Barbie Was Once a Modern Girl

My first Barbie was a hand-me-down, an original manufactured in 1959, just like me. I got it when we were six. She had few clothes, and her striped bathing suit looked dated even then, so my mother set about making her a wardrobe, starting with a black satin, strapless gown that The Supremes might covet. Soon Barbie had ruffled crop tops, pleated pedal pushers, and calico sundresses, all stitched from my mother’s imagination and scrap bag. The more she created, the more her imagination took hold, until soon Barbie had a wardrobe of museum pieces.

            I can still picture her chuckling over Red Skelton’s comedy hour, pinching a tape measure around Barbie’s tiny waist and muttering past the crochet hook in her mouth as she pinned the diminutive ecru dress in her lap. 3 ¼ inches here, pin, two fewer stitches here, pin, to flare out here, pin. She then ripped out several rows before reinserting the hook to fashion a fuller skirt for the wedding gown she envisioned with its fitted bodice, square neckline, and three-quarter length sleeves. Like Coco Chanel, she was exacting in her vision, as the wedding dress is the highlight of every designer’s show. This collection, which occupied an entire week while my father worked nights, included a red and black knit Flamenco dress with a lacy shawl; a Hungarian folk costume with floral apron; a white knit sheath with a gold lame bolero suitable for the Oscars; and my personal favorite, a bustled Victorian number in wintergreen with an evergreen jacket, bonnet, and bloomers.

            The concept of a fashion doll, before the Barbie brand and marketing became nauseatingly pink and juvenile, was one that my mother admired for its sophistication. She saw Barbie’s glamor as giving me something to aspire to beyond the domesticity of the era. Small wonder that when she broke out of the mold to pursue a college degree in the early Seventies, she studied to become a Home Economics teacher, and fashion design was her favorite class. As traditional as that may sound today, she was a ground-breaker among her generation, and I was immensely proud.

            As you’ve no doubt guessed, I’ve just come from seeing the Barbie movie, and I must report that this pink farce is thoroughly delightful for the manner in which it steps back from Mattel’s ultimate corruption of the original premise. To summarize without excessive spoilers, Barbie and Ken leave Barbieland for Los Angeles in search of answers to her sudden and disturbing awakening to mortality, only to find that the real world is not the matriarchy they inhabit. Empowered by the possibilities of Kenland. he returns to upend the status quo, with her mincing in his wake to deprogram her sisterhood under the new regime.

            Margot Robbie [Barbie] and Ryan Gosling [Ken] are spot-on as the long-term, chaste couple who must learn their value as individuals rather than stereotypes. Kate McKinnon is hilarious as the broken but wiser “Weird Barbie” who commands the quest. America Ferrera and Ariana Greenblatt are achingly suited as the Mattel exec and her disenchanted daughter who caused Barbie’s existential crisis and must help her resolve it. The costumes and props are to die for, with song and dance spectacles featuring a cast of hundreds. The energy and imaginative touches made me feel like a kid again and kept me laughing for the whole two hours. This is not a kid’s flick; it’s sophisticated, like the original Barbie herself.

            If you are reading this on my blog, you can see the pictures on my Facebook page

Becoming Duchess Goldblatt ~ Anonymous

People often come to me seeking the true meaning of life, but I find they are usually satisfied with half a sandwich.

Truth in 280 characters, it’s so refreshing that the Twitter phenomenon known only as Anonymous garnered over a quarter of a million followers in eight years. A modern-day Dorothy Parker with a Dame Judi Dench demeanor, Duchess Goldblatt of Crooked Path, NY—a self-styled octogenarian literary giant with such blockbusters as An Axe to Grind and the mother/daughter meditation Not If I Kill You First—is one wise and witty woman. If only I could invite her to tea, I imagine I’d have a new BFF. But alas, this genteel and surreal cheerleader to the world is a fictional character, a self-help distraction born of depression in the wake of a bitter divorce.

