Definition: Barbieland

Our Barbieland is the sum total of all our dolls, furniture, cares, homes, schools and other accessories.

Your Barbieland is all your stuff.

On this blog we use the term to Barbieland to refer to the sum total of “our barbie stuff”. It’s not really a place as much as wherever you happen to set up your stuff for a play session at any moment in time.

We store our barbieland in the basement of our small house. That is also where do most of our playing. Occaisionally we will take a playset upstairs to the living room or we will take our swimmig pool set outside.

Two houses and East High School

I have found that coffee tables from a thrift store will put the bottom floor of a house at the perfect level for play, and leave room for “parking” underneath. You can see from this pic that we recently held some performances on the second floor stage at East High so we have an audience leftover. Also a few days before that we had a suprise birthday party for Chandra at the Mission Style house.

Our Core Player and Character Player shelves above three playsets we were playing with last night.

We keep our Core Players and our Character Players on shelves in our main play area. This is because we want them handy for any storyline developments.

Underneath those shelves we have an airport setting that’s been there about a month and hasn’t gotten any attention. I rotate sets in and out of storage to keep them feeling new and exciting.

The tall pink tower is a house that someone gave us recently. We weren’t sure we needed another house but the shape was so interesting that we kept it.   In the foreground you can see that we were playing Vet’s office. We always set up a waiting room and then the inner office. We use magnetic boards as platforms. These make it really easy to move the set around. We put high powered magnets on the bottom of some of the furniture so that it is more stable.

Definition: barbégé

Pronunciation: barb-uh-zhay. When you are a Barbie-Playing-Mentor you have people that you are mentoring. The “mentored” person in a relationship is usually referred to as a “Protégé”.  This is a french word and it is pronounced “pro-tuh-zhay”. I thought about calling the players a Barbie-Playing-Mentor mentors “barbie-playing-charges” but the use of the word “charge” as a noun referring to people is not that common and I was afraid it would confuse people too much. A barbégé  is anyone being guided by a Barbie-Playing-Mentor. Your barbégé might be a child learning to play, a teen looking to round out a babysitting dossier, a friend with children looking to develop into a mentor.

Definition: Barbie-Playing-Mentor

I am a Barbie-Playing-Mentor because I like to both teach people how to play barbies and guide them toward playing independently. To be a Barbie-Playing-Mentor you basically show your Barbie-Playing-Charges how to choose a scenario as a starting point for a play session. Then you play through the scenario with them.

Some kids will dress, undress, arrange and decorate barbie items (what I call preparatory activities) day after day but will never move into a mode of having characters speak to one another and act out scenarios. My goal as a Barbie-Playing-Mentor is to get my charges to move past the prepartory activities and move into full play.

Full play is important to me because as Mattel SVP Richard Dickson notes in the video clip below “Role Play becomes Real Play.”

Definition: BBBBarbie

I will use the word BBBBarbie on this blog pretty regularly. BBBBarbie means “Blonde Haired”+ “Blue-Eyed”+ “Boring”+ “Barbie”.

Yawn.

BBBBarbie bugs me. I know she is the lynchpin of the Barbie trademark but she just irritates me. This tidbit is ironic when one considers that I was born blonde-haired and blue-eyed. At the same time I was playing with Malibu Barbie (see my 2nd Grade School photo in this post), I was sporting a fantastic tan and puka beads.

Thirty years later I am a forty-something feminist and I am bugged by the hegemony that the BBBBarbie image continues to have in modern culture. I don’t blame it on Mattel, though they certainly don’t reject BBBBarbie. It’s Mattel, plus beer commercials, plus Pam Anderson plus 100 other cultural and historical influences.

I get sick of hearing things like, “Blondes have more fun” and “Gentlemen prefer blondes.” I don’t feel this way because I dislike myself, but because I realized early on that being blonde was very rare and so the hegemony of BBBBarbie made a lot of little girls feel inadequate. It didn’t seem like a good plan. It didn’t seem fair. Every girl should celebrate her own beauty and uniqueness. BBBBarbie seemed like a constant reminder to 90% of girls that they weren’t blonde and blue-eyed so they somehow weren’t right.

Plus, I can’t help it, when I look at BBBBarbie, I imagine her to be like the real-life women I try very hard to avoid. They are self-centered, overly concerned with pleasing men, and vapid. In high school they are cheerleaders. In college they are in sororities and care more about spring formal than learning something. They major in Marketing or train to become Elementary School teachers and as soon as they find a husband they quit to become Trophy Wives. Or as my mom used to say, they go to college not to get a B.A. but to get an M.R.S. degree.

So, for the purposes of the blog, when I refer to BBBBarbie – I am referring to HER. The one I am annoyed by. But when I refer to barbie, as in “barbie car” or “barbie house”, I mean a rockin’ car that Grace might tool around in or a super cool Living Room that Kara might use to host Midge’s baby shower.

Btw, when Kara did host Midge’s baby shower, she didn’t invite BBBBarbie because she, Trichelle and the other women agreed that they could not bear the thought of sitting through another party where BBBBarbie talked incessantly about  the best spray tan (“not as orange as the others”) or how her boob job was starting to calcify and cause her underarms to ache.

Definition: barbie, barbies

When I blog about “barbies” I use it as a generic term for all 11 1/2 inch dolls or 1:6 scale dolls as some like to call them. They are also sometimes referred to as “fashion dolls” or “playscale”. I understand that Mattel owns the trademark but, like most people, I use it generically,  like saying “Kleenex” when I mean “tissue.” 

With that said though, I totally give props to Mattel for making the 11 1/2 inch doll market the powerhouse it is and will continue to be. 

I am not too much of a barbie-snob to buy Polly clothes at the dollar store. Polly has more modest clothing tastes than Barbies do and sometimes our barbies need an outfit to clean out the garage in or just run errands. Then again, I would never allow a Polly doll into the collection. Their faces are whacked and the bodies would collapse easily under Gordo’s rough and tumble play style.  

Disney has a complimentary line of Princess and Prince dolls . They are complimentary in the sense that the Princessess fit into Barbie and Polly clothing. Leah has Tiana and Naveen of course but we don’t really let Tiana and Naveen play with Trichelle and Darren at our house because their faces are just too moon-pie. I end up unable to get into Bavatarbie character because I spend the whole time feeling sorry for Tiana because she has such an oversized head. In short, you can mix Mattel’s Barbies with Disney but we don’t.

Bratz never excited me because the greatest thing about barbies is that, thanks to Mattel, you can buy 50 years worth of used Barbie stuff from garage sales, Craigslist and eBay. Bratz is already gone (though LIV and Moxie and others are trying to capture the market, and Bratz is supposed to be making a comeback). I feel confident that Barbie will still be around 30 years from now when Leah has little girls of her own.

So – to wrap up – when we talk about playing “barbies” on this blog, we mean 11 1/2 inch dolls – no disrespect to Mattel.  When we talk about “Barbie” – capital B – we mean the Mattel brand and Mattel products and when we talk about BBBBarbie – well, read that definition to find out what we mean.

Definition: Bavatarbie

Bavatarbie is a mashup of the words Avatar and Barbie. Your Bavatarbie is the doll you choose to represent you most often when playing with Barbies.

Before the 2009 movie “Avatar” made the word commonplace, the word was most often used to mean” an online representation of oneself.”  Avatar is a Hindi word that is best translated to English as “incarnation” or “manifestation.”

Example – “Trichelle is my daughter Leah’s Bavatarbie. I am still looking for my own Bavatarbie but I may go with Joan Jett.”