Skipper

I received my very first official Barbie doll on my 6th birthday.

It just wasn't Barbie. It was Skipper, her little sister, but I didn't know any better. Sure she seemed kind of short compared to the Barbie knock-offs I was used to, but perhaps it was because this was the real thing. It made sense.

We celebrated my 6th birthday in Miami during a visit to my grandparents and my mother's brother's family... (and to go to Disney World, my father's favorite place to go). It was that uncle, my uncle Joe, that got me the Skipper.

My uncle Joe always got me the best toys on Christmas and my birthday. He was the hero that showed up one Christmas eve with a Cabbage Patch Kid when parents everywhere were out for blood. He got me the Beat It Michael Jackson doll when all stores only had the crappy Grammys outfit one.

I would not expect less from him. Of course HE got me a REAL Barbie!

To say I was pleased to have a Barbie would be like saying a fat kid is simply "pleased" to be offer a second piece of cake. I was ecstatic.

I don't remember anything about that birthday or what else I got. From old photos I see I cleaned up in the presents department, and that my cake had most awesome Disney characters one could use as toys... but none of that sticks in my memory. But I do recall ripping the paper containing my Barbie. I remember seeing the yellow box with the distinctive Barbie-esc script. (I couldn't read yet, but I recognized the logos and artwork from TV commercials.) I remember yanking her out of the packaging and discovering she came with a giant yellow skateboard. That was it... I spent the rest of the trip playing with Barbie.

She slept with me. She went to the pool and in the bathtub with me. She went to Disney World with me. Barbie was my pal.

When we got back home, this new found kinship with this plastic bombshell continued. By now though, her cute purple outfit (A pink bathing suit, with purple shorts, and a purple skirt) were getting a bit boring. I was able to convince my mom she needed a few new outfits, so off to OddLots we went.

That was when I got my first clue all that was not well in Barbieland.

The clothing we picked up were knock off fashion doll clothes that were meant to be used with Barbie. The problem was... they didn't fit. The dresses were too big. Now, being knock offs, my rationalisation skills kicked in BIG TIME. Of course they didn't fit. They didn't even come with shoes! They were not official Barbie clothes. Duh.

That excuse was blown out of the water when the very next week my mom was kind enough to buy me a REAL Barbie outfit at Woolsworth, after I explained that Barbie needed new shoes and the other outfits didn't come with any. And wouldn't you know it... the dress was too big as well. If that wasn't enough, the shoes not only did not fit... they were the wrong shape! See, my Barbie had flat feet, unlike my cheap fashion dolls that stood on their tippy toes. I figured it was BECAUSE she was real. Something was wrong.

I continued to stew about this until spring, for that was when all the kids in the neighborhood took to playing outside. That's when the bottom fell out.

I brought my Barbie out to play with the older girls down the block who had pretty much every Barbie thing you could think of. They had the Dream house, the camper, the horse, the Corvette, and of course Ken. When playing with them I was always relegated to being the next door neighbor, since I didn't have a real Barbie and only real Barbies could live in the Dream house. I figured this was it! I was in the house when I showed up with my Barbie.

Then I was told that my doll was not Barbie. It was Skipper, Barbie's little sister.

I could live in the Dream house, but no driving the Vette or camper. I couldn't ride the horse because I was too young. I couldn't go to the ball, because it was past my bedtime. It was worse than being the neighbor! At least the neighbor was allowed to borrow their clothes.

When I got home I took a good hard look at "Skipper."

She was still the doll that hung out with me during my 6th birthday when I had no children my age to play with. She was still my friend. Who cares if her REAL name was Skipper. In my bedroom, she was still "Barbie" to Mego Spider-man who kept asking out for dates even though she was taller than him, and she was still "Barbie" to John Travolta who didn't care how short she was, because he was into short chicks.

And she was still "Barbie" to me.

She'll always be Barbie to me.

CHiPs motorcyle

When I started kindergarten, my lack of understanding the English language, and my status of only child made my socializing with the other children difficult. It did not help that I was a painfully shy child who was taught early on that the squeaky wheel did not in fact get the proverbial grease, but instead got the very real hand across the face. Lesson taught: keep quiet.

While that made me a teacher's dream, it also made me a teacher's nightmare. If I did not understand, instead of asking for help, I just smiled, kept quiet and faked it until I could figure it out alone. This, of course, lead to many misunderstandings of the sitcom variety that I may touch upon later. Just know that I quickly learned that a bum was not an explosive devise, and that "Dick" is not short for Dick Van Dyke.

Because we were young children and required supervision, I suppose, instead of a traditional recess with the older kids of the school, we were kept inside and had "Play Time." We had a variety of games, toys and other things to amuse ourselves. The most popular toys were the blocks and the miniature play kitchen set up. The teacher would assign us to either the block corner, or the doll corner. We would raise our hands and hope to get picked, and hope we got to where we wanted to go.

I usually went back to my desk and drew in crayon.

One day the teacher started to notice that no girl wanted to play with blocks and no boy wanted to play house. So instead of picking those with raised hands, she just randomly assigned kids. I ended up in the block corner. That's where I met Max.

Max was an Argentinian boy, who also struggled with English. We found a kinship in that. The more we spoke the more things in common we had. Turned out he lived about two blocks from my house.

I told my mother about him on the way out of class and she went up to his mother and introduced us. I guess my mom and his mom hit it off immediately, as we started hanging out on swing set after school quite a bit.

In class, Max and I became best friends. We always volunteered to play in the block corner. If one of us was chosen and the other was not, the chosen one would give up their spot to some other kid and we'd both go draw.

We started to notice that the teacher started making an effort to separate us. Max came up with an idea. He'd sneak in a toy from home and we'd play with that at our desks.

