A Partnership Like No Other

By Mary Reiman

Last week I officiated a wedding. Now those of you who know me are saying...what? You? I know you might be wondering what that lovely young couple was thinking. I was asking the same question. Of all the people they could have chosen...

FYI: I wanted to write about this for my most out-of-the-box moment in May, but it had not yet happened, and I didn’t want to get ahead of myself...or jinx anything! 

Let me be clear, I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to completely describe how honored I was to be asked. At the same time, I won’t deny being terrified. Such a mixture of emotions!

When they invited me to dinner in March, I thought they might ask if I would cut the cake at their September wedding. Well, obviously, I did not know what they were thinking. Yes, I was stunned. And yes, I was nervous. And yes, after we wrote the script I practiced for many weeks. But practicing in front of the mirror is not the same as standing in front of a family that you love and admire, wanting to make sure you don’t trip walking up the aisle before the ceremony begins, or lose your voice...or faint! Yes, all those scenarios crossed my mind between March and September!

Welcome Family and Friends. 

Thank you for being with us today. On this day of joy!

It is love that brings us here today.

That’s how it began. The first words of the ceremony.

What was most important for me was that each and every word of their ceremony be what they wanted it to be, determining what was most important to them, and to their hearts. Not that the exquisite flowers or the beautiful setting or the stunning dress or the lovely decorations were not important. But for me, it was about the words spoken. That was the role I hoped to fulfill. Speaking the love.

Creating the ceremony involved writing the script, finding the perfect words to describe the love I saw, heard and felt when talking with them. Contemplating the perfect words needed to describe this beautiful relationship to all in attendance. 

I watched them interact in March. They were blissfully happy. Listening to the early discussions, thinking about everything that needed to be done, moving through summer and into fall. There were more conversations than they might have wanted with me. And they were still blissfully happy. 

And then suddenly it was September and I was standing within inches of them as they made these vows.

I ask you to be no one other than yourself.

Loving what I know of you and trusting what I do not yet know,

I will respect your integrity and have faith in your abiding love for me,

Through all our years and in all that life may bring us.

Yes, it all came together. They were beaming, as they did when they sat across from me in March, enjoying every moment of their wedding. The feeling in the air, not simply because the air quality was better, or because it was a lovely outside venue on a gorgeous September evening, but truly, because of the love in the air. Love. Joy. As simple as that.

I also had the vantage point of watching the faces and listening to the wonderfulness of their friends attending the wedding. They and their friends inspire great hope for our future. They are all smart and funny and excited about where they will land in the world as they leave college and begin their professional careers. They are looking forward. They will make our world better. Most importantly, they exude the great value of strong friendships.  

I have not talked to them since the wedding. They have flown off into the sunset. As it should be. But my hope is that the ceremony was everything they had hoped it would be, and more. And that their life will indeed be filled with the love and joyfulness and laughter that was shared by all at their wedding. 

I don’t know why they picked me. But I will be forever grateful.

Thank you, my fine young friends, for allowing me to be part of your life’s journey. It was indeed an honor to witness the beginning of your partnership.

A partnership like no other. Where the best part of each day is your time together.

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Fighting for dreams

By JoAnne Young

“Hope lives in the shadow of this state’s Capitol,” I wrote in a Journal Star article six years ago. “It resides in the blocks that surround the Capitol square and stretches into Lincoln’s more irregular neighborhoods.” 

I wrote about the people who lived in that shadow, a seventh-grader who attended a parochial school across the street, a school that has since closed. I wrote about a young community activist living in an apartment in that shadow, with no car and no bike, who walked every work day to her job as a paraeducator at a Lincoln school. A family living paycheck to paycheck, who stood in a line each month at a Lincoln church to get food. 

 

In that shadow, those and many others who lived and worked and went to school there had hope. Their hope was for jobs and housing assistance, for prison reform and health care that fit their needs. For the rights and freedom and choices to live their lives without the dictate of politics. 

 

Now I see, when I visit our imposing Capitol, the shadows have moved inside. I apologize to our founders, but I roll my eyes each time I pass under the words: Political society exists for the sake of noble living.

 

I have always loved our Capitol, the carved marble and tile, the words etched in the stone, the principles it was built on, the hope it could offer. I had an office there for 14 years. I’ve sat in the Rotunda many nights after closing … 8 o’clock, 9 or 10 … when it was quiet and dimly lit and smelling of the soap used to buff the floors. There, I could marvel at its creation, its beauty and meaning, and how lucky I was to be there. 

