My sister broke her tawny rubber legs.
I sheared off all her golden hair. And buried in a desk drawer in my living room, beneath a box of canceled checks, an old amortization schedule, a spare hammer and a jelly jar full of nuts and bolts, lies my daughter's once-beloved playmate: Totally Hair Barbie. Sans head.
Barbie. For the last 39 years American girls have come of age with the Queen of Plastic, the perpetually open-eyed, pink-smiled, pert-nosed plaything, the bearer of Hooters-sized honkers, the most perfectly perfect piece of female flesh ever to roll off an assembly line.
She has informed our childhoods and warped our sensibilities -- at least, it appears, in the Lange family. Why did all my Barbies end up with Sinead O'Connor hairless hair- dos?
Why did my sister put Barbie to bed each night beneath the protruding pectorals of Ken? Why did she force poor Barbie into contortions that severed her thighs from the hip?
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And why, oh why, does Totally Hair Barbie slumber beheaded amid the mundane clutter of a middle class household?
Perhaps the answers will be found tonight when "Barbie Nation: An Unauthorized Tour" airs at 9 p.m. on Nebraska ETV Network, Cable Vision channel 13.
Filmmaker Susan Stern, according to press release prose, "blows the roof off Barbie's "Dream House' with an irreverent look at the histo- ry and fantasy of this enduring cul- tural icon..." "I don't collect Barbies. I collect Barbie stories," Stern says. Following in that tradition, NETV will open its Lincoln studio at 1800 N. 33rd St., from 3 p.m. to 8 p.m. Wednesday for viewers to share their own Barbie tales and reactions to the show. Videotapes will be sent to New York City for possible inclusion in a follow-up segment slated to air Aug. 4.
Like memories of sunny summer baseball games in the souls of men, Barbie sagas spring eternal in the minds of women.
It was a tumultuous relationship between me and my Barbie. My dog chewed off her carefully cupped hands and nibbled her funky feet clean off. Sometimes I'd twist her top half off and connect her together again: Buns of steel side front.
And, of course, there were those scissors attacks to that luxurious, fountain-like mane of hers.
Years later I saw those acts as the work of a budding feminist refusing to acquiesce to the narrow confines of a patriarchal society bent on molding women into petite play- mates and docile doormats, objectified and dehumanized, perverted and...OK. So I thought that for about 30 minutes in 1982, long after my Barbie had been disposed of in the garage sale bargain box.
Women know Barbie is an unattainable ideal -- too buxom, too perky, too everything. But she sure beat lining up plastic soldiers on the basement floor and shooting them with spitballs, and somehow we grew to love her.
Thirty-five-year old Susan Smith, now a dental assistant, played with her Barbie and a short-haired Skipper, who filled in for an absent Ken, all the time back in the '60s.
What did Barbie do those long hours, trapped in the lair of an imaginative prepubescent? "She changed clothes a lot," Smith remembered.
She was a glamour puss, sure, a starry-eyed supermodel, but she did real life stuff too, Smith said. Cooking, cleaning, driving, working, each task accomplished with a quick costume change.
"Having a Barbie was like having a hamster. You couldn't just have the hamster, you had to have everything that went with it," noted former Barbie owner, Kristin Holmes, 31.
Ah, the accouterments of Barbiedom: Itty-bitty Barbie shoes that never stayed put on Barbie's vertically challenged feet. Big pink convertibles -- Ken waving behind the wheel. Tiny hair brushes, skintight swimsuits and fur-lined eveningwear. Fishnet hose. Diamond stud earrings. Silver hand mirrors that slipped from Barbie's plastic palm. Penny Bachmann, 36, missed all that. The mother of four never had a Barbie doll. Never wanted one.
"They never looked like that much fun," she said.
Sometimes, late at night, I miss my Barbie. I mourn her bad haircuts and her missing fingers. I take my daughter's headless Totally Hair Barbie with the double DD cups and the spaghetti-thin waist from the drawer and arrange her arms.
"Wave to Ken, Barbie," I say.
Dance. Go swimming. Do the dishes. Get a job. Wipe that smirk off your face. Do something.
I look at the dog, sleeping at my feet. "Here," I say, waving those perfect rubber feet in his face. "Want a nibble?"