Valley of the Dolls – Dave Barry

By Dave Barry Miami Herald

What I do, first thing every morning, is play with dolls. The dolls belong to my 15-month-old daughter, Sophie, who likes to start the day by giving her dolls a toy bottle. She has a strong nurturing instinct, although it is not matched by her hand-eye coordination, so often she sticks the bottle into a doll’s eye. The dolls don’t mind. They’re always happy. They talk in perky, squeaky doll voices.

“Hi, Sophie!” say the dolls. “Cough cough cough!”

The dolls cough a lot, because I provide their voices, and it is not easy to sound perky and squeaky when you’re a 53-year-old man and it is 7 a.m. and you have not had your coffee. You have to struggle to get yourself into a doll-voice mood, and you find yourself wondering what all the other 53-year-old men are doing at that hour. You suspect they’re doing manly, grown-up things, like baling hay, or preparing a sales presentation, or burping. They’re probably not lying on the family-room floor, speaking for a Barbie doll.

Yes, my daughter has a Barbie doll. And not just any Barbie doll: It’s a Republican Convention Delegate Barbie. Really. She’s wearing a business suit and has a little delegate credential around her neck. In other respects she’s a regular Barbie, by which I mean she has an anatomically impossible figure and enough hair to be a fire hazard.

Republican Convention Delegate Barbie was given to my daughter by a woman I know who is connected with the Mattel company, which made a limited number of Republican and Democratic Barbies that were given to the delegates last year at both political conventions. The woman told me that Convention Delegate Barbie is a valuable collectible item, and we should keep her in the box. But of course as soon as Sophie saw Barbie, she had to get her out of the box and give her a nice, nurturing bottle to the eyeball.

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