 

Now, I see it more often in darkness. An absence has settled in, of love and openness for all the people who have a right to claim it. Hope has been covered over by political agenda. 

 

In that darkness, though, are fragments of light. Sometimes it falls on the messages we shouldn’t miss. The darkened library light perched beside our law books. Virtues of hope, courage, wisdom, justice, joining hands at the top of the dome, where fourth graders are told to look and learn. The life-giving winged figure casting seeds and flowers across the landscape despite the shadows closing in. 

 

The writing above the bench in the locked Supreme Court, seen through the glass dimly: “Eyes and ears are poor witnesses when the soul is barbarous." 

The Greek philosopher who is quoted there is the same who is credited with the idea that the only thing constant in life is change. We can't go backward or stand still. 

 

This is a condolence message, as it were, for all those who have been wronged by events and decisions in this arrestingly consequential building, those who have been shoved into its shadows. 

 

It is also a get-well-soon wish, that the light we see when the curtains are pulled back can heal it. We are not children, but on their behalf, we have become tethered to this state’s survival. My children were born here. Two of my grandchildren were. They have all left now. I want them to have something good to remember besides a state that turned its back on so many.

 

We can’t stay huddled in the darkness where selected officials believe they represent us. Represent me. In a place where, for me, trust is being peeled away session by session, election by election.  

 

“No matter how fast light travels,” says writer Terry Patchett, “it finds the darkness has always gotten there first and is waiting for it.”

 

Dreaming, says writer Jean Genet, is nursed in darkness. But then those dreams have to find the light, or else they fade. We can’t remember them. In the light we can remember the people who have rallied on our Capitol steps, who have fought for their dreams in hearing rooms. Who have reasoned and sometimes shouted their needs in the Rotunda, begging, “please don’t make us leave.”

 

In the light of this building, people have acted out their fears and watched as others acted out their power. 

 

“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness,” wrote poet Mary Oliver. 

 

It took her years to understand that it would turn out to be a gift. 

 

Darkness can be debilitating, such that action seems pointless, someone once explained. Pointless but enormously necessary at the same time. The opportunity for hope exists in turmoil. 

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A Hum in the Universe

 

By Marilyn Moore

It’s there…a hum in the universe.  Hummmmm, ambient noise, part of what some astrophysicists call a cosmic symphony, evidence that the universe is not static, but rocking and rolling, changing, expanding, shifting shapes….and singing.   A low-pitched hum, way lower than humans can detect, but “heard” by gigantic telescopes, measuring emissions from hundreds of thousands of pulsars.  Telescopes in every continent of the planet, except for Antarctica.  Planetary agreement among the astrophysicists that indeed the universe is humming.  

The source of the universe’s hum?  Most likely it’s from gravitational waves, coming from the spiraling and merging of pairs of black holes throughout the galaxies.  Perhaps the black holes are dancing?  I like the image of dancing, great big, huge black holes, dancing in space, a dance that makes music….it reminds me of the Northern Lights, that danced the night away…I wonder if they were making music…

Last summer the James Webb telescope let us see the universe in ways never seen before—we could see the birth of stars, billions of years ago.  Again, they were dancing….and exploding with life and light and energy and, dare I say, joy.  This summer, we learn that the universe is humming…another cause for wonder, at a time that I need a little wonder in my life.

I think, though, that while the astrophysicists are just now able to quantify, and verify, the humming of gravitational waves, there are those who live amongst us that have somehow always been aware of the universe’s hum.  They most likely did not “hear” it, at least in the sense that we think about hearing a spoken word, a trumpet’s note, a child’s laughter, but they have sensed that hum, a deep-within-the-soul visceral connection to the universe.  Across continents and across cultures, indigenous peoples drummed, and still do, to an internal beat, to a deeply felt vibration, that connected them to one another and to the earth.  I sense that harmony in the words of Black Elk, in the drums of the Masai and the Ponca.  Perhaps that is what those we describe as “old souls” are sensing, are feeling as the source of wisdom and groundedness.

