Barbie Graveyard

Missy and I were creative children. This came in handy when we were young, and our dad was on a limited budget. Trisha, who would one day become our stepmom would sometimes bring us gifts and treats. This included Barbie dolls. We LOVED Barbies. I hate to admit it, but I played with Barbies probably well after I was supposed to stop. Well, in those early years we didn’t have much to go with our Barbies either. For a long time we did not have a Ken. So we just kept one Barbie as our “Ken.” Poor Barbie. We left her with no clothes and cut her hair short- and never brushed it. She looked crazy. Even crazier was when we had “Ken” kiss Barbie. If someone had happened across us they would have thought we were into making our Barbies lesbians. But truthfully, in my imagination, it was Barbie and Ken lip locking.

DIAGRAM 1: "KEN" AND BARBIEPlease note that both "Ken" and Barbie have boobs. I tried to render them in a friendly way- despite that one is completely naked

We also didn’t have a Barbie house. Somehow we came up with the idea of creating our house using books. We would lay them down flat, and each book represented a room-almost like a floor plan. They obviously weren’t to scale, but we were on a budget. We would use our jewelry box as her bed, a pile of pogs as tables, teddy bears as bean bag chairs or statues, etc. The best was those little white plastic things they used to put in pizza boxes to keep the lid from hitting the cheese. We made those little tables. It was very creative. The only “real” Barbie furniture was this couch that our Nana had made out of a tissue box and some fabric (it was actually really well done). Sometimes the house would be vast with tons of books sprawling our bedroom floor. If we were feeling lazy they would be smaller. I used to day dream about giant Barbie houses. I wanted to have a vast Barbie Village. Perhaps one of my first childhood dreams was to grow up and use my big people money to buy Barbie stuff.

DIAGRAM 2: BOOK HOUSES

This diagram represents out Barbie house. They were often filled with much much more stuff. For the purposes of this illustration I kept it simple.

I think what caused the most upheaval was the clothes dilemma. A couple times Trisha bought us an outfit by itself. However, the vast majority of the time, we only got new Barbie clothes on a new Barbie. This was tedious when we wanted to change outfits- undressing one, dressing another endless times until we found the right look. Then Missy got this amazing Barbie closet. That changed the game for us. We needed to fill the closet. Plus it was a hassle dressing and undressing a Barbie every time we wanted her outfit. We stripped them all naked except for our absolute favorite one each. We had already started the Barbie Graveyard – the bottom drawer of my desk where we put our broken or defunct Barbies. Seemed like the perfect place to put the naked useless ones. So now this drawer was jam packed with misfit naked and some mutilated barbies. Scary stuff. To this day, I find nothing wrong with this. However, Trisha would find our stash of Barbies. I have no idea what she thought of it, but she would redress them all. Outfits not matching, broken or not, each Barbie was dressed. Then Missy and I would find them and be like what the heck? Who dressed these Barbies (and so horribly)??? Poor Trisha probably thought we were nuts, annnnd had issues. She was just trying to get clothes back on them. We were infuriated though. We would strip them all back down and put all the clothes back how we liked them. It was a cycle.

DIAGRAM 3: BARBIE GRAVEYARD

THE BARBIE GRAVEYARD
dun dun dunnnn!

We loved our Barbies. However, we fought a lot- as you should know by now. Clever as we were, we used the nearest thing possible as a weapon when we were mad at each other. Apparently (Trisha just told me this last night) we used to stab each other with Barbie feet. And come to think of it, they are pretty sharp- if being stabbed fiercely into your arm by an angry sister.

Moral of the story: get your daughter a Ken (which we eventually got), a lot of extra clothes for that Barbie, oh and get two of everything.

oh...and just as prison folk can make a shank out of anything, apparently two angry little girls can too- so watch them closely.