Sign language Barbie.
Barbie
floats center stage in her pink dress, her paper-faced
husband forcing a smile. He
is struggling to remember
the gist of
the speech she 'll deliver.
Barbie twists her mouth
in a momentary grimace, not wanting to come off too self-assured,
the lights that will halo her, the clumsy demeanor of her
husband, so purple and smothered in his raincloud of fibs. But
then she's reminded of duty, how she signs to those who can't
hear, of the image to recover and the peanut -crunching crowd.
The irresistible charm of the charitable, like those English ladies in a film
she once saw, so polished in gentle arts of distraction, so promptly disguising
their scorn for the handmaids. The generals all rode horses back then,
raised their spectacles to read maps, wrote home to women in long dresses and
white gloves. She has never read a British novel, not even
a book of etiquette
but swears
she has mastered it all by intuition, and the frequent trips to her top-notch
stylist. In this brave new world, Mattel now offers plastic
sheep and pastures,
a Cyclops to conquer and even Rambo Ken
who can morph into a real man, ready to pull
his gun at the
first traffic fight. Yet this Barbie has issues: how to manage the multiple
movements of
wrists and fingers, make hands that
sweep softly up and down in
gestures not
too robotic. Mattel calls its engineer army into action, hoping this Barbie
can bring some good sales to a falling market, one where girls are always wanting more
out of life. After all, is she not an embodied saviour, poised to return to the unborn their value,
some quiet to the streets, and a choir of angels to home and hearth?
