My neighbor and I went to see Barbie this past weekend. I loved it. Without saying too much, I loved the colors and the cleverness and the way that the characters said things that I have thought but haven’t said, and things that I’ve felt but that have never risen up and assembled into consciousness.
I did feel a little bad for Ken, though.
Ken. In the movie, his job is “beach.” Not anything specific at the beach. Just beach. In the real world, he isn’t qualified to be a lifeguard. He can’t go out into the water, he can’t even help people on land. In Barbie Land, he collides with an immovable wave when he tries to surf.
He does get a resolution of sorts in the movie, but I had trouble seeing where he was headed, how he was going to take all he learned and move forward. (Sometimes I have a little trouble returning to reality after watching or reading something.) It bothered me like a tiny stone in my shoe, moving around but never disappearing.
I was still thinking about Ken the next morning, when one of my kids agreed to go on a walk with me. We walked down to the beach, which was covered in kelp and patches of small rocks.
This is a kid who is crow-like, a collector of anything shiny. We stopped to pick up sea glass, we found rocks to skip. We saw sand dollars and ropy clumps of kelp. We wondered how a country could really become a country. How many people would have to agree? How big would it have to be?
We watched two dogs wrestling each other, identical except for the color of their eyes. We walked past a man yelling at harbor patrol, stomping his feet, shouting at the sky. We talked about what preys on the spiny lobster.
I stopped thinking about much for a long time as I kept my eyes on the sand. Green sea glass was the same color as torn kelp blades, white sea glass looked like shells. Clear plastic that I wanted to pick up looked like dried-out Velella, which I didn’t.
And then after we’d turned back—we covered a mile in about an hour—it came to me. Isn’t this beach? It’s doing nothing, but also doing everything. Looking, seeing, seeking, finding, wondering. I wasn’t so worried about Ken anymore.
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First photo by Flickr user NoIdentity under Creative Commons license
I love that you went to see Barbie with a neighbor! It is good to have all kinds of people for all kinds of activities.
A few months ago, a new friend said if I wanted to see “Cocaine Bear,” he’d see it with me. But, I definitely didn’t want to go anywhere near “Cocaine Bear” even if this new friend said it looked “awesome.”
I always appreciate your musical references, Cameron. Lately, I’ve been turning to Gershon Kingsley’s “Popcorn.”* I first heard it in fifth grade during music class. Every week the music teacher wheeled a cart into our classroom with a SONY boombox and a bunch of CDs. We requested “Popcorn” often. It was the one song we didn’t have to sing! But we liked singing, so it wasn’t that. I feel like we just smiled and maybe bopped a little in our seats, enjoying its groove, totally in awe of the idea that music could be like this–instrumental and unexpected even without voices. There is all that build up towards a melody that delivers…what? The sublime? That music teacher shared with us the satisfaction of listening to an artist at play, moving faster, inviting in additional instruments, & just seeing what happens.
I recently introduced “Popcorn” to my five-year-old, and he watches this video** rapt by that sound, that motion. My eight-year-old doesn’t feel strongly either way about “Popcorn.” He prefers another fifth grade favorite, “The Fifty Nifty United States,” the kind of song that requires you to memorize the full list of states in alphabetical order. To learn the song, he asked me to sing it over and over again as he wrote everything down. He also wanted me to spell the names of all the states he couldn’t spell. Once I was half asleep and still responding to his prompts to spell Mississippi and Nebraska. When I looked at his list the next day, I saw how poorly I’d spelled when prompted in a state of half-alertness.
Maybe we also have different kinds of kids for different activities, too. Mine each bring out something new in me, something I’ve long forgotten, something I imagined was no longer there.
*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUndWIcuk7Q
**https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDEXvvGeebE&list=RDMM