And the critters….what about the critters?  If you’ve been on the prairie on a summer day, or in your own back yard at close of day in late summer, you hear the buzz of bees and the song of the cicadas.  I don’t think they hear the hum of the universe any more than people do, but perhaps they sense the vibration, and they join the chorus.  Or a flock of birds, on the ground, who seemingly without warning and without signal, all rise in flight together.  Are they responding to the universe’s vibration?  What about migratory animals, the zebra, the wildebeest, the Sandhill cranes, the Monarch butterflies…do they move with some thousands-of-years-old pull, in concert with gravitational waves from black holes?  

And finally, what about us?  People, that is.  If there are gravitational waves that create an ambient hum throughout the universe, is that hum embedded in us, too?  In our cells?  In our DNA?  Do our cells hum at a level that can’t be heard, but can be felt?  Do we give off energy, that either repels, or attracts, those we meet?  Is my sense (sometimes) of being “at one with the universe” a function of my cellular hum being the same, or in harmony with, that of the universe?  And when I’m out of sorts, has my cellular hum jumped pitches?  Can I fix that, because I always like to think that I can fix anything?  Or do I have to just stop, and let myself be drawn back into the universe’s hum?  

I think about that hum, and I wonder what the note is.  If the astrophysicists have written about that, I haven’t read it.  I think they’re focusing on other questions…but I wonder what note it is.  In my mind’s ear, I’m hearing a C, many octaves below Middle C, much lower than the C the 32ft. pipe on a pipe organ can produce.  But I hear a C.  I hear it in a classical music context, because that’s what I think of.  Others may hear it in jazz, in ballad, in rap, in a march, in a lullaby, in a folk song, in any of music’s many forms.  But throughout all, it’s the universe’s hum….a single tone, wrapping all of us together.  Imagine, we're bound together by the gravitational waves, emanating from colliding and merging black holes throughout the universe....in a summer when much seems to divide us, I'm glad to know there's a hum that holds us together.

And like the images from the James Webb telescope last summer of the exploding births of stars and galaxies, the discovery of the universe’s hum this summer is one that I can’t quite wrap my mind around…it’s bigger and more complex than my brain can understand.  But my soul gets it….and I am grounded in the hum.

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A summer of collywobbles

By Mary Kay Roth

I’ve been thinking lately about extra virgin olive oil.  I mean, is it really better than plain virgin olive oil?  Is there such a thing as an … extra virgin? 

And, as long as I’m wondering … 

Why does Lincoln suddenly need so many carwashes – are all our vehicles suddenly dirtier?  Is there someone with a notion of how algorithms really work?  Why doesn’t anyone under 30 ever listen to voicemail messages?  And is the sun truly the culprit in erasing Neptune’s ghostly clouds – something astronomers recently determined – when the main suspect is 2.8 billion miles away? 

Although these may sound like crazy ramblings, I believe the squirrels and bees would understand.  Every year, sometime around late August, or early September, they become completely unglued and amped up. Apparently, I do as well, my soul wigged out in a sudsy brew of unease and muddle.

Of course, as summers go, this has been stranger than most: Presidential indictments, Ukraine’s battles sadly raging on, wildfires lighting up the certainty of climate change. 

In the past few months, flesh-eating bacteria have killed people at the beach. Amateur detectives planned to convene in Scotland in serious search of the Loch Ness monster. People who testified at an official Congressional hearing on little green men – talked of recovered alien bodies and crashed extraterrestrial spaceships. And true scientists discovered a cosmic symphony of gravitational waves, reverberating through the universe, as millions of supermassive blackholes – collide. 

This kind of thing keeps me up at night.  Can I hear those gravitational waves?  And, if not in Lincoln, where can I go to hear them?

Perhaps the heat has baked my brain, but recently I am indeed sweating the small stuff.  The world simply confounds. 

I mean, come on, how does anyone get Wordle on the first try? 

How come they call those wacky shoes, crocs, and not gators?

Anybody understand all the settings on your dishwasher, your remote control?

Who decided to change the recipe for Girl Scout cookies?

Oppenheimer or Barbie?

How does anyone keep track of where you can only use cash – and where you are limited to plastic?

And, good grief, after I’ve traveled south Lincoln for more than six decades, why did they decide to blend Highway 2 with some hellacious thing called Nebraska Parkway (where I now get hopelessly lost)?

I was watching a favorite detective show last week and one episode featured a hapless fellow who suffered from something called the collywobbles.

The minute I heard that bewitching word, I knew.  Bingo.  That’s what I have. “A feeling of fear, apprehension, nervousness.”

