by T.Hemsath

Created on: June 01, 2008

As children, my sister and I used to play with Barbie dolls all the time. Barbie dolls were what we asked for every birthday and Christmas; they were the first thing we bought when we had money; and they were the first thing we ran to when our mother took us to Target or Kmart to shop. And through the years of loving Barbie dolls, my sister and I had collected so many, we had to get a large cardboard box to hold them all.

All together, we probably had about 25 Barbie dolls, 5 Ken dolls, the Barbie mansion, the Barbie Corvette and Ferrari, Barbie horses, a Barbie Jacuzzi and surfboard, piles of clothes and accessories, and a bunch of other junk that we made for their homes. We used to take the little thingamabobs from the center of delivery pizzas and use them as coffee tables for their living rooms. We would make dresses out of socks, beds out of shoe-boxes, blankets out of washcloths, and couches out of rolled and formed face towels.
Playing Barbie dolls took the place of playing house or make believe because we could simply combine all three games into one. I remember waking up early on Saturday mornings and quickly cleaning the bathrooms (our Saturday chore) so that we could start setting up our Barbie world. We made our room into cities, with malls, and streets, and homes, finding anything thing we could to transform into ramps and walls. The funny thing was, however, that my sister and I spent so much time planning, decorating, and designing our Barbie world that by the time we got to actually playing with them, we were burned out.
But on the occasions that we did get around to actually playing, Barbies proved to be our method of learning about adulthood. We often pretended that our two favorite Barbie dolls (which were whatever newest two Barbies we had) were actually us. And as the dolls, we dated, got married, had sex, had kids (yes we even had Barbie babies), divorced, and did the whole thing over again. Our Barbie's had friends and enemies, got hurt, and sometimes even died. The worlds and stories we created were like miniature soap operas and yet, my sister and I had never actually watched a real soap opera-we just knew the formula.
We had a girlfriend named Sherrie who lived across the street from us. We didn't really like Sherrie, but we played with her because she had even more Barbies than we did, including all of her mother's vintage Barbie doll stuff to. Her mother's Barbie clothes were so much more detailed and realistic, not all pink and ruffled

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