Plastic Stamps 

Nothing is more emblematic to our culture than tattoos. Don’t believe me? Lift your friend’s skirt and check out her tats.  See what that says about her. See what it says about you.  Don’t know your friend that well? Not sure you’re ready to yet?  Go ahead and examine the fuzzy teddy covering her rib cage.  No, the Funeshine Bear fiasco fresco tattoo, not the other teddy. Funshine Bear say’s she likes having fun.  Tattoos say all kinds of things about us.

Tattoos are art. They show perfect images of what we want or what we expect.  We use their art to imitate the events of our lives.  Sometimes our lives aren’t art though. Things happen that nobody should see.  These scars we gloss over with pop tat art, pretending they never happened.

Know what else says something about us? Our Barbies.  Not that thing I throw my shimp onto next to the roasting koala spit, the other Barbies, the collection in the closet.  Ok, I don’t have any Barbies, MyEx took those, but that doesn’t mean they don’t say anything about us.  Which ones do you have?  MyEx had a Radiant Rose Barbie, because that was her style. She also had a panda tat.  I’m not really sure I got that. Maybe it’s cuz she liked Chinese food.

For those of you torn between your teen-dream Barbie and your authentic-adult tattoos, Mattel now tells you that you can have the toy for all ages. That’s right, they’ve mixed chocolate and peanut butter of life to give you the Tramp Stamp Barbie. 

Ok, that’s not her real name, but let’s just call a moneymaker a moneymaker here.  Barbie’s got something to sell, and everybody’s bending her over to get some.  What’s more cute than seeing Barbie leaning over a desk, showing a heart tat with a name emblazoned on her sweet spot for eternity?

“Jazzie forever?”

“Sorry Ken. We need to talk.”

Holy kissing cousins Batman!  See, and that’s just Barbie imitating life. Sure, Tracy’s got her unbending arms in the air of uproar, and sure, it looks more she’s just made a basket ball granny shot, but let me tell ya, that Tracy is one outspoken figurine of indignant offense.  She knows a poser when she sees one.  Still, Nikki and Dana are goose-stepping their “go-girl” attitude. Barbie still leads the pack. They have tats to prove it.

What’s a Ken to do?  How can he compete?  Prince Albert Ken just won’t work:  the stud just falls to the bottom of the box and rattles around: impotent.  Yeah, he could get his own tat’s but Tit for Tat Barbie really isn’t Ken’s style.  Ken needs to man up, and now that the pants are down, his manhood is in question. 

This is why Ken never showers in the locker room.

So he moves out of the dream house and finds comfort in the arms of Fashion Fever Courtney.  She’s a little shallow, but Ken isn’t exactly Gene pool Geek Chic either.  They’re happy and that’s all that matters in this dream story.

Even at 50, Barbie imitates life.  She’s a hungry cougar showing that she can make it on her own.  Tramp stamp rump and rosy tat ring around the bicep,  yeah, she’s the ageless Aphrodite.  And those of us who follow? Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.  We can’t keep up with the plastic princess. When real women turn 50 those tight rosy bicep rings of their youth swing like hammocks from their arms.  Tattoo Barbie doesn’t show that.

Of course now that Barbie has tattoos, real tattoos will lose their popularity. You might as well ask the artist to ink the word “Cliché’” to your forehead. It’s too bad, because some ink is anything but cliché’.

Oh, it’s not for me, I may have worn my wedding ring for what seemed like forever, but is there anything else that describes me enough to need an engraved reminder? I mean I’m sure if you ask MyEx, she’d tell you that a hairy ass is emblematic enough.  I already have one of those.  Nobody needs two. It doesn’t take Cliché’ Barbie to tell you that.

Apparently it does take Barbie cliché’s to tell us some things though:  the perfect guy, does not have balls; The dream house isn’t as solid as a real house, it only has 3 walls and everybody knows what’s going on inside; and you may get your pink Corvette, but you still need to afford a way to make it go, because there is no “big hand” to push it across the room.

Barbie glosses over the real, but once we see it through her eyes we realize how silly it is.  Maybe we should use that to our advantage.  Could we make the Barbie Dream Divorce set?  Soul Sucking Barbie, and Deadbeat Ken, both come with baggage and sacks of insults to hurl.  Everything splits in half including their perfect nativity baby Jesus.

“No!  I want the Jesus head!”

“Fine, but I get visitation with your sister Skipper.”

It’s ridiculous and awful, but so is divorce. Yeah, sometimes it is necessary, but when 50 percent of all Barbie marriages end in divorce because we find we didn’t marry the perfect plastic partner, we need to ask which is worse: rt imitating life, or life pretending to be art?  The grass is always greener on somebody else’s tattoo.  Just ask Barbie when she was 12 inches tall.

Life gets a little hairy living real. Maybe that’s what my tattoo should say. I’ll use that to frame my hairy butt.