Why I'll Always Be A Barbie Girl

LONG ISLAND, NY — The new sandals I wore were Barbie pink. Yes, I'm a fiftysomething woman who normally wears black, but I, like so many others, was one of the first to flock to see "Barbie," directed by Greta Gerwig and starring Margot Robbie, on the big screen.

Surely, there are some that have taken issue with the film, some citing "woke" messages, others stating that there's an anti-male undertone, and a belief uttered by detractors that there's a possible lack of equal representation for all. The mention of a patriarchy that has some firing back. Others have, for years, dissed Barbie because they say she, for decades, set an unrealistic standard for young girls who felt they could never measure up to her definition of plastic perfection.

But still. Despite the inevitable backlash, audiences, giddily clad in Barbie pink, are lining up — in droves. The film has been such a smash that it's reportedly passed the $1 billion mark at the box office. "Barbie" has brought together generations of Barbie fans, mothers and daughters, long-time besties, Barbie collectors, young and old.

The best way to describe the joy I felt, stepping into that theater, surrounded by my son and my own childhood best friend and her kids, is to say, for the entire time I was in that theater, I was a little girl again, everything still ahead.

My best friend from childhood, Lindis, lived around the corner from me. We grew up in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and were first introduced by her Norwegian mother and my Norwegian grandmother when we were both 2 years old. Our friendship was forged in the playground across the street from my second-story apartment in the two-family brick house with a porch where I lived with my mother, grandmother and Uncle Norman.

Lindis and I spent hours in that park, flying higher and higher on the swings, riding the seesaw, and hiding secret notes to each other in a small hole in the structure at the top of the monkey bars.

And then, there was Barbie. I can't remember the day my mother brought the first Barbie home, but she opened the door for what became a lifelong love — I still have my Barbies, all of them, in a big plastic storage container that's come with me, no matter where I've lived.

Back then, Lindis was my Barbie buddy. She'd come over to my house and we'd camp out on my porch upstairs, setting up a fort with a blanket over two chairs, the inside transformed into the stage for Barbie's ever-unfolding adventures. My grandmother would bring us tall cans of Pringles and a green Depression glass pitcher filled with cherry Kool Aid, to help fuel our winding summer afternoons.

We created quite the storyline for our Barbies. My favorites, Malibu Barbie and her copper-toned Ken, usually starred in my doll dramas. Together, Lindis and I concocted an ongoing story about Skipper, Barbie's little sister, who, we decided, had run away from home and was hiding out on top of the yellow and orange 1970 Mattel Barbie Country Camper.

Oh, how I loved that camper. It had a pop-out tent, folding chairs, pots and pans where Barbie and Ken, and her cousin Francie, also a favorite, could cook over in the mountains over the open camp fires of our Brooklyn-city girl dreams.

And there was Skipper, hitching a ride to wherever Barbie was headed, seeking adventure and new horizons.

It's only now, so many years later, that I realize maybe Skipper represented something Lindis and I, still so tiny, couldn't even vocalize yet, the desire to break free of our Brooklyn apartments and see something bigger than our worlds then, so small.

We've both agreed, later, that as we grew up and found our paths, both of us writers, that our imagination and creative flair and penchant for storytelling was born when we were those two little Brooklyn girls on a sun-baked porch with black tar flooring, girls who learned early on that the way to our futures was to write our way to our next chapters.

Barbie, for me, was also an equalizer in my small family — the one way my mother and grandmother always expressed their love. Money was always tight, in our house, but somehow, every Christmas, there was a pile of bright-pink Barbie boxes wrapped under the tree. There was the Barbie camper, the Barbie airplane, the Barbie cafe, and so many, many, sparkly, beaded, fur-draped, extravagant Barbie fashions, each with its own perfect little plastic hanger.

There was that perfect 10th birthday, when my grandmother gave me the Barbie pool and Lindis and I filled it with water and carefully placed our Barbies on their bright yellow beach towels — we little Brooklyn girls who only found relief from the sweltering summer in the surf at Coney Island or at the Jersey Shore.

We may have had limited experiences, but with Barbie, we could go anywhere — we could board the Barbie plane and have a stewardess bring us cold sodas on her rolling cart! — do anything, be anyone.

And, over the years, Barbie did all of those things so many of us yearned for. Became a doctor, an astronaut, a ballerina, a tennis player, an Olympic gold medalist. If Barbie could do it, we knew we could, too.

When we were just emerging as sulky, pimply pre-teens, not even sure what the future would bring and bewildered by the thought of boys and our changing reflections in the mirror, there was Growing Up Skipper, who developed a chest by turning her arm and also, grew taller and more svelte in her maxi skirt and halter top. (Growing Up Skipper has a cameo in the "Barbie" movie and I couldn't have been happier to see my old friend have her day back in the sun.)

And then there was the Dream House. A bitter bone of contention for my little girl self, because that's the one Barbie accessory on which my mother and grandmother refused to budge. I had a dollhouse, they argued, a beautiful dollhouse that was the same as my cousin's in Norway, a dollhouse that had electric lights that worked and carefully curated furniture.

True, I thought, but was it pink? Was it plastic? Did it have an elevator?

In hindsight, I guess in a way, the fact that I didn't have a Barbie dream house was a good life lesson. Dream houses, the real ones, anyway, don't come easily. They take hard work and determination and a life plan. They take a job and sacrifice and don't come with pink plastic furniture.

I just wish my own mother and grandmother, who never lived in anything other than Brooklyn apartments, had been able to have the chance I had, to live in a dream house of my own and raise my child in a house that did, indeed, have a bright blue pool and a rolling cart for iced tea and cocktails on the sun porch. They never got to ride cross-country in a real life RV, the way I did with my own son during the pandemic, cooking over a real-life open fire, the wind in our hair.

I guess, watching the Barbie movie, I realized just what Barbie had given me, and is still giving me, honestly — the license to dream. The belief, deep down, that I can do anything, be anyone, go anywhere, succeed beyond any of my childhood dreams. Barbie has always been my talisman, my go-to girl even when childhood was hard, with adult problems in my home that I was too young to grasp.

And the best part of the whole Barbie odyssey? My childhood best friend Lindis is still my friend today. Her daughters, when they were small, played with the same Barbies their mom and I played with as kids — dragged out of their battered plastic storage box for another day spent with tiny hands brushing their long hair and dressing them in fashions that still dazzle.

We went together, Lindis and I, to see the "Barbie" movie, making sure to sit next to each other, my son and her kids piled around us, crying and laughing and all dressed in pink. Two lifelong friends and their kids, generations brought together by a doll and a movie that really, mean so much more. And that, I guess, is what this "Barbie" movie lovefest is all about — it's about friends, and mothers, and kids, about grandmothers and families. It's about the realization that a wish made in childhood can come true — with your childhood best friend, your forever Barbie buddy, still there and ready to take off together on your next adventure to Barbie Land, dressed in pink and ready to dazzle, no matter how big you dare to dream.