Coming right up: Ginny and Ginnette fan fiction

I gotta tell you, Twitter can be an absolute revelation.

Most of what comes across my feed is from the folks I follow, which admittedly means a lot of echo-chamber liberalish stuff - I mean, why give Sean Hannity a legitimate follower? - and some sports news and some cultural news and some other stuff. Including some ads in Spanish. (Porque, solo porque???) Plus a lot of cute doggo tweets, which serve as a reminder that dogs make some of the best people. And I also see whatever it is that Jack Dorsey's algorithms shoot my way,

However it came my way, this was a delightful tweet that popped up in my feed on Monday:

hayley (@hayleyghoover) tweeted at 1:26 PM on Sun, Dec 29, 2019: There’s a whole community on Instagram of adults who create elaborate storylines for their Barbie dolls and I’ve been following one for years and on Christmas Eve the Ken doll got murdered. (Link)

I've heard of fan fiction, in which folks use fictional characters in books they like (or movies, or TV shows) and make up their own storylines. Which I guess means that I could write a happier story for Hester Prynne - single mom! celebrity seamstress! - or insert myself as a character in Mad Men. Or something. 

But storylines for Barbie? Presumably - since we're talking Insta here - with tableaus set out in which Barbie gets to show off her wardrobe, car and dream house. And Ken. Until Ken gets offed.

Oddly enough, I had a friend in business school who is an artist - why he took the sidetrip to business school is another story - who does a lot of work with toys and small objects. Somewhere around here, I have a b&w print he gave me of one of his works: a white Barbie doll being beaten by a black GI Joe. Given the unsavory content, I've never actually hung this up. But, hey, I knew it was art when I saw it. And if I've got my googling right, it just might be the most valuable artwork I own. By an order of magnitude. 

But back to Insta Barbie and her dead doll of a husband. 

When you google "instagram barbie kills ken" - and in the tweeted out story, it's not Barbie killing her Ken - you get nearly 6 million hits. ("ken doll murdered" yields a piddling 1 million and a bit of change hits). Whatever it is, there's apparently a lot of it going on out there.

Anyway, I'm not on Instagram. Or Pinterest. I'm not a photographer. I don't have any interest in either Barbie or Ken. Especially not in Ken. At least Barbie got to be an astronaut and an obstetrician and a professor. With a cool house and a cool car. Ken's just a bland and wooden (plastic, actually) dullard. 

But there may be some Boomers out there who wouldn't mind reading about (rather than looking at pictures of) the adventures of Tiny Tears. Tiny as an infant. Tiny all grown up. (Did she/it become - gulp! - me???) 

How about Ginny and Ginnette, and their big sis Jill (a wholesome, non-buxsom, pre-Barbie)? I had a Ginny and a Ginnette, but Nettie was my preferred dolly. (Probably because I wrecked Ginny's hair trying to comb the curls out, and my mother replaced her brunette flip with blond braids that I was less able to destroy. But then she no longer looked like a Ginny doll.) Why here's Nettie now, and this could even be my Nettie, as this snowsuit outfit was one that I owned. So it could be my Nettie. Except for the fact that, other than my stuffed dog Sniffy (now 66 years of age) and a double-runner skate salvaged from my mother's basement, my childhood detritus was long consigned to some landfill or other. And except for the additional fact that, in attempting to make Nettie's eyes even bluer, I colored them in - including the whites - unfortunately, with a magic marker. 

Perhaps my Ginnette fan fiction could be a horror story about those blue eyes. Hmmmm.

I may be onto something. Fan fiction revolving around dolls of the 1950's and early 1960's. Saucy Walker. Betsy Wetsy. Patty Playpal. Chatty Cathy. Maybe I could do a mashup with popular TV shows. Saucy Walker and Beaver Cleaver end up as hippies on a commune. Patty Playpal crashes the Triple-R dude ranch to become the only girl on Spin and Marty. Or I can insert these dolls into off-shoots of the books I loved. Chatty Cathy helps Nancy Drew solve another modest little crime.

Monetize the entire thing. Make the big bucks. Figure out how to add pictures to it, and sell stuff off of it, and become an influencer.

I'm on it!