LitWit Challenge 2.3: Bad, Bad Barbie
Barbie’s been around for decades, in many incarnations: Ballerina Barbie, Malibu Barbie, and so on. The problem is, they’re all good girls, and good girls get boring. It is up to us, dear reader, to make Barbie more human. Barbie needs to be bad.
This week’s LitWit Challenge: Send in a short biography of Bad Barbie. It should be 500 words or less, the more outrageous the better. Post your entries in Comments; the deadline is 11.59pm on March 20, 2010. The winner gets a hardcover copy of Wesley Stace’s novel By George, the autobiography of a ventriloquist’s dummy.
Here’s a sample entry. (Your entry does not have to reference the 80s.)
She was working as a waitress at a cocktail bar when he met her. She was still Victor then, a fey 18-year-old who was saving money for his sex change so he could move on to the lucrative field of ping-pong ball propulsion. Still Akihiro picked her up, shook her up, and turned her around, and financed the operations that turned her into Varvie Aramvulo-Vriones, the toast of high society, high meaning mass consumption of uppers and downers.
Now five years later on she’s got the world at her feet, success has been so easy for her, and Akihiro’s beginning to bore her. She thinks it’s time she lived her life on her own. But Akihiro will only let her go over his dead body, so I guess that’s just what she must do.
The Weekly LitWit Challenge is brought to you by our friends at National Bookstore. Thanks to James Reyes for permission to use his Barbie designs.
March 15th, 2010 at 03:19
Her name was Nola
She was a choirgirl
But that was 50 years ago
Claimed her mother was Gabor
She wore a turban
And some bird’s buttocks
She dated Rocco, Joe, Peping
Aided by blusang itim
She carved their wangs with knives
Poured acid on their wives
She took their businesses, she took their assets,
None for kids survives
She’s now Barbra, Barbra Kedavra
Infamous kept woman from Abra
Devious Barbra, Barbra Kedavra
Guys with hoards guide her, a black widow spider
Barba Kedavraaaaa…
Looks like Deneuve.
March 15th, 2010 at 06:30
The Human League!
March 15th, 2010 at 13:15
i must admit i sang to the tune while reading askaniclan’s entry. :P
March 15th, 2010 at 13:19
Tenia miedo! Miserably trying to manage the hacienda as Papa wanted, I could not help but be distracted by the sweaty stablehands. I watched from behind my curtained window as they toiled under the hot, hot sun; I could not fight the stirring of my passions! My American cousin Midge took me to the Big Apple in an effort to set me straight. On a whirlwind tour of drunken parties and East Side bedrooms, one night found us off-Broadway to see Hedwig and his angry inch, and I was enlightened. Hay esperanza!! Back in Cayo, I begged mi madre’s costurera to quickly put together a grand ensemble, and bought the woman’s silence with a plot of farmland. A parcel of my inheritance, será inútil después de mi transformación. Mi hermana del bebe’s coming out ball at the Hotel Le Carillon in Paris is in 4 days, and I will be there! I will dazzle them all! I can see it now, clad in shimmering silk, sequins, and feathers, I am kohled, painted, and sprayed to the nines. I walk through the doors just as the formal dance begins. The people whisper, jaws drop, and the music fades away. Who is this gorgeous apparition? Quien es la muchacha hermosa? I walk bravely, boldly, to the center of the ballroom, and throw off my feathered cape. I turn slowly until I am facing mi Padre, and I say, “El es yo su hijo.. Salvador!”
March 15th, 2010 at 13:21
Barbie had been a good girl—a nun’s consummate protégé just missing that black habit. That is until she met the Holy Trinity of party girls—Paris, Lindsay, and Amy—a drunk pack of young women she instantly knew the Almighty Lord frowns upon. Realizing that it was not Tao that they walked into, and glancing at Barbie’s sleek, modelesque physique that could be dressed in haute couture or skanky cocktail dresses, Paris asked Barbie if she wanted to have the time of her life. Barbie contemplated for a second, looked back at the boring stone edifice of the convent, fled to the back seat of Paris’ petri dish of biological horrors of a Benz, took off her dark wimple, and shook her head to reveal long, glorious, and fragrant blonde tresses. With a devilish smile, she threw her wimple out the window with an obligatory “wooo!”
Years after living in Hollywood as a reality show star rivaling the cast of Jersey Shore, she was living Paris’ promise of the time of her life. Leaving the front entrance of Katsuya as a live bait for the paparazzi, a female fan approached her for an autograph to which she waved off in her studded fingerless gloves, even though she was far from being a biker chick (although she had a one night stand with one). As she hopped on an Audi with football star Ronaldo, she felt a swirling tinge of disgust within herself for being the person she had become—an attention whore with no values—and also at seeing Ronaldo’s herpes-laden smile. For God’s sake she even left the toilet seat up without flushing! What had happened? She was a nun before all this, God’s faithful servant. She was like a white Whoopi Goldberg in Sister Act. She ordered Ronaldo to leave his car and stay off self-tanning so she could be alone and ruminate on the life she has been leading. She wondered, what the reason she had for leaving the convent. She tried with all her might to remember that pivotal motive for fleeing the convent, and then she remembered:
Mother Superior Dora had asked her to peel 3 cloves of garlic. After she had just done her nails!
Barbie hit rock bottom; she had no idea who she was anymore, and what her life was going to be once she skips over Ronaldo’s tanned imprint of his butt. What was she? All she knew was what she was not. She walked up to her doorstep with drooped shoulders while flicking her finger on a TMZ paparazzo hiding behind her trash bin. This is it, she thought, I am just a nobody in in demand designer clothes! She wanted to do something to define herself anew, to create a new image for herself. Once she touched her door knob, she had the most outstanding epiphany since God knows when:
It was time to write a tell-all.
