Donny and Marie Osmond Barbie

Published in Fast Forward: The Mix Tape

My Donny and Marie Osmond Barbie dolls came with matching purple outfits—Donny had purple socks that slipped into white shoes, and both Donny and Marie had holes drilled through their left hands for their matching microphones that I promptly lost. Their brunette heads were fastened onto typical Barbie bodies, Marie’s 38—22—26, feet permanently arched for high-heels, Donny’s nondescript bulge.

There was only one game I played with Donny and Marie Osmond Barbie, who were no longer brother and sister. It went like this: Donny wakes one morning ready for another exciting day in plastic world. After a refreshing plastic breakfast, he decides to go to the mall. In the atrium of the mall an event is happening, a large, raised platform with a line of beautiful women, including Marie. It’s a Wife Auction—the fast-talking announcer is rattling off his prizes to the highest bidder.

Now Donny really isn’t in the market for a wife on this beautiful Saturday in plastic world, but he’s never seen anyone as beautiful as Marie in his whole life. As one woman after another is bid on and married away to the mall-visiting man of her dreams, Donny can’t stop looking at his Marie. He approaches the stage, starry-eyed. He bids. He wins.

Marie is shy, demure behind that perpetual toothy smile. Like any bride wife who has just been sold from a platform in the middle of a shopping mall, she is nervous. She approaches the edge of the stage as if she is entering civilization for the first time. She shyly accepts Donny’s hand and steps from the platform, scared like a little bird. The few onlookers applaud the new married couple.

Donny, now manly and confident, leads his new wife away from the auctioning block, away from the platform and the mall to his shoebox Ferrari. A short drive across the carpet later the newlyweds arrive home. Marie is again overwhelmed, as she’s apparently never seen a house before, and Donny shows her the two plastic fold-up walls ending at the bedroom, which, ironically, is the only room in this cheap, non-Barbie brand plastic house. In the fold-out plastic bed they kiss, him the sweet but firm aggressor, her compliant, and then finally they are naked, her plastic legs swiveled out, his nondescript bulge pushing between.

The plot never went any further. By then the game had reached its shaky conclusion, the sky was darkening and my mother was calling me to dinner.