[Cheerio]

When I was about five, an Aunt who had three boys and no girls somehow gifted our family one original but slightly played with out-of-box Barbie (striped swimsuit included). Of course we didn't KNOW it was an original until the collecting trend took off AFTER we had played with her for many years.

With many girls in our family we each got Barbie friends with a different name, outfit, ability and/or skin tone from the doll our other sisters recieved: P.J., Francie, Skipper, Tutti, Malibu Barbie, Christie, etc. I was so enamored of my Francie's Bendable Legs I vigorously shook her by her special legs and broke them the first day. Only my sister had a Twist 'N Turn Waist Barbie.

Back in rural areas in our day there were not many mass-merch stores (Walmart/Target/Toys R Us) to shop at, so we rode bicycles to the dime store/pharmacy/hardware store to choose cool Barbie clothes and multiple cheap, bagged
doll accessories like small plastic soda bottles, toothbrushes, bowling balls with pins, record players with a tiny 45rpm record, tiny plastic dogs, and so on. I recall the coup of buying the beautiful Silver Sparkle Barbie Dress from our local hardware store TWO YEARS after the dress was introduced (commerce moved slowly in rural areas!).

We handmade ALOT of our Barbie clothes, our Barbie houses and our Barbie stuff. Cotton balls stuffed into sewn-shut wrist cuffs made Barbie pillows, with a big letter B written in magic marker on them that stood for BARBIE. Rugs were cut-up fuzzy shirts, room dividers were made from long 1960s shirt fringe or long strings of plastic beads.

The last year I played with Barbies I was fourteen, and that was because I still had to play Barbies with all my younger sisters. I decorated my homemade, cardboard box Barbie House that year with construction-papered red and orange walls.

I will admit: in my 30s when Xmas shopping for new Salvation Army toys I bought myself the Glitter Beach version of Theresa (friend to Barbie). Everything about her was so pretty! I kept her in-box for several years; eventually she did make it (still unused in-box) to a child through the Salvation Army. And I distinctly recall purchasing The First Presidential Candidate Barbie, for a Salvation Army Xmas donation, in 1991.