The first toy he ever brought in for us to play with was the CHiPs Motorcycle Launcher. Wed make ramps with stolen blocks from the block corner, we'd make obstacles with those fat crayons the school provided, we'd draw people and cut them out and make standees so the motorcycle could run them down, but most of all we'd found our own way to have fun.

Of course our teacher put the kibosh on it once she caught onto our setup. She told our mommies on us. Our mommies had our backs, but told us not to make waves in class and to mind our teacher. So we did... In OUR way.

We pretended we were no longer friends when the teacher was watching and we went back to our withdrawn ways. Finally noticing we were no longer participating and sad, the teacher relented.

We celebrated by playing with Max's CHiPs Motorcycle Launcher once again.

I don't know whatever became of Mrs. Micelli, our kindergarten teacher, or that CHiPs toy, but I do know that Max and I are still friends.

28 years and counting.

Interlude: Just as good

Before I was legitimately old enough to understand the true economic state of my family, I knew we were in no way rich.

I knew by comparing the toys I did have to those of a rude little kid about three houses down. His name was Charlie, and he had every toy you could think of. He would come outside with his toys and play in his fenced in front yard, while the rest of the children on our street rode by on our hand-me-down bikes like gawking construction workers admiring a lady with too short a skirt.

Now, Charlie would on occasion choose one of the many admirers and invite them through the gate to partake of his many wares. The rest were "allowed" to watch them play.

I was never chosen, because I had committed the unforgivable sin of being born a girl.

Charlie did serve somewhat of purpose in my life, though. He served as toy catalog. If he had it, it was available at stores. I just could not for the life of me figure out WHAT store.

Whenever my mother would go shopping, she always took me along. It helped that I was rather well behaved. My mother was a bargain shopper, so generally when shopping we would stop at multiple shops. Among them: Alexanders, Odd Lots, ABC (in Cityline), Woolsworth, and several Oriental market type stores that carried stereotypical Chinatown like wares.

Although I was usually allowed to wander in the toy sections, the toys I found were usually either a few years old (and heavily clearanced) or they kind of looked like the toys I was looking for, or were in foreign packaging (read: knock-offs.)

On the few rare occasions I would find something I wanted, like say Voltron, my mom, smooth salesman that she was, would point out that the Go Lion Force Robot thing that was not diecast, but most probably blow molded was "just-as-good."

Although I never quite fell for this trick, I got the message loud and clear, "We can't afford it, get the knock-off or go home without a toy."

In my imagination, whichever knock-off I happen to be playing with, was of course the real thing. We all had grand adventures, Plastic Lion Robot, Googly-eyed Godzillaish Lizard, Bo and Luke Duke (on clearance from TruValue), their ride, a broken Bespin cloud car I found in the neighbor's trash one day (which I still own), Remco Warlord (instead of He-Man), Decker, and a Rambo lookalike from Remco's GI Joeish line.

Of course all the fun would come to a screeching halt, the day Charlie rode his brand new BMX by my house and loudly made fun of my cheap toys.

I started playing in my backyard more often after that.

Charlie was a jerk.

Baker Smurf

I started kindergarten at the ripe old age of 6. It was my first lone venture into the world.

Okay, maybe not so lone. My mommy came along.

You see, until then, I had never been apart from my mother. She was a stay at home mom (or as we called it back in the 70's, "a mom".) She took me everywhere with her. I never had a babysitter nor I was ever left with relatives. No, I was attached at the hip to my mother. You can imagine the look on my face when the whole topic of going to school came up. "What do you mean you drop me off and leave me alone in a room full of strangers?"

There were other issues, of course. Although I was born in the United States, my parents were not. They had immigrated long before I came around, but were still in the process of acclimating. They spoke rudimentary English, enough to get by in NYC, but almost exclusively spoke in Spanish to each other and to other members of the family.  I say "almost exclusively" because they were both fans of cussing in English, but that is a story for another day.

My point in this diversion is to explain that until the age of 6, I spoke only Spanish. I understood very little English. What I knew, I learned from Sesame Street and the cartoons of the day.

When Kindergarten came into play, I found myself being abandoned by my mother, in a room full of strangers who did not understand me, and who I could not understand myself. I felt like an alien. I felt like a baby. So I made like a baby and cried until they called my mommy in to calm me down.

After that, my mother began her unpaid career of "Teacher Helper" for my Kindergarten class. I stopped crying, and started to acclimate myself. Soon I made friends and learn the language...but if my mom ever mentioned retiring from being a helper....waterworks.

One Thursday, on the way home from class, my mom mentioned needing something from the stationary store a block away from the school. It was an old fashioned pharmacy/stationary store/ 5 & Dime kind of place. It's still there in one incarnation or another, if Google Streetview is to be trusted.

While my mom did what she had to, I found myself staring into the glass display counter. It was the first time in my life I ever saw the Schleich Smurf PVC figurines. My mom must have been silently observing me as I went one by one and examined the little blue elves, because she came up behind me and in a soft voice asked if I wanted one, I could have one.

I picked Baker Smurf.

Not because I particularly like baking or baking-like activities. Honestly, I thought he was some sort of digger Smurf with a shovel. Only when I got him home did I realize that it wasn't dirt, but a loaf of bread that he held. I felt a little stupid, but that lasted only for a little bit.

The very next Thursday, on our walk home from school my mom turns to me asks if I wanted to stop by stationary store to look at some more Smurfs. Well, ya I wanted to look at more Smurfs!

Once I was mesmerized by the magical display case bursting at the seams with Smurfy goodness, my mom makes the declaration:

If I behave myself, get good grades, refrain from crying and act like a big girl...every Thursday I will get a new Smurf.

I behaved myself. I got straight A's. I didn't cry.

And ...I got a Smurf every Thursday without fail for at least 2 years.