The
Plastic Princess - By Juan Albuerne 
I always paid attention to that thin doll that was all legs and long
hair, with her daring non-doll look, her irruption on the children’s market
as if she was a poisoned dart. Cause... could you see before a doll
with breast, such slim waist, dizzy legs and high heel shoes? Never.
Till she came, with her proper name turned into diminutive and prepared
to eat the world. And she ate, really. Suddenly, one day we realized
that just a few girls never had one, and fewer mothers that didn't envy,
in a rather dark way, even though soundless, her top-model shape –at a
time when they didn’t exist yet. The non-children adjusted
to watch the phenomenon from outside, free from a magnetic power that had
devoured the yes-girls. That doll had won her place in the modern world.
Now, much later than I first saw her, I spot her new and very beautiful
in her 40th anniversary. There is a new whiteness in her skin; wisdom in
the modelling of that face without life; mastery in the design of a wardrobe
that has nothing to do with those old swimsuits of the older years. Forty
years among us without loose any popularity. What a whole achievement,
if we think about it! The words “collector” and “Limited” on the boxes
attract my attention. Is there an official collectionism? On the Internet,
I find that there are thousands of them at the disposal of the best bidders,
her new slaves, her American, European, African, Asian servers; all the
orb is in the air. The world’s best designers are in her service,
hooked up, like me, of that doll shameless in her beauty and elegant till
the insult. How can she hold up that look in a world where the ugliness
and misery are surrounding all? Or it will be the reason that we adore
her for, a new heroine with a popularity difficult to match? The more calculating
don’t get them from their boxes. They resell them inmediatly, or wait that
time adds more value to that cheap thing. Perhaps some day
they become rich. Perhaps they are just hoarding up a great legacy on the
closet that they will lock in order that their children, the same that
someday played with them, can’t ruin now with their strawberry candy greasy
fingers. Now she’s not a toy anymore. Now she is an venerated
thing, a plastic goddess –vinyl, actually- who run throught you with
her innocent look of imposed virginity. All around her, authenticity certifies,
artist and stylist’s signatures, statistics, mass media that run to inform
about news the same way that they’d do with an earthquake, exorbitant prices,
web pages, chats, magazines, books by brainy economists about revaluations.
She is a bomb. The most collectible thing after the stamps.
A worship thing. At bottom, she is beyond these economic interests.
She smile (always smiles) and waits. She is like a quiet lover that submits
without tell any word, though when you watch her it looks as she was going
to do it. She is not a mud idol. She is plastic – O.K., vinyl-.
A Plastic Goddess. The new and surprising Millennium Plastic Goddess
–this millennium and, I guess, the next too-. What more can
you ask for a simple doll? Maybe that she become real?
Juan Albuerne
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