It's a big deal -- maybe even a bigger deal than Madonna turning 50.
On Monday, Barbie turned the big 5-0.
That's an awfully long time to stand on your tiptoes.
In the past half-century, this ridiculously proportioned fashion doll has delighted little girls, excited fanatical collectors, emptied parental pocketbooks and exasperated feminists.
But as a little girl, I knew nothing about such things. All I knew was that the Barbie doll was the greatest, most fashionable, most beautiful girl toy on Earth.
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Back then, she didn't have to fight for popularity against those trollop-tots, the Bratz, with their freakishly tiny miniskirts and freakishly giant feet.
Barbie was, quite simply, the belle of the toy box. So what if her waist was so small she could wear a Cheerio as a belt? So she made us feel a little insecure about our own bodies. (Victoria's Secret would have done the same thing sooner or later.) Barbie stood alone as the best, most feminine, most "grown-up" doll you could own.
Some of my fondest childhood memories revolve around playing with Barbie. Back then, little girls didn't own dozens of Barbies. My three sisters and I each had one doll -- differentiated only by hair color.
This created quite a problem when we decided to give Bertha's doll a haircut. Bertha's doll had been blessed with beautiful dye-able locks. You could color its hair any hue under the sun. You could not, however, cut it, which my sister found out the hard way. After a few snips -- with Mom's "good" scissors, no less -- much of the doll's long hair fell out. By the end, the poor thing looked like a cross between Anna Nicole Smith and Friar Tuck.
From then on, our bootcamp Barbie became an unpopular stand-in for Ken during the necessary boy-girl functions -- prom, weddings -- that dominate Barbie life. But we always fought over who had to play with the poor "Kojak" doll, and sometimes resorted to "accidentally" backing over him/her with Barbie's cardboard convertible.
We then callously tossed cross-dressed Barbie behind the philodendron, and -- with a sensitivity later captured by the top clique in "Mean Girls" -- turned our attentions toward the more cosmetically appealing members of Barbie Land.
When we finally got a real Ken doll, he turned out to be similarly accident-prone. Right out of the box, Ken could spout several phrases -- such as, "Let's all go to the swim party," or, "Hey, neat!" -- when you pulled a string on his back.
But during a fit of bratty-little-sister temperament, I slammed Ken against a chair. After that, his already-limited vocabulary became even less Mensa-ready: "Rrrrzzzzzwwwwp."
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Later, in an attempt to make Ken straddle Barbie's horse, one of his legs broke off.
From that moment on, he was forever destined to wear hot pants fashioned from black electrical tape. Although the tape held on his leg and gave him the look of an edgy German hipster, it also made it impossible for him to sit down.
Even at Ken's own wedding reception, he had to be leaned up against the Dream Van while everyone else sat around the shoebox head table and ate the plastic airline food from the Barbie Dream Airliner. And when it was time to stand up (which he already was) to thank his guests, he could only say one thing: "Rrrzzzzzwwwp."
Oh well. Barbie didn't marry Ken for his brains, anyway.