The collywobbles are all around us.

Why, just why.

Why bitcoins?

Why cotton candy grapes?

Hot yoga? 

Leaf blowers?

Fake pockets?

SpongeBob SquarePants? 

Justin Bieber?

Why, just why … 

Do my forks disappear faster than my spoons and knives?  Why have all my wine stoppers vanished? (Ok, the plumber did discover one, plugging up my sink). 

Why are there pharmaceutical ads for medications that don’t name what they cure? 

Why are people afraid of sweet honeybees, and not terrified of melting polar ice caps? 

And why do we really need coffins?  (Think about it…)

In fact, I can’t stop thinking about it.

Of late, I’ve wondered if some wicked wizard lurks behind a curtain, making random decisions that govern our lives. 

After all, who decides that those sweet, lovely violets – are weeds?

That liquid laundry detergent is superior to powder – that manual cars need to be discontinued – that ridiculously oversized boxes are chosen for Amazon deliveries – that painting over brick is a good thing?

And who decides we must declare bankruptcy to buy printer ink these days? 

Really, does anyone ever get fitted sheets – to fit? 

Why is a small cup of coffee no longer called “small?” And what is the purpose of super-sized beverages, especially when they won’t fit in your car’s beverage holder?

Historical fiction, why? Gotta be history or fiction, choose one.

How come the street I live on – Woods Avenue – is located between L and M streets?

In fact, I know there are actual answers to many of these questions.  But frankly you don’t need to share. I think I prefer to … let the mystery be.

For instance, is all gasoline secretly contained in the same tank underneath the ground (because when I see supply trucks at the service station, I swear I only see one hose)? 

Who conducted research that found people are taller in the morning than at night? 

Why do they make it impossible to pry open cottage cheese, juice boxes and every child’s toy? (There’s actually a term, called “wrap rage” for those desperate souls who turn to razor blades, boxcutters, egads, ice picks.)

And … aren’t the eyes on Black-eyed Susans – closer to brown?

Is there anyone left un-murdered in the tiny villages where TV murder mysteries take place (St. Mary Mead, Grantchester, Midsomer County, Brokenwood)?

And why on earth do 70 percent of my fellow citizens prefer toilet paper “over,” when clearly it is meant to go “under?”

Now, in truth, I’m a glass-is-half-full kind of gal.  So, it’s a fair question to ask: “Mary, is there anything in the world that doesn’t confound you?”  

Well, a daisy doesn’t confound me, a daisy is pretty darn perfect.

A rocking chair is perfect.

Fresh corn on the cob.

A baseball cap. 

Birdsong. Moonlight.

Redwoods as the snow falls.  The first blush of crocus in the spring.

Live music – outdoors – at night under the stars.

A book. A dog. A spider web. A grandchild.

Twilight.  Sunrise.

And autumn is perfect, a much more reasonable season.  

Autumn waits for us, patiently, gently tendering an uncomplicated time of year, a time of golden leaves, sweatshirts and heading for apples in Nebraska City … on Highway 2 … where I inevitably will get lost.

It's Because You Care...

by Mary Reiman

To those of you who won’t get enough sleep tonight....

It’s because you care. 

Some students are thrilled that tomorrow is the first day of school in Lincoln Public Schools. Some are not. A new school year brings about all kinds of feelings and emotions.

If you are a parent like my mom, the first day of school is the hardest day of the year. Mom always said she hated to watch us get on the school bus that first day. She liked having us home all summer...who knows why! 

For many, the first day of school also brings a photo moment. So many pictures posted on Facebook! Photos have been a great way to document fashion trends throughout the years. What was your favorite first day haircut/outfit? 

And school supplies! They are everywhere. In every store, in every aisle. Oh how I wished for a box of 64 crayons. What I would have given for magenta, cerulean, bittersweet and azure. It took every ounce of restraint yesterday at the grocery store to not buy a giant box of 120. Imagine all the color names in that box! 

Today, we celebrate students and teachers. We celebrate learning. 

Administrators, teachers and many staff play a role in designing a successful first day of school...with the plan to keep everything running smoothly EVERY day until the end of the school year.

There may be new textbooks that has never been opened. Maybe new laptops. Definitely clean whiteboards and shiny floors. Breakfast for some and lunch for many. Signage to welcome everyone.

