By Vanessa LeVesque on Tuesday, 29 October 2024
Category: Acrylic

Shrimp On The Barbie

I was never much of a Barbie girl.

I honestly didn't have any. But my nieghbor (and good friend) did... and a video camera... well her parents had one that they graciously let us use to make videos.

And make videos we did.

There were SNL parodied skits, faux novella soap operas (for a Spanish class project), talk show parodies, dance routines, but some of my favorite might have just been the Barbie girl song video we made.

We ended up tying every single Barbie they had up with dental floss by their wrists, necks and waists. And then we tossed them into a pile on the floor directly in front of the camera. We sat upstairs on the balcony with our dental floss Barbie DIY marionettes...

Someone pressed play on the camera and then on the boombox... we had pre-recorded Aqua's Barbie Girl...

Slowly as the music began to pick up, our Barbies came to life out of the heap... one.... two... three... four... there were soon dozens of Barbies 'dancing' to the beat as we did our best to maneuver them from the upstairs balcony above.

By the end of both the song and our video, the Barbies were badly tangled in clumps and various stages of both dress and undress due to their intense dance moves, pivots, and turns.

And later that day we all got a good laugh when her dad gave us the big cassette we had made and we popped it into the VCR for our first screening.

Many years (fine, decades) later, my friend stumbled across the video. We ended up watching it and I must say of the dental floss heap of diy marionette Barbies: much like the CGI quality of the breakthrough master piece that is Jurassic Park, it maintains its quality to this day...

Just like ours.

Except ours was pretty bad then, and hilariously bad now. But a good bad... it's still on brand.

Anyhow... that was my very short lived stint as a Barbie girl.