Chapter 6.6: Barbara Millicent Roberts

Pretty much everyone is familiar with Barbie. You simply say the name and suddenly there are arguments about unhealthy body image and fond memories of childhood. My sister and I had a huge collection of dolls. Enough that we each started with about six adults, three kids and a baby each. And that wasn't even all of them (yes, we were a bit spoiled).

Although usually my family got bigger (as it should) as children got older, got married, had children of their own. My sister made her people evil and her families shrank as we had to kill off the psychos until I had probably twenty people and Meg had three. Then we'd start over. Mom was a little worried that we always seemed to be having funerals for our dolls, but I think we turned out okay.

And what more natural place for a discussion of children's dolls to come up than in a class about classic Science Fiction? In my Philip K Dick class today, we had a story (The Days of Perky Pat) that springboarded into a short discussion of Barbie. If you think about it, she was really one of the first self-sufficient woman role models.

She was a young woman who lived on her own, but she had no man or parents to support or take care of her. And she didn't need one, although she did later get a boyfriend. She was a doctor and a lawyer before she got a vacuum (and she had careers other than housewife). She took good care of her younger sisters. If she wasn't freakishly proportioned, parents now would have no issue with her.

Because of this talk, I decided to look up Barbie and see what else there is out there about her. Her full name is Barbara Millicent Roberts and it was mentioned in some books written starring her that her parents are George and Margaret. She had a shocking number of siblings, some of whom I'd never heard of. There was the teen, Skipper, preteen Stacie (who apparently had a twin brother named Todd), the little Kelly, and baby Krissy.

Ken was her on again off again boyfriend. She may have had a fling with an Australian surfer named Blaine. She also had a cousin who was introduced later named Francie(yes, that's right, her name is Francie. Did Stephenie Meyer have a hand in the naming?). And she had a friend named Midge when was creepily sold pregnant at some point with a baby actually inside her stomach (anyone else find this intensely creepy?). Soon after Midge married and had children, she and Barbie stopped being friends (apparently).

And after reading all this I feel like I've been reading a soap opera. Barbie is kind of messed up, but she was a fun doll. And I feel sad that Barbies as I knew them are becoming a thing of the far past, being taken over by Bratz dolls and the like. Mattel has started a kind of reboot with Barbies who are more proportional, but it's not the same.

But what does any of this have to do with a science fiction writer from the late fifties and sixties? Well in his story, he's talking about a game played with a doll named Perky Pat who is about 17 and lives in a house that is constantly being updated. She has a boy friend who lives down the street. Then the Perky Pat people hear about a Connie Companion doll in another colony and go to face Pat against Connie in a sudden-death, winner-takes-both-dolls match. Oh yeah, they're intense about their dolls.

Connie though, is "much" more mature than Pat. She's twenty five and is married and has a career. And she's pregnant. So clearly, we just naturally think of Barbie when talking about these dolls and that's what led into this conversation. So what?

Well here's where it gets freaky. It turns out that Barbie used to have a best friend named Midge. In the early 2000s, Midge married a doll named Alan. And then a pregnant Midge doll was produced (as mentioned above). But all of this happened long after Dick wrote this story! It just seems a little eerie to me how the dolls connect to what actually happened. My class also decided that somewhere out there is probably a Jaded Jennifer who's a forty year old chain smoker that life has beat down and a Geriatric Jean who's probably in her sixties.

Anyway, do you have memories of playing with Barbie? Do you still have your dolls? Oh, and just a helpful note, never cut the doll's hair. It will not grow back, and it will 9 times out of 10 look much worse.