Just Sit Right Back and You'll Hear a Tale...

...a tale of a fateful ship, that started from this tropic void aboard this tiny ship.

Well, not really. I don't have story about a fateful ship, but I do have another childhood narrative. This one's about mutilated Barbies.

Barbie Real Estate

As you can probably speculate, I wasn't much of a Barbie doll kid. In fact, I didn't even really encounter them until my stepsisters entered the picture, which was about age 7. I don't know what happened, but one of our favorite pastimes eventually became, basically, torturing the Barbies. Barbie and Friends were soon subjected to a myriad of rather sadistic practices. They were given magic marker tattoos all over their bodies, horrifying makeup and punk haircuts. We'd rip off Ken's head and put it on Barbie's leg and dress his headless body in a tutu and bustier.
This is all fairly commonplace. OK, so maybe ritualistically abusing your Barbies isn't fairly commonplace but - well, whatever, I know a lot of people who messed with their Barbie dolls. A girl on my lacrosse team once played catch with the flaming body of her neighbor's collector's edition Barbies. Anywho, what set our little rituals apart is that we had access to Chinese jump ropes. Chinese jump ropes are these giant rubber bands that you use to make designs with your feet - sort of like cat's cradle for your legs. Ours were all broken for various reasons (that's a story for another day), so what did we do? Yup. We sent our Barbies bungee jumping. From the rafters of our basement.
What a glorious sight! We'd pull the poor plastic soul in question, hung by the neck from its rubber band noose, as far as we could. Upon release, the Barbies rebounded crazily off the floor and ceiling. Sometimes their limbs, heads, and clothing would fall off. It was hilarious.
So, when I was about 10 my parents were trying to sell our house. My mom spent days cleaning and making the house look presentable for prospective buyers. She even organized the basement, which had aways looked post-Hiroshima. On a day they were expecting people to look at the house, my mom specifically told us not to go mess up the basement. So we went and messed up the basement, complete with a fantastic Barbie bungee-jumping spree.
The buyers entered the basement, content with the spotless, well-kept house they'd just considered. They were greeted by the most disgusting array of degenerate tatterdemalions ever assembled by 8 to 11-year-olds.
They did not buy the house, and we spent about a year and a half trying to sell it.