Barbie with the Bad Hair

My first Barbie doll was my only Barbie doll.

Barbie and I were both born in the late 1950's. Barbie and I both had lots of clothing. My mother loved to shop, and Mattel had not yet figured out that it was far more lucrative to switch out Barbies than simply change their outfits. If I wanted my Barbie to look serious and smart, the best I could do was pull off her slinky dress and stuff her into a pair of seersucker shorts and substitute her red high heels for basic black. Barbie in a white coat with a stethoscope hanging around her neck had not been packaged.

Stripped down -- as she usually was -- my Barbie had an idealized body - long lean legs, made longer by pointed feet propped up at a steep pitch by flexed toes, (flointed, as phrased by a favorite yoga instructor), narrow hips, an anatomically impossible tiny waist, and nipple-less boobs raised in a permanent salute. I could only dream of the day when my skinny-limbed, pot-bellied frame would morph into something Barbie-like. Fifty something years later, notwithstanding lots of morphing, I'm still dreaming, still waiting.

My Barbie had a particularly hideous hairdo, coarse and bouffant-ish, which I credit, in part, with my early decision to give away most of her clothes and abandon her naked and partially limbless body, along with my girlish Keds, for books and Mets games and boys' Adidas and unkempt hair in a long, stringy pony tail. Envy about her perfect, nipple-less and orifice-less body aside, my self-esteem remained in tact largely because her hair looked, and felt, like a Brillo pad.

Well before Dr. Barbie and Astronaut Barbie and Attorney Barbie burst onto the shelves, I had fantasized more about becoming a doctor or an astronaut or a lawyer -- or President -- than a woman who could look great in white tee shirts without a bra. Even in my fantasies, I was a realist. Still, I spared no expense on Barbies when my own daughters were little. Like my single Barbie with the bad hair, most of my daughters' Barbies landed in a trash heap, naked plastic amputees with flointed feet (or foot), stripped of their clothes and, with far more to lose than their original counterparts, their  professional credentials.

The wildly gay man who cuts my hair collects dolls, and Barbie and Ken make up a good part of his menagerie. He has promised me a vintage Barbie, one with the coarse bouffant hairdo that he picked up downstate for under fifty bucks. He wants to make her more presentable for me first, to smooth out and restyle her hair. I have to admit, I am looking forward to seeing her, all these years later. I know she hasn't changed a bit, but I wonder if she will look different to me, through my beholder eyes.

Will I still envy her long lean limbs and her impossibly small waist and her nipple-less boobs while I comfort myself with her imperfect hair and the notion that I, unlike her, can be anything I want to be, whether I change clothes or not? Will I resent her for her absence of back fat, her flawless, unwrinkled complexion, her factory original parts all still where they began, defying gravity and time?

Barbie, circa nineteen sixty-something, might be exactly the same, but Barbie (the brand) and I have been through a lot of changes and, kudos to both of us, we are still standing, and I imagine her ankles hurt, just like mine, from years of high heels. We have become, in our own ways, women to admire, whether it's because of the outfits we wear or the diplomas we hang, or the dark circles and wrinkles and back fat that may cover, but never obliterate, the dreamers we have always been.