The challenges, as I can recall . . . up to tangential additions

God DAMN this thing: a nice long post and this time I remembered how they disappear and carefully highlighted from the top instead and it disappeared when I got to the bottom, going into "save" mode immediately.

what's left:

(although it took me forever to find them -- an adage we've discovered in Project Dollway: "When you have just the piece of fabric for a project, it is nowhere to be found.")

Barbie Turns 50

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Barbie will celebrate her 50th Anniversary as a fashion doll this year on 9 March (she's a Pisces, folks), and suddenly a mayor in West Virginia (South Carolina??) has proposed banning the doll from shelves because she offers an unattainable goal to young girls. Well, duh.

I was eleven or twelve when she first came out and I didn't like them: it was the eyes and the shape of the head and the miniature hands and bound feet . . . and did I mention the unrealistic body?

Perhaps the Mayor is thinking of protecting the children from their mothers.

The doll was intended for older children, which one would think would be obvious enough; however, since the first few years she was out, maybe since the first girls to own them started having their own children, girls have grown up teething on them.

I didn't like them until about five years ago when I found a blonde Barbie and an AA Nichele dumped at the edge of a field, along with a variety of other vinyl dolls, across from a nursery school/day care center. They had done their duty and were unceremoniously dumped, like racing greyhounds after they've served their time.

I threw all of them in the washing machine and washed them on hot -- my usual practice with "found objects" that aren't metal or glass. It got them clean and it was not until later that I discovered that it had also loosened up their neck joints.

I picked them up because I had needed a fitting model for years for a doll wedding dress I had started to crochet and which looked impossibly small at the torso and waist. It fit perfectly. I switched to the AA doll because she was less offensively vapid-looking than the standard blonde. During the course of finishing the dress, I began to admire that doll and the designers for her wider, flatter nose and fuller lips; she was not what I had seen as the AA versions before, a dark vinyl poured into the standard wide-eyed and grinning Barbie mold. While trying to get her hair into a manageable state or back to the state it had been in before I threw her in the washing machine still dressed in her hillbilly shorts, I spent some time experimenting with various braided hairdos . . . one of which gave me the idea to make a Frida Kahlo doll, a sort of ironic iconic twist, I thought, and set out looking for a brunette Barbie. That turned out to be a far more difficult task than I had imagined: I knew Mattel had come out with a number of "representative" dolls, and I was shocked to find shelf after shelf of the good old Barbies, the blondes, and not a brunette to be found.

I did, however, find the new My Scene dolls on the shelves, among them a lovely Brunette: Nolee. Since I would be repainting the face, I figured that with a change in the eye size, the head size would not be disturbingly large (and gak, kaff kaff when those hideous B---z came out; the boys have their uses, with some head swapping, and it was some time before I discovered that). When I got her home and undressed her (sorry, that's just what girls do with dolls; the first thing they do is see what kind of underwear she's wearing: hence, "real dolls wear underwear"), I was taken immediately with the lovely new body that Barbies had been given -- although I did not know at the time that that same body was on newer Barbies -- and went out to get several more.

to be continued, here . . .. . . holdilng that thought . . .


. . .
She's more of a fetish than a role model or feminine ideal; kids know that.

. . .
the totally unflabbale affability of the wide-eyed grinning Barbie
. . . .

Luisa Luna and the Sepulveda family