March 15th, 2010 at 14:22
Kasandra was born to a mother whose family tree bore some of the most memorable faces who graced the silver screen; and to a father whose last name was used to identify boulevards, buildings, bridges, and barangays in the country. Unfortunately though for Sandra, genetics ruled over money, and she got her father’s homely features and her mother’s deficiency for gray matter.
But Sandra’s world was never short of “well-meaning” friends. At 16, during a trip in a European city, she met a lusty derma-surgeon who introduced her to a whole new world of body-altering-confidence-enhancing procedures, and pain killers taken in for reasons other than to kill pain. Within the next two years before she was formally introduced to high society, Sandra was complete stranger to the people who knew her from her childhood, and was an icon of notoriety for those who openly admire and secretly despise her, which was actually the same group of people. Only her Yaya, who endured looking after her home schooling could accurately chronicle her evolution.
But Yaya would not want the world to know the wild and wordly undertakings of her darling Sandra. Not now that her ward is being groomed to follow in the footsteps of her great grandfather, himself a former resident of “the Palace.” Yaya could easily type in a shoutout from her Facebook account to send the people an early warning, but she is just too dumbfounded by the Frankenstein she helped create to care about future consequences
March 16th, 2010 at 11:45
Barbara hurt her twin in the womb. It was that simple. There wasn’t enough space in the world for two buxom, tanned, blue-eyed and blonde bombshells, and the foetal Barbara knew it, in that deep wisdom of the unborn. So she wrapped her fingers around the umbilical cord and pulled it taut around her twin’s neck. Bones that have not finished forming are not so strong, however, and Barbara failed to kill the twin. The cord stayed wrapped around the twin’s neck for a while, and when they came out, Barbara was perfect in every way, but Skipper was stunted and ugly.
They grew up, and Barbara never let her little sister forget that dear Skipper was the deformed funhouse mirror version of herself. Oh, Skipper had her admirers – the half-witted poolboy, the lecherous old milkman – but all it took was Barbie sashaying by in one of her veterinarian or stewardess or safari outfits (costumes were the old girl’s particular fetish) and the men promptly forgot the little sister: lured upstairs to Barbie’s pink bedroom, the moaning and thrashing rose to a fever pitch.
Yet it was not enough for Barbara. Her fiance, all-American, football-playing, tanned Ken, seemed abnormal somehow (what man could resist those legs, those pneumatic breasts?), and he had taken a liking to shooting the breeze with the safe, asexual Skipper. So on the eve of the twins’ 19 birthday, Barbara took a length of silken cord and crept upstairs to Skipper’s room. Little sister was fast asleep when the cord pulled tight. This time, Barbara’s bones were strong enough to finish the job.
March 17th, 2010 at 16:30
These entries are so witty and hilarious! I salute all of you gays and gays at heart! Bravo!
March 20th, 2010 at 22:03
All Marie Antoinette ever wanted was the world’s attention and the latest fashion, which the real Barbie received so effortlessly. Marie Antoinette spent every day with Barbie but was always seen as one of her accessories, her play thing, her boy toy, back when she was still a he known Ken. Well, he didn’t really love Barbie, he just pretended to love her so that he could bask in what little limelight and haute couture may come his way, what he really loved was to be Barbie.
Ken put on an elaborate act to be Barbie’s sweet boyfriend, but secretly he was learning all her strengths and weaknesses, her mannerisms and speech, her likes and dislikes. When he found out that Barbie disliked the perennial dieting to maintain her gorgeous body and liked Belgian chocolate truffles and lechon, he took Barbie to exotic restaurants and let her eat as much as she wanted, whispering to her ear he loves her just as she is, no matter what she looks like, yes even when she gains a pound after another pound. Barbie gained so much weight she could not bear to go out and let the public see her – and as the ever loyal and sacrificing boyfriend, Ken offered himself to the only solution to the problem: he will have to go out to the world and masquerade as Barbie, to protect her reputation. Barbie’s fans would just break down and cry, the standards for beauty will crumble and be hailed humanly impossible, feminists will celebrate if they ever found out the truth. Barbie knew this, so she obliged. Ken cut her golden hair and fashioned for himself a wig to complete his ensemble – for every fat Barbie gained Ken shed, and now Ken was as lithe and svelte as Barbie used to be. With Barbie’s blessing and her walk-in closet at his disposal, Ken dressed himself for glamour, and with some hormone pills and surgery Ken no longer was and the world loved him, rather, loved her, as Ken/Barbie-now-reborn-as-Marie-Antoinette.
Marie Antoinette’s signature is her ever-changing hairstyle – now in a bun, next in a blond afro, corn-rosed, curled, J-Popped – she became patron saint to all hairstylists but the identity of her hairdresser remains secret. She cemented her status as pop icon, second only to Madonna. When asked about Ken’s disappearance she fought back tears and announced Ken left her for another woman, inwardly giggling at the truth and irony. But she has a new beau, the charming and incredibly sexy new doll Jacob Black, and he’s been helping her move on.
P.S. In the basement, behind bolted metal doors lay all of real Barbie and her 250 pounds, so that no one, not even the butlers, maids, pets and party guests would ever see what she’d become, her only comfort is the vitamin E-enriched lechon Ken feeds her thrice a day to keep her skin and hair nourished, and he’s so sweet he still cuts her hair after all these years.