SPEAKS IN TONGUES! - animated gif. from Mars Tokyo!
BLONDE BARBIE SWEEPS THE SIDEWALK - poetry from M.L. Nemir
BARBIE'S GRIN - fond poetic memories from a little brother
BARBIE, COME DOWN! - From, THE DREAM JOURNAL OF A.S. LEEPER
BARBIE BLENDS IN - A photo session/ playette teaser with B & Ken