Runway Fashion with Barbie Millicent Roberts

I am not one of those people who is capable of what is commonly called “linear thinking.” My thoughts bounce around my head like pinballs, occasionally hitting the jackpot bumper where sensible discourse resides. Fortunately, most of my friends are able to follow along when, in the middle of telling some complicated plot twist in a novel I’m reading, I suddenly ask, “How long should you defrost a frozen turkey in cold water?” There’s always some logical synaptic leap, but it can be hard to discern.

I’m telling you this so you’ll know how I made the leap from Vietnam War veterans to Barbies.

Cinderella Church is still on my mind, perhaps because several people commented on that post I put on Facebook. Everyone’s name has a story. So I’ve been thinking about names, which led to me think about the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in DC. All those faceless names, each of them with a story. That led me to think about whether I knew any Vietnam veterans. I could only come up with one, a guy whose name I can’t even remember. He was the boyfriend and later husband of my down-the-street babysitter. (You know which babysitter—the one who twirled fire batons and who willed me her awesomely great Mt. Carmel High School majorette boots with the gold tassels? I wrote about them on the trash blog. See what I mean? Pinball thoughts. Where was I?)

I was the flower girl in their wedding. They later got divorced, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t because of me. What I remember was that my mom made my dress—a petal-pink number with a high-waisted maroon sash. Hoo-boy, I thought I was some kind of glamorous at five years old in that outfit. What I remember even more is that my mom made my Barbie a matching outfit.  

My Barbie was not the kind of girl who got to wear couture. She was strictly an off-the-rack Barbie. This was a cause of some dismay since my Barbie BFF had a grandmother who made her Barbie high-fashion Barbie clothes, and I was jealous as hell. Her Barbie had great clothes, and for all I know, her Barbie was taller, thinner, blonder, smarter and richer. Her Barbie was the Charlize Theron of the Barbie fashion, and mine was like some random Olson twin.

At some point, I traded in my Barbie at K-Mart, essentially upgrading to Barbie 2.0. I swapped out my stiff-legged plastic Barbie for one with soft, pliable, bendable legs. I let my Barbie go barefoot. I didn’t care how soft her new little feet were; no Barbie of mine was going to jam her feet into those teeny little shoes. I’m sure CharlizeTheronBarbie was wearing Manolos, living the high life in a Barbie dream house, dancing with Ken at glamorous parties and tweeting* selfies with celebrities while MaryKateAshleyBarbie was trying to pay the light bill, living in a bunch of shoe boxes masking-taped together to create an apartment, waiting for the AOL dial-up to connect.

It didn’t matter though, because she had One. Great. Flower Girl Dress. We both did.

*Barbie has her own Twitter account. This is true.