And I would like to tell you that when students walk into their classrooms tomorrow, those spaces will have been magically organized to prepare for a room full of energy. However, do not for a moment think it was magical pixie dust that created those sparkling classrooms. 

Yes, it takes more time than you would think to get ready for the first day....

* Take out the old textbooks, unbox and check in the new...and then learn the new curriculum.

* Number laptops and organize with color coded cords for recharging each night, and learn any new technology that will be used this year.

* Arrange desks and tables with names and learning materials in place.

* Create new bulletin boards for the hallway as well as the classrooms.

* Attend meetings, workshops and staff development, to learn new policies and procedures.

Being a new teacher in a building adds another layer of what you need to learn by the first day.

Moving to a new classroom means more packing and un-packing. 

Those are just a few of the things that teachers and staff and administrators have been doing this summer. The list is long. 

To those I know most dearly, and to those I have not had the opportunity to meet, know how much I appreciate you. Thank you, thank you, thank you for being there. For showing up. For caring. For teaching. 

I wish you a 2023-2024 school year filled with engaged learners,
classrooms full of joyful minds, with enough laughter to complete each day with a happy heart.  

Sleep well tonight.  You are ready.

The Case Against Travel?

By JoAnne Young

We all are travelers of one kind or another. 

 

Not just we humans but also those migrating birds and mountain lions, sea turtles and whales, caribou and monarch butterflies.

 

One human named Agnes Callard, a 47-year-old with a PhD in philosophy, has riled some travelers with an essay titled The Case Against Travel, published in June in the New Yorker magazine. 

 

She quotes other writers, travel contrarians such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Socrates and G.K. Chesterton, who disparage travel as narrowing the mind, as having a dehumanizing effect, and worse, as being only for those with such poverty of the imagination that they have to move around to feel. 

 

She calls much of what travelers do, such as flying to Paris, going to the Louvre and standing 15 feet in front of the Mona Lisa for about 15 seconds, nothing more than "locomotion."

She argues that more than wanting to experience something new, travelers want to be seen experiencing something new. 

 

If I am interpreting her and the other writers she uses to prove her point correctly, she seems to be saying that travelers seek to be enlightened, to do some human bonding with those who they consider as the "others." Instead, they end up not bonding but relating to them only as spectators. 

 

They view them in the abstract. In reality, the human bond they are seeking is right there at home, in feeling the presence of those “others” nearby who they traveled so far to see. 

 

When your friends return from their summer adventures, she says, they may speak of their travel as being transformative, but will you be able to detect a difference in their behavior, their beliefs, their moral compass? Any difference at all? 

 

As much as we may want to beg to differ with Ms. Callard, her essay was thought provoking. Many of my family and friends are hardier travelers than I am, but I can count among my travels and visits and temporary living spaces a good number of locations both in this country and a few others. 

 

I am thinking about my own reasons for travel: To break out of the confines of everyday life; to explore the origins of our American culture and that of others; to experience new influences and get a view of how people become who they are. 

 

I have learned a lot about other states and their residents by spending a few hours at their Capitols, looking at the architecture of those buildings, the art they treasure, the words they display. When I can, I spend a few minutes talking to a senator, a reporter, a lobbyist or just a wanderer. Then I go to a nearby restaurant and sample its food and décor, and listen to what wait staff can tell me about life there. 

 

For me, the good that has come from travel are those standout moments I bring home in my head. They're implanted there as some bit of pleasure or peace or amusement, crafted by the feelings and experiences that have already made themselves at home. 

 

A few of those moments are these: 

 

* Kneeling in the water at low tide on Cannon Beach in Oregon on an overcast afternoon to glimpse the large pink and smaller orange sea stars clinging to the underside of large rocks with just one arm visible. It’s a sighting I had never seen before or since, and I got to share it with my daughter. 

 * Walking through Juneau, Alaska, and stopping to talk to a man with a ruddy face and a seafarer’s cap, his grandson on his shoulders. They had just sailed up the coast from California to this place that is only accessible by boat or sea plane because of the rugged terrain which surrounds it.

 

* Exploring the house of Emily Dickinson in Amherst, Massachusetts, peeking into a drawer in her bedroom where she stashed her poems, many of them rejected by publishers until after her death. Seeing where she wrote, where she walked, and setting a token on her gravestone in a nearby cemetery as many other devotees had done. 

 

* Sitting in Farrell’s Bar & Grill in Brooklyn with a brother-in