Day 2

[bironic]

Holy crap, guys. Day one has more than doubled the largest single-day comment count from last year. I'm so thrilled by the turnout (so far: 14 participants, 6 countries), and hearing all these memories, and seeing everybody talk to each other, and just, yay.

A memory today that should not result in a page full of descriptions of people's injuries:

2. Elementary School

I used to play with Barbie dolls (and, a little later, Legos, with which I'd enact complicated hostage scenarios involving shifting alliances on both sides of town and lots of air/ground/underwater destruction, but that's another story), but not always in the way most kids played with Barbie dolls. At least, I didn't think so at the time. I bet it wasn't that uncommon after all, especially not in these circles.

I have this one clear memory of taking a doll called Maxi -- I don't know if that was the name of the line, like Barbie, or if we'd just named her Maxi, but she was differently shaped from the Barbies and had flexible feet -- stripping her and tying her to the side of the Barbie motorhome, I think, or something tall and sturdy. I remember that it wasn't an unusual situation for my Barbies to find themselves in, although I don't remember exactly what I used to do after this: whether one of the male dolls (my sister and I each had a Ken doll and a New Kids on the Block doll) was behind the abduction, whether it went any further than being tied up, whether I even knew at that age what could come afterwards. I do remember that it always gave me a little thrill and that I knew it was something to be ashamed of and so I did it all covertly in the corner of the room because my sister was playing with her own Barbies on the carpet next to me and I didn't want her to see.
 
 

Comments

[stephantom.livejournal.com]

Ahahaha

You know, I don't think it's that uncommon. My older sisters have a pretty absurd story that's very similar. (This is more their memory than mine, since my memory is just hearing it retold, but.)

Their was this doll named Jem that was (like Maxi, I guess) not quite Barbie. She had bigger feet and broader hips and shoulders, so Barbie's clothes wouldn't fit her right. My sisters didn't like her. So... they had this... ritual of a sort, lol. Jem was stripped and the words "JEM IS DUM" were written all over her in pen, and her hair was shaved. And the other Barbies stood around her chanting "Jem is dumb!" And then they hung her upside-down in the closet.

...where my mom found it a day or so later and was a bit alarmed. lol

I never really played with Barbies at all. I was a Playmobil (http://store.playmobilusa.com/on/demandware.store/Sites-CA-Site) girl. I did sometimes treat certain Little People (as I called them) worse than others, though. But it was always the ones I liked. There'd always be some little kids that were put off somewhere on their own. I'd get mad if family members moved them, because they were over there because they were poor and orphans. And I was coming back to them (they were the main characters after all). It just had to be established that they were outcasts. lol

[bironic.livejournal.com]

One girl ostracizes the dolls she identifies with, while her sisters communally humiliate the doll they don't like. I want a psychologist to participate in this post. :D

I remember Playmobil (Lego wannabes!), although we didn't have any, and I remember the cartoon Jem -- she was a rock star with a guitar, wasn't she?

[thewlisian-afer.livejournal.com]

You know, I always mistreated the dolls/stuffed animals/whatever that I liked the best, too. And you know what? Thinking about my writing/RPing? I never outgrew it.

[roga.livejournal.com]

The way my sister and I played with Barbies was almost always the same: We'd dress up our Barbie heroine with as many layers of mismatching clothes as we could, and mess up her hair so all the other Barbies and Kens thought she was really fat and ugly. Then, at the very end of the game, she'd shed all her clothes (well, almost all *g*) and they'd discover she was a beautiful knockout and EAT THEIR HEARTS OUT.

...kind of classic, I think. Possibly based on an episode of Married With Children (more so than on the Ugly Duckling, because like in that episode of MWC, our heroine was often an exchange student). And oddly (or not?), we never got tired of playing the same plot over and over and over again...

[bironic.livejournal.com]

Aw. (You didn't mean she'd literally eat their hearts out, did you? Because that would've been awesome.) Did she spurn them for being so superficial or graciously accept their apologies?

[jadesfire.livejournal.com]

*grin* At least this one won't produce quite such a gruesome list. Although the results could be even more interesting, of course.

