Religious right puts ‘80s Barbie in hairy situation

According to the Washington Post, Mattel and Golden Books are launching the “Barbie Diary of the Decade” series. These history books will give a Barbie-eye view of the 1960s and ‘70s.

But unless I help, there’s a slice of history that Mattel won’t write. It’s about Spokane’s own 1980s’ Big-Haired Barbie. Here’s her tale:

It all began on Christmas morning in 1989 when a little girl on Spokane’s South Hill pulled me out of the wrapping paper. She had curly brown hair and eyes the color of chocolate M&Ms. She swirled me over her head and tried to make me stand up. I immediately tipped over.

My top-heavy frame and my oddly arched feet didn’t help. But I believe it was the sheer volume of my outsized blond hair that sent me crashing to the floor.

Later I commiserated with the other Barbies in the girl’s closet. We all shared that same horrible hair. We couldn’t even sit down without drowning in it. Our scalps itched, and we always smelled of Aqua Net.

One day the girl with the M&M eyes and her friends piled us into a white plastic convertible, and zipped us off to the “beach” at the bathtub. There, they dressed us in bikinis and threw us into the water.

My hair swirled around me, a stringy golden seaweed, and my cracked plastic scalp felt renewed. I splashed in a back float of freedom, and I realized life held more for me than bubblegum-colored fashion. When my hair dried, it stuck stiff and strawlike to my neck. But I didn’t care. I finally swam free.

One day the little girl brought me along when her mother attended a women’s empowerment class at the community college. I got lost in a toy box there, but at night I’d creep out and listen to all the women’s programs in the building. I learned about nontraditional jobs, and resume writing and more, much, much more.

Soon I was pouring myself into a little navy blue suit with a matching power tie, and hitching a ride to the Small Business Administration office. I wangled myself into a special SBA loan for women-owned businesses. All those nights in the little girl’s closet, I’d dreamed of developing a product for big-haired dolls like me.

Suddenly, it took off. It was a special protein-enhancing formula that restored flat locks to their original luster. Every ‘80s Barbie in the country had to have it. One night in Tallahassee a bleary-eyed working mom tried it on her own hair by mistake. Turns out it changes a human’s hair instantly blond — Malibu Barbie blond.

Before long, I had a fancy office, a big profit margin and a chance to have all the treatments I’d always dreamed of. A podiatrist in the Valley fixed my feet. A South Hill plastic surgeon performed a breast reduction. Glen Dow’s gave a bob.

My life took off. I moved the corporation to New York City. Soon I had my own television show. And a magazine all my own. I dispensed women’s empowerment advice and hair care tips. Copies flew off the shelves each month. Oprah and Martha hated my guts.

But I didn’t care. I was running my own billion dollar corporation by then. I was riding high, and I deserved it, after all I’d been through. I’d been running my own personal big-hair, big-boob, angled-feet recovery program for years. I was a survivor.

Then one day it all came crashing down. The religious right got wind of the secret ingredient in my protein hair formula. They’d never realized I had a factory harvesting stem cells in China. They were pink plastic Mattel stem cells, but they looked amazingly like human ones, and the conservatives couldn’t care less about the difference.

Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity came after me loaded for bear. I agreed to go on “The O’Reilly Factor,” and I wound up being charged with assault and battery after Bill O’Reilly screamed “Shut up” at me one too many times.

I was sent off for a few months in a minimum security facility in Virginia. There I scrambled to collect crab apples in the yard and befriended a Tropical Midge with a sad tale about Trent Lott. It’s a hard world, this new conservative era. Not like the ‘80s when a girl with dreams could go far.

I’m out now. I’m wearing a poncho knitted by a fellow inmate, a faded Dance Club Barbie. She was doing hard time for telling a class of third- graders that Darwin may have been right.

I have to wear an electronic monitor around my ankle for a few months. But life isn’t so bad now. I’m humbler and wiser. Business has never been better.

My newest hair-care line is a secret. But it’s about to explode. I can tell you this much: It’ll be the only product on the market designed specifically for yakking conservatives with male-pattern baldness.

I can’t wait to see how O’Reilly will look in a blond Barbie bouffant.