Casting about for a way to lift her spirits, the mysterious author found her inner advice columnist mischievously quipping about everything from time [When people say they are going to make time for you, it’s instant time from a mix] to hopes and dreams [Cracking the window an inch and leaving them in the car while you run errands will not work], and making celebrity friends along the way. Prime among these is her favorite performer, Lyle Lovett, whose easy banter offers a gentle diversion from Gabra Zackman’s smart narration in the five-and-a-half hour word fest that is my new favorite listen on Audible. Although I have not flipped through the 240 pages of this NYT Books to Read in 2020, I feel sure I could knock it out in a weekend between folding loads of laundry.  

Lessons and Carols: A Meditation on Recovery ~ John West

Maybe redemption is not a place you find, but a system of mapmaking.

John West made a name for himself with Pulitzer-nominated technology reporting for the Wall Street Journal. But with this newly released memoir, he can add the poet-philosopher feather to his cap with prose such as this line that captures the ineffable with beauty and truth; depression is a moon in a perfect orbit, always moving, never closer to or further from its object, which is my own broken self. It is precisely this ability to square off against his own demons that helps me as a reader understand those less articulate loved ones in my own orbit who share similar struggles.

The story, told in fractured time, chronicles the roller coaster of a mood disorder exacerbated by alcoholism amid his coming-of-age confusion over sexual identity and eventual joy in fatherhood. It is the story of a classical musician who is both atheistic and obsessed with Christmas carols, a story that is by turns desperately sad and inexplicably hopeful as the holiday he loves. Neither heavy-handed nor halting, this succinct account merely illustrates a miracle of personal reformation.

At under 200 pages, many of which contain a scant sentence, this is a quick read for the serious and searching mind. [William B. Eerdmans Publishing]. A brief author interview is available here.

The Brilliant Life of Eudora Honeysett ~ Annie Lyons

She has a death to plan and can’t allow human kindness to stand in her way.

Eudora Honeysett is a miserable old woman who, after devoting herself to making others happy at the expense of living her own life, decides to pursue euthanasia. If I can have the choice of how I live my own life, why can’t I choose to die my own death? It’s a timely premise worth pondering, especially as her determination is steadfastly challenged by two well-meaning strangers with whom she enters into an unlikely friendship after too many years of secretive loneliness. Her new neighbor, a boisterous ten-year-old girl, and a widower who forms a threesome with them, become the center of a life that previously held no excitement or human connections. That these two take an immediate shine to Eudora is baffling, but they see her as a remarkable woman and insist on drawing her out during her four-month wait for her final chapter. The plotline is predictable and less nuanced than that of the similar novel A Man Called Ove [or Otto, as he is called in the American version.]

Here is a book I was glad to purchase for a couple of bucks as the Deal of the Day on Audible, but I’d have been disappointed if I spent a credit. I can’t decide if it would have felt less cloying had another narrator read it, but I found Nicollete McKenzie’s portrayal of the child’s voice to be too young and the curmudgeon’s voice too clichéd in its aristocratic sourpuss quotient. As a result, the ten-and-a-half-hour listen felt painfully longer. But I kept going because I was invested in these characters and wanted to know how it ended.

The Undocumented Americans ~ Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

I think every immigrant in this country knows that you can eat English and digest it so well that you shit it out, and to some people, you will still not speak English.

So says the Ecuadorian-American author and Harvard grad whose 2020 account of immigrant hardship was nominated for the National Book Award in nonfiction. In profiles that Publisher’s Weekly hailed as incandescent, she crisscrosses the country interviewing Latinos as they chase the American dream by queuing up for day labor, cleaning up Ground Zero, burning out in the restaurant industry, and banking on herbal medicines to in lieu of healthcare. Whether reporting on the role-reversals inherent in parent-child relationships where only the latter are fluent, or interviewing the Flint, Michigan mother of an infant with lead-poisoning contracted from the tap water during pregnancy, Villavicencio combines the detached eye of a reported with the understanding of a survivor who was abandoned by her parents as a toddler only to rejoin them later and try to make sense of it all.   

The immigrants she writes about are all around us, from the line at Target to our gardening center and doctors’ office: the dreamers and their parents of all ages. Do yourself and them a favor by reading this captivating and short [185 pages] book. As one who teaches English as a Second Language to adults, this account is dear to my heart, as it was stories such as those recounted here that inspired me to write my own collection, World Class: Poems of the ESL Classroom when I was new to the job.