I didn't really have Barbies, but I had all the My Little Ponies (and the Nursery and the Castle) and most of the He-Man and She-Ra action figures. Like yours, they would be involved in long, complicated and intricate plots, where one of them would be kidnapped and the others would have to rescue them. My Lego figures (I had the Robin Hood set) were subjected to similar abductions. The only problem was that I wanted to be in the stories, and I was so much bigger than them!

I solved this my switching my interest to tying myself to things - the imaginary baddie would kidnap *me* (I'm an only child ;)) and I had to get myself free. The headboard on my bed had poles at intervals just wide enough for me to get my wrists through, and I once tied myself to a chairbed so tightly that my mother had to use a fork to ease the knot loose. I remember that one vividly, since I had to drag the wretched thing to the door of the living room and yell up the stairs for five minutes for her to come rescue me.

[elynittria.livejournal.com]

I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall to see how you explained the situation to your mother when she rescued you. *g*

A lot of the scenarios I devised for my own toys were abduction/rescue ones, as were the plots acted out by my brother (1 year older than me) and me. A lot of the play-acting plots also involved torture and space aliens; the latter was probably due to the influence of Star Trek (the original series).

[bironic.livejournal.com]

My Little Ponies! Robin Hood Lego! With the black castle pieces and the plastic vines and the feathered caps! That was my first Lego set, which actually is/was on the list of potential memories for another day.

I solved this my switching my interest to tying myself to things - the imaginary baddie would kidnap *me* (I'm an only child ;)) and I had to get myself free.

I think I love you. Wish I'd had a bed like that, or the bravery to try to tie myself to stuff instead of just pretending to do it under the covers at night!

[mer-duff.livejournal.com]

I went through a phase when I would tie myself up as well, but I wasn't exactly role playing, I was training in case I was ever captured by bad guys (I wanted to be a private detective at the time). If my sister was around, she'd tie my wrists for me, otherwise I'd loop the (skipping) rope in intricate patterns and tie it at my ankles, but not allow myself to use my hands until I'd freed them separately. I also used to practice holding my breath in case someone tried to drown me (I got that one from a Travis McGee novel).

[phinnia.livejournal.com]

Dude. I just had imaginary sets of Smurfs. (Seriously. Dozens of imaginary smurfs.)

[phinnia.livejournal.com]

I had Barbies but I don't remember what I did playing with them (again with the vast memory gaps.) I do remember playing with bags of styrofoam cups, stacking them into pyramids ... and I had all the posable Care Bears figurines (which kind of rocked) and I'd make cardboard box dollhouses for them. I think I still remember how. A triumph of seven year old cardboard engineering.
The Boy (who is autistic/blind/nonverbal) has odd toy choices. His favorites right about now are those travel toothbrush cases and plastic bottles: he likes to blow across the top. And his trampoline. :-)

[bironic.livejournal.com]

There's something to be said for the ability to be easily amused. :)

I don't remember much of what I did with the Barbies the rest of the time, other than brief flashes of posing them in their cars, hot tub, ice cream shop (or was that My Little Pony?) or office settings.

We had the plastic Care Bears too! One had a rainbow cloud car that was just fantastic. For some reason, we tended to play with them when we were playing with Play-Doh instead of when we were inside with the Barbies, unless I'm misremembering that. Hmmm. Your cardboard houses sound very cool.

[nicocoer.livejournal.com]

When I was wee, meaning when my parents were together, I had all sorts of things as far as dolls and Barbies go. When we left, I only took a few things, and when we returned from Washington state (after Maine) I had even less.

So When we moved into the trailer, My sister and I had the toys from when my mother was a kid that were still buried under mountains of piled up random crap. We found an old Hearts album and a closet fully of clothes from the late 70's and early 80's. There was also some old barbies and a plastic bus.

We ended up having dramatic! Soap Opera-esque! stories in which illegitimate children were made, elopements were common, and two of the female dolls ran off together when their husbands weren't looking. The clothes came on and off a lot, and usually it was behind the plastic van. They also had huge "houses" that we constructed out of blankets, furniture, and imagination. Did I mention that we didn't have TV at that point? and when we did, we didn't have TV, but rather a Play Station hooked up to a Tv without sound.

Alternatively, My brother would get out his action figures, And we'd have epic assassinations of Diplomat Barbie and sky diving from the top bunk. Ir having a Firing squad set up to get Barbie for spying. Very Special Ops type of thing. Not too surprising looking back at it. My brother was reading Tom Clancy at that point, though he was only in 3rd or 4th grade.

