by Lori Renee

Created on: October 13, 2008   Last Updated: August 25, 2010

BarbieLand

Oh, the world of Barbie! For several generations, little girls all over America have treasured these dolls, and in many cases, allowed these molded pieces of plastic to shape their lives. Barbie has been blamed for prompting young girls to starve themselves so they could look like this unrealistically tall, thin and buxom image of femininity. I have to agree that Barbie is at least partially responsible for my poor body image, (OK, mostly it's the extra pounds on my frame from all the Ben & Jerry's I've pumped into my face, but I digress.) Nevertheless, I do have wonderful, happy memories from my years living in BarbieLand.

During my elementary years, my best friend was Terry from down the block. Our brothers were friends too, so the families blended. We spent most of our free time at each other's houses playing, eating and having sleepovers. I was the youngest of three and the only girl. She was the youngest of five, but had two older sisters. I was a girly-girl, but she was the tomboy. I was two years older than her and went to public school while she attended the local Catholic school. This worked out to be a great partnership as we each had the best of two different worlds. Terry's Barbie collection was huge, much of which was handed down from her sisters, and I possessed some of the new and modern collection.  Since most of her friends were tomboys too, she only had two or three that would play with dolls, myself included. I had a growing collection that was still fairly new, so all my high-heeled shoes had their matches! We combined the two collections and took over the girls' bedroom.

It was common for me to bring a lot of my stuff over to Terry's and I would leave it there for days or weeks at a time. Friday evenings I would walk down the block, often with help from Mom or my brother, with sewing and tackle boxes filled with all things Barbie for our weekend sleepover. One spring weekend, we were bored. We ventured into the attic, as we occasionally did, to explore the old boxes filled with Christmas decorations and ancient family photographs. It was an old house, where the attic staircase led to the middle of a main room, with two smaller rooms at the back. The larger room had a lot of space and we realized that we could spread out all the Barbie stuff at one time, which we couldn't do downstairs in the girls' bedroom. We lugged up dozens of Barbie's, boxes of clothes, the pink Corvette and pop-up

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