For once in my life, I beat Barbie to the punch.  For once in my life, the latest Barbie is a wanna-be-ME.  (Hey, allow me my little moment of delusion here.)  I don’t know why this should make me grin–I’m not a fan of Barbie, wouldn’t buy one for my daughter.  (Interestingly enough, my daughter has never asked…)  I cringe to remember the one year I succumbed to the insidious evil of cartoon-morning advertising and campaigned relentlessly through Advent for a “Pink’n’Pretty” Barbie under the Christmas tree.  (That was the year I’d figured out my mom was Santa.  But I didn’t think she knew I knew, so I spent at least a month engaging in loud and continuous speculation about whether “Santa” would understand how desperately I desired this absolute necessity, the Pink’n’Pretty Barbie.  I was so obnoxious with my protracted and public pining, I’m lucky “Santa” didn’t stuff my mouth with pinecones to shut me up.)

Santa did, in fact, deliver–as Santa always did in my childhood.  In fact, Santa was a helluva showman.  He visited our house twice every Christmas: once while we performed in our church’s Christmas Eve program, and a second time while we slept.  We would come home Christmas Eve to find our stockings filled, always accompanied by a hand-written letter.  I still have his note from the year I was four, advising my baby sister, “it’s about time you tried walking,” and admonishing me to “work harder on staying dry; Santa doesn’t like to see lazy girls & boys.”  He finished kindly by observing that we were “both good kids” and that our Mommy and Daddy were very proud of us. (whew!)  When we woke in the morning, we would find he’d been there a second time to eat the peanuts and beer we left for him (Daddy said he must be tired of milk & cookies), and his reindeer even left hoof-prints in the snow around the pan of water and carrots we left out for them.  (One of these days I’ll have to ask my mother how on earth she manufactured reindeer-prints!  Given her no-holds-barred creativity, I’m only surprised, in retrospect, that they didn’t also leave reindeer-poop.)

So Pink’n’Pretty joined the cast of characters in my room–which, incidentally, included my mother’s own vintage Barbie, a much classier gal whose double we later saw featured in a doll museum.  (Imagine my mother’s horror at realizing her own thousand-dollar doll was at that moment besmeared with makeup from Pink’n’Pretty’s arsenal… I recently saw that a single shoe–from one of those vintage outfits I so carelessly played with–was the subject of a small bidding war on eBay…)  Aside from that one ill-judged Christmas season, though, I have not been a fan of Barbie.  Her horse, yes–but Barbie? Meh.

Enter, this week, the controversial Tokidoki Barbie, who comes with (gasp!) tattoos.  Not the stick-on temporary tats–this girl’s got INK.  Cue the Nationwide Parental Outrage!

And here I am, for the first time in decades, thinking, “Now there’s a Barbie I might actually like to meet.”  Because tattoos mean stories, and (Writers, listen up!) they are also a “free pass” to hear the greatest stories from a perfect stranger in the produce department or wherever.  As in, “Go directly to jail Story, do not pass Go up a Story, do not collect $200 inconsequential things like introductions”–because a simple “I gotta check out your ink” will gain you instant access to the most interesting material you hadn’t imagined.  On the flip side, they give us the chance to tell stories–I’m thinking of my second-grade classroom-visit last month, when Elena Grace seized the opportunity of her teacher complimenting my Art to show him (proudly) HER tattoo on my arm, and explain how it relates to her name…

So yeah, this is a Barbie I’d like to meet. I won’t be buying one–my daughter still doesn’t need a Barbie, and she doesn’t need me to “push” tattoos at her, any more than the kids of  the flipping-out conservative crowd need to be “protected” from seeing them.  (As for me, I’m an open-minded parent–if my kids grow up NOT wanting tattoos, I’m okay with that.)  And if she did take it into her head to want a Barbie, I could wickedly (but truthfully) tell her that “Santa” reads Mommy’s blog… ;)