To hear a brief author-read excerpt, click here, –but first a trigger warning for language. She’s F___ing angry on this page, and her words carry the same kind of punch you can find in a rant by Native American author Sherman Alexie. And who’s to blame them, really?

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter ~ Carson McCullers

Maybe when people longed for a thing that bad the longing made them trust in anything that might give it to them.

For the deaf-mute John Singer, that thing is the preservation of his friendship with Spiros Antonapoulos, the mentally unbalanced roommate who shares his affliction and his life. For the disadvantaged teen Mick Kelly, it is music where the whole world was this symphony, and there was not enough of her to listen. For the volatile alcoholic Jake Blount, it is the Communist ideal. For Dr. Copeland, it is distinguished regard for himself and his family in a Southern town where people see only the color of their skin. For Biff Brannon, owner of the diner, it is love. Together, their lives crisscross amid a cast of unforgettable characters so nuanced that each feels like a personal acquaintance as they spin dreams from hopes and tragedies.

Written in 1940, this literary classic was ranked seventeenth in The Modern Library’s list of the 100 best-selling English language novels of the 20th Century. To some it is about social commentary. To others it is about homosexual allusions. To me, it is simply the most beautifully written book I have ever read. This classic was made into a film starring Alan Arkin, Sondra Locke, and Cicely Tyson in 1954; watch the trailer here . Yet despite the passage of eighty years, the characters and their dilemmas feel just as urgent and fresh as when they were created on the brink of WWII.

12.5 hours on Audible, beautifully narrated by Cherry Jones, or 359 pages.

The Measure of My Days ~ Florida Scott-Maxwell

When old, one has only one’s soul as company….Silence receives too little appreciation.

Sometimes you stumble on just the right book at just the right moment. For me, Florida Scott-Maxwell’s reflections on aging explain much of what I’m witnessing with my father as he celebrates his 90th birthday. Stubborn and perversely independent one month ago, he is now tired and submissive in a nursing home. I’m tempted to check his basement the body-snatcher pod that so intrigued and terrified me as a child watching Creature Feature. Something, indeed many things about his personality have shifted, and I’m finding answers to this puzzle within the pages of this slender [15O page] volume.   

The author—an actress, fiction writer, playwright, suffragette, and psychologist—brings a kaleidoscope of life-experience to her musings, and the fact that she wrote it in 1968 in no way diminishes its relevance today. For human nature has not changed drastically in fifty-five years, The elderly, as she says, are mysteries like everything else.

There is no plot, simply the random musings of a sharply reflective intellect. Here is a gem to savor and reread for a lifetime. I have noted some highlights to pique your interest.

   On reaching one’s potential: No one lives all the life of which he was capable.

   On parenting: If a grandmother wants to put her foot down, the only safe place… is in a notebook.

   On wisdom: I wish a notebook could laugh.

   On diversion: I used to draw…make rugs…and now only music prevents my facing my thoughts.

   On honesty: Impossible to speak the truth until you have contradicted yourself.

   On originality: What but being different brings the conviction of having found the best way?

   On secularism: To destroy god used to require a hero, one who was fit to be a god.  

   On purpose: We may have to learn that we failed to live our lives.

   On emotions: Anger must be the energy that has not yet found its right channel.

   On aging: We wonder how much older we have to become, what degree of decay we have to endure.

I highly recommend this read for introspective, mature souls of all ages. At the very least, the reader will take away a greater appreciation for the present moment.

Dancing With My Father

Babka, my dad’s grandmother, died when I was three, but it was another two years before the family held a work party to clean out her weather foursquare two doors down from his childhood home. Though her withered face framed by a black kerchief had been as much a fixture at my grandparents’ table as her ever-present pot of simmering potatoes, she spoke only Polish and was therefore a mystery to me until that day I crossed her threshold.

The place felt cavernous and under-furnished with, to my way of thinking, nice antiques that Dad called junk. In the attic were brittle boxes of yellowed linens and National Geographics, cracked high-button boots, and clay marbles flattened from the heat. But even he was impressed by the upright player-piano in the parlor. Considering the sagging affair the house had become, this nod to gentility came as quite a surprise. No one in the family played, which may be why he’d forgotten it, but a piano in those days was just one of those things you owned to show the world that you could. 

