My Barbie Manifesto Continued

I made this fish last year, the glaze is called Floating Blue,

it is a very reliable cone 5 glaze and is one of my favorites.

I stopped "ruining my daughter's Barbie experience" and when my grandaughter walked in and saw the Barbie, her eyes lit up and she wanted one too. She asked me if I would buy her one too, so....I told her that of course I would buy her a Barbie. No sense being both a bad mother AND grandmother....

Off we went to Target to buy a Barbie, I wanted to get the same one and I did. I told my daughter that if it had the same messages inside that she should take them out and save them for me. This Barbie was going to be a Christmas gift.

When Christmas came and went I asked about the Movie Star Barbie and sure enough it had the same subliminal message on the little books found inside. She mailed them to me. Here I now had my proof and something to work with.......

My first call was to Mattel; I had a complaint. The customer service person on the other end was polite and told me I should talk to someone in a different department. I can't remember what department - product development or something. I spent a while on the phone getting nowhere at Mattel. I told them that they were putting inappropriate message inside of Barie packages and I wanted to know if this was a standard practice. ...huh?...

My next step was to go to Target. I went there and told them my story about the subliminal weight loss messages in the Barbie packages. The manager was quite kind but couldn't help me. I said I wanted someone to be aware that the Barbies they sold had weight loss messages in them and that it simply wasn't acceptable to give this message to little girls. She suggested that I contact corporate headquarters on the phone or by email.

THEN I went to Toys R Us. Now, I didn't buy the doll there but I knew they sold Barbies (see the madness beginning?). This is where the crazy-lady looks began also. I repeated the bad Barbie messages being sold in the boxes meant for little girls and on and on....

It was a cold and rainy day and I delivered my message to those 2 retailers that might or might not have cared.

Barbie Manifesto Begins

Well, it all started when my daughter said to me one day, "You know, I never had a Barbie".

It never occured to me that she had wanted a Barbie. I never had a Barbie and I never wanted one. I just didn't "get it" about Barbie dolls. So I said, "You never asked for one," and she told me she wanted one even if she didn't ask for one. My daughter at this time was a few years over 30 years old...

Before visiting again, which I would do a few months later I visited a large well-known store and purchased her a Movie Star Barbie. Just to get over the guilt of not ever giving her a Barbie...

So, a few months later (she is in another state) when we saw each other I presented her with the Barbie. Now she had her Barbie, she couldn't say that her mother never gave her one....

As she opened her gift and was looking at the things that came with Movie Star Barbie she saw a small booklet type of thing and with her sharp 30+ year old eyes she saw some very obscure writing hidden on the booklet cover. She read it to me, "Look, it says, 'I lost 20 lbs - so can you'." I didn't believe her so I put on my reading glasses and took it out into the bright sun and sure enough that is exactly what it said. I was not happy. I must have started to carry on about it because she told me that I was ruining her Barbie experience. (Great). We examined all of the other little things that came in the Movie Star Barbie and there was another small booklet that had another subliminal type of message which said something like: Lose 1-5 lbs in 10 days.

So, off I went on a strange and crazy ride for about 6 months. I have saved a lot of the correspondence surrounding all of this story that I call my Barbie Manifesto. I will try to tell the story as completely as possible.

What I am wondering about is if I can name names as I have in calling out "Barbie", do I dare to say store names, the names of people I contacted and what they said, and EEK, what about the makers of Barbie?

More to come.

I just like the photo at the top, it shows an angel carrying some fish...

The Barbie Manifesto

I am suddenly a blog expert since I have now posted twice.

What caught my attention about many blogs was the way people seem to have some kind of message they want to deliver to the world. Or maybe they just need to write it down to process it, I don't know. Gee, I don't have any great, huge convinctions that I must let the world know about, or do I? What happened was that I started thinking about my Barbie Manifesto that I started a while back and how it affected me while I made it, and what I learned from it....

The Barbie Manifesto Story is a long one, I need to decide how to tell it.

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I do make more than fish and this is just a small ceramic vessel I made one day. It has four sides and it has a square opening in the top, I didn't glaze the feet or the bottom. The glaze is very thin and matte.

More Fish at The Beach

Ok, this is the only other fish that I have taken to the beach. I am happy with the way that they look there though so it may become a habit. Nothing surprises the locals and tourists will have a story about a strange woman at the beach with ceramic fish I suppose.

A request has been made for "stripers" - not strippers; the stripers are striped bass that fishermen and women catch here at the beach. So eventually I hope to have a few to show here.

Life is good. More to come.

Fish 101

Hi,
Welcome to my new blog, if you are wondering what the fish are all about, well, I make these fish out of clay and I took these two to the beach to have their photos taken.

Each fish is rolled out of a slab of clay and I cut them out freehand which keeps each one unique. The red ones are low fired, some are raku fired and some are stoneware. I incise lines into many of them to represent scales and some of them have scales applied one at a time. I sell them at local art and craft fairs usually in the fall. The men always come to look and want to talk about fish, but the women are the buyers!!!
Thanks for looking and I will add more fish or other creations as time goes along.