When it comes right down on it, I always got along better with my brother. From when we were little and I'd Hang out in his room with his boy toys while my hair set in curlers for pageants to hunting frogs in a back puddle to Video games years later when I'd sit next to him on the top bunk and watched him beat Shinra in Final Fantasy VII. He didn't beat the game until we moved to Utica, but I remember watching him fight the SOLDiERs In their blue uniforms as we ascended the Shinra corporate building.

Around the same time, I found a copy of Phantom of the Opera on cassette, and fell asleep to that. Before that, we had all slept to the sound of the audio books for The Screwtape Letters and Interview With a Vampire. Phantom was a natural progression, I suppose.

[bironic.livejournal.com]

What adventures! And very liberal ones, too.

Did I mention that we didn't have TV at that point?

Perhaps evidence that imagination can soar when kids aren't occupied 24/7 by prefabricated fantasies like TV and video games.

[mer-duff.livejournal.com]

I know I had Barbies when I was little, but I abandoned them pretty quickly for G.I. Joe (my mother the socialist must have been horrified) and Big Jim, because you could go on camping trips!

My favourite toy, though, was my Hot Wheels track. It had a "garage" that would shoot the cars out at high enough speeds to do a continuous run of the track or even a loopty-loop. My friend Ian and I used to set the track up so that there was a jump straight after the garage - sometimes we'd try to land the cars back on the track, sometimes we'd position it so that the cars would launch off the jump and smash directly into the wall.

[elynittria.livejournal.com]

Hot Wheels FTW! I don't think we had the garage, though: We always had to set up the loopty-loop using the back of a dining room chair and gravity as the method of propulsion. Between the drop and the initial shove manual acceleration, most of the cars could manage to do the loop. The heavier ones were the most successful, obviously.

I love the idea of setting up the track/jump so that it ends at a wall—it sounds like an action movie scenario.

[bironic.livejournal.com]

Hee. I remember Hot Wheels commercials with the cars flying around the tracks and through the loop-de-loops. Did your cars used to shatter on impact? Do I remember rightly that some of the cars would come in pieces so you could smash them and put them back together?

I didn't have many Hot Wheels, and no track, but my mom's best friend's son had them, and we used to play with them when we were at his house around the corner. There was a spiral ramp and a garage, but I don't recall a track.

[topaz-eyes.livejournal.com]

I think I've repressed all my memories having to do with Barbies. *g*

OTOH... when the Cabbage Patch dolls first came out in the 1980s, my two little brothers each got a Cabbage Patch pet. My older brother and I kept threatening to make cole slaw out of their pets and then eat the cole slaw. (Why yes, I was a mean older sister, why do you ask? XD)

[thewlisian-afer.livejournal.com]

I have absolutely no memory of this but apparently the first year I could talk at Christmastime, the only thing I wanted was a Cabbage Patch Kid. They were IMPOSSIBLE to find. My parents actually DROVE TO ANOTHER STATE to get me one because there were none around here. (Seriously, I say this all the time, but it deserves repeating again: They FAIL in the emotional/psychological department, but I have always been completely spoiled when it comes to things.)

Anyway, since it was the first year I could talk, I wasn't really very good at it. (I'm still not. lulz.) So when I asked for the doll, what I said was that I wanted a "Catch-a-Catch Kid." Decades later, "Catch-a-Catch Kid" is still the code word in my family for that one present that someone has to get otherwise their Christmas will be ruined.

[thewlisian-afer.livejournal.com]

I only had one Barbie doll when I was little, which a misguided "friend" bought for me for my birthday. (It was when I was way back at that age where you have to invite your whole class to your birthday party because zomg if you hand out invitations to some people and not others you'll damage their fragile psyches or something.) I didn't do the whole G.I. Joe thing or anything like that, either. Action figures were still dolls to me and I Did Not Want dolls because dolls were for girls. (I had a ton of My Little Pony stuff, though. I don't really understand my logic there because, yeah, that's really butch and not girly at all. But whatever!)

Mostly what I had were little animal and dinosaur figurines. You know, the sort of thing you find in museum and zoo gift shops. They don't do anything. They just sit there and look cute and give off a weird plastic odor and taste funny when you chew them. (Yes, I've always had a hard time keeping things out of my mouth. stfu.) Anyway, I spent a lot of time weaving intricate stories about inter-species love affairs, death by drowning (usually after being flung from a cliff because I spent a lot of time playing in the bathtub and the sides made lovely impossible-to-scale cliffs), murder, mayhem, amnesia... You see, my mother used to watch soap operas while I napped on the couch as a child and I'm pretty sure some of the plot lines seeped into my head while I dozed.

More often, though, I played with imaginary friends and ... yes, they often wound up in some pretty BDSM situations. Because apparently when I imagined, I imagined hardc0re. My imaginary friends? They didn't just get tied up with imaginary ropes. Oh, no. There were imaginary shackles and imaginary chains and imaginary handcuffs. I'm so not kidding. I was such a bizarre little thing. There were never any imaginary whips or anything like that, though... I liked tying them up and making them vulnerable (as if they weren't under my control enough already since they were, you know, in my head) but I never liked actually hurting them. I liked coercing them. Holy crap, I was so screwed up.

[stephantom.livejournal.com]

Ahaha. You know, I totally can relate. It's like a dirty secret, but as a little kid, my favorite characters or imagined characters (not quite imaginary friends, but... imagined selves, which were pretty much always guys) were tied up or shackled and vulnerable. That scene from Disney's Aladdin where he's handcuffed to the wall in the dungeon? An oft imagined or acted out scenario.

I too hated Barbie with a passion because I hated everything girly. But I didn't think action figures counted. I loved action figures, and, as I said, Playmobil toys. I was obsessed with those. Because they came as normal people, but also as knights or pirates, or doctors, or circus people, or Indians, or cyclists or horseback riders. I even had some Playmobil lions. I'd play with just the Playmobil horses sometimes too, but make them all anthropomorphized of course, and there'd be these involved plotlines and stuff.

Ah, good times.

[purridot.livejournal.com]

That is TOO FUNNY! I wish it was captured on a home video!

My mom wouldn't buy me Barbies! Which is hilarious b/c she was and is a total fashionista and is now obsessed with Project Runway (as am I).

As I recall, in the scenarios with my dolls, they were not victims, but rather plucky heroines. *quelle surprise*. *is pathetic*.

I did, however, watch ONLY the angstiest cartoons which I could find (like the ones where the heroes had secret identities they had to protect, which made them suffer emotionally.)

[bironic.livejournal.com]

Oh, Lord, I'm glad it *wasn't* caught on tape (unlike many other embarrassing moments of our childhood, including diaper changes). It was bad enough when I got caught at school in third or fourth grade having drawn some BDSM thing on the back of my math homework, and called in front of practically an inquisition including the school psychologist to Talk About It.

Yay Project Runway! Before that, my biggest interest in clothes was probably playing with Fashion Plates. D'you know those? Where you put three or four patterned plastic pieces in a mold, put a piece of paper over it and run a flat crayon over the top so you get a mannequin in patterned clothes? That, and Spirograph, which made lovely intricate patterns.

You and mer_duff sound as if you were both very resourceful in your fantasy lives. *g* You're forgiven for it (heh) because you watched the angsty cartoons. Batman?

[daasgrrl.livejournal.com]

LOL, this post is like a foreign country for me. Barbies were 'too expensive', so I had a knockoff called Cindy. Or Sindy. Or possibly Sindee. Anyway, she had brown hair, but otherwise was of mostly Barbie-ish dimensions. I was annoyed because 'all the other kids' had Barbies. My mother also thought clothes were a horrible waste of money, so the things I remember asking for most repeatedly and NOT getting were clothing sets, although I did get a few in time. I used to stand in the shop and look at them for hours, considering which one I'd buy if I could.

Later on I received someone's second hand bedroom set as well which was kind of nice. But it's not like I really played with her anyway, apart from occasionally testing the joints because it was cool/intriguing how her knees could bend back backwards when people's couldn't. Other than that, I just liked changing her in and out of clothes, and occasionally she would get into bed and... get up again. I didn't really pretend she was anything - I mean, what's to pretend, she's a doll! LOL. I just liked changing her outfits. I loved paper dolls too, same reason.

PS Your icon is somehow disturbing - when I think Barbies and lj, I've been corrupted forever XD

[bironic.livejournal.com]

It makes me think of cryptictac's icon of the fluorescent pink woman with the swinging breasts. Scary, yet mesmerizing.

My mother also thought clothes were a horrible waste of money,

Me: *beat*
Me: *beat*
Me: Oh, DOLL CLOTHES.

LOL.

I used to stand in the shop and look at them for hours, considering which one I'd buy if I could.

Aw. A little bit of longing is good for the soul, right? Builds character.

it was cool/intriguing how her knees could bend back backwards when people's couldn't.

Oh, wow, you just made me remember that Maxi's legs would do that too, so we used to have her sit like that, as if her knees were backwards.

Sounds like you used to play with your doll(s) with a true scientist's eye. :) I'm sorry to have participated in this part of our culture which annoyed you as a child because apparently Barbie exports weren't affordable. If that sentence is even in English. I wasn't even much of a Barbie person. Alas for the unfairness of it all.

here via thewlisian_afer...

[dramaphile.livejournal.com]

My barbies were always pregnant. lol. But like, it was an accident, of course. Only, I thought it meant that it was really an accident, like barbie was walking down the street and poof, she was pregnant! I think I caught on a littlwe too well to the soap operas my grandma watched. I had lots of pregnant barbie weddings, which I'm sure horrified my very conservative, very catholic mother.

Hi there! Happy to have you.

[bironic.livejournal.com]

Ha! And then there were hurried talks of birds and bees...

I saw this (http://www.dailywaste.com/images/564-pregnant-barbie.jpg) this morning while hunting for Barbie icons, and it completely freaked me out.

[thirdblindmouse.livejournal.com]

Wow. These are some seriously twisted stories. I asked the three guys in the room what they did with their personified toys (GI Joes, stuffed animals). They had their toys fight (being toy soldiers and all), and one said he used his to reenact movie scenes, which sometimes included hostage situations, but on the whole, their toy soldier war stories were more "Charge of the Light Brigade" than Abu Ghraib. Totally missed out on the hair dressing and ritual executions I remember (well, not totally on the hair dressing, but that's a different story).

Reading this post, though? This post would me by answer to 'Won't someone think of the children?'.

[bironic.livejournal.com]

*g* Alas, too late to submit for a comeback. Though you're welcome to link this there if you like.

Re: GI Joes etc., it reminds me of something I read sometime (probably in the course of articles on fanfic and "women's storytelling") about the female focus being on individuals and relationships and the male focus being on epic/group scale and struggles for ... *trying to remember* abstract principles.

de-lurking because this looked like fun

[renice.livejournal.com]

I had a couple of Barbies in my childhood, mostly from family members who asumed that, because I'm a girl, I should like dolls. But I played with them on occassion out of boredom but I was always disappointed that they were never anatomically correct below the waist (My mom has basically the same story from her youth where she and her sister would take off Ken's pants and be disappointed when there was no penis). And, though having no real concept of the matter, I always made my dolls have sex (despite the aforementioned lack of genitalia) and get pregnant and have kids and blahblahblah.

But I mostly played a lot with my numerous stuffed animals (zoo was always fun) and with my brother's legos (because, for some odd reason, I never asked for them myself) and with my Batman/Power Rangers/X-Men action figures (my brother and I would stage epic battles when he felt like playing with me)

I do remember, though, in keeping with the theme of toy abuse, that a lot of the stories I came up with for any imaginary friend, or action figures (if I was playing by myself) would always involve people getting, in some way, hurt or injured and on the brink of death and I don't really think that's changed too much over the years.

(I apologize now for my egregious use of the parentheses...)

Glad to have you!

[bironic.livejournal.com]

It's been so interesting (and, yes, frequently hilarious), hearing the stories people used to enact with their dolls. It's cool that you had a combination of family-building, battle-fighting and hurt/comfort -- a very well-rounded childhood fantasy life. :)

[fizzylizard.livejournal.com]

I fed my sister's Barbie to the dog. Left the clothes alone, because my cousin had made them specially, but...yes. Barbie spent about eight months being played with minus a head.

I was a bad little sister.

[bironic.livejournal.com]

Hee. I think we were all a little evil when we were kids. Or at least we were more likely to act on our evil impulses. My mom's brother used to pull the Barbies' heads off and bowl with them.