The ivories, those that weren’t stripped, were butter-yellow and smooth to the touch as I explored the length of the keyboard—from the buzzy bass to the tinny top notes. Several keys didn’t sound at all. But when we found two perforated scrolls of music in the bench, Dad opened a mysterious door to the guts of the instrument and threaded The Beer Barrel Polka into its yawning cavity, flipped a switch, and then presto—dance music!

A lanky figure in grey Dickies with a little girl perched on his toes, he spun me around like Lawrence Welk with a 1-2-3 an’ a 1-2-3. Soon my feet were following instinctively while my eyes locked on the keys toggling of their own accord. The incongruity infected us with such laughter it burst forth in giggles the rest of the day as we trucked it home so that I might take lessons.

The piano sat on the porch for two months, the last thing I touched on my way to school and the first thing when I came home again to plunk out sour melodies. Then he had it appraised, and I came home to a pile of desiccated leaves where it had stood.

I thought then that the piano was the greatest treasure I found that day. Now that Dad is staggering and gasping toward ninety, I know that it was dancing with him.

CivilWarLand in Bad Decline – George Saunders

Maybe the god we see, the god who calls the daily shots is merely a sub-god. Maybe there’s a god above this sub-god who is busy for a few minutes with something else and will be right back, and when he gets back will take the sub-god by the ear and say, “Now look…”

If you haven’t yet read George Saunders’ futuristic satire, put this 1996 award-winning collection of short stories at the top of your to-read list. Now. Better yet, buy it as a holiday gift for your favorite curmudgeon and see them chuckle for a change at this vision of a futuristic world where society’s worst tendencies have created a hostile, elitist, toxic environment, yet where the downtrodden endure with irrational optimism. Set in a historical theme park peopled by unscrupulous management, wage slaves, ghosts, and real slaves known as flaweds [due to their genetic mutations], Saunders’ stories combine Hemingway’s terseness with Hallmark Channel hopefulness and dystopian vision to rival Margaret Atwood at her most outlandish. In the pivotal scene of “Bounty”, for example, the hero weighs forced servitude with three squares and a daily toot of cocaine against the possibility of escape to a rumored land of pastoral beauty and unfettered freedom. Then an old timer advises: Don’t budge from here. Learn to enjoy the little you have. Revel in the fact that your dignity hasn’t been stripped away. Every minute that you’re not in absolute misery, you should be weeping with gratitude and thanking God at the top of your lungs. It sounds outlandish, like the threat of coal in your Christmas stocking. And yet it is not, as our hero learns, and still he keeps his eyes on the prize with sentimental naivete. To sample Saunders’ wry humor, listen to a snippet from the title story in which he explains the genesis of this strange world.

This book is 224 pages or 5 ½ hours on Audible, artfully narrated by the author.

Afterlife ~ Julia Alvarez

Who do we ask for help when we’ve run out of options?

“There are many little deaths in our lives, to our old selves, to our certainties. But there is an afterlife after that,” says Julia Alvarez in this brief author interview.  It is a notion any mature person can appreciate, but the premise that hooked me was that of individual principles colliding with the law. When a respected widow in small-town Vermont, a retired English professor of Dominican descent named Antonia Vega, finds an undocumented and pregnant teen from Mexico on her doorstep, she is faced with not just a humanitarian opportunity but a seeming panacea for her loneliness. What can she do? What is she willing to do?

I couldn’t wait to find out. Unfortunately, the story gets derailed by a secondary plot about family loyalty and mental illness when she is called away to deal with a crisis within her large sisterhood—a compelling topic, but one perhaps better served by its own narrative. Without giving away the ending, I will say that Alvarez finds creative ways to resolve the dual crises in an even-handed manner that reflects reality, offering neither unbounded hope nor total despair.

With the immigration debate dominating news headlines, this 2020 novel by a celebrated Hispanic-American author is a timely read. I would particularly recommend it for students of Spanish looking to hone their skills with well-translated conversational vignettes. 241 pages or 6 ½ hours on Audible, beautifully read by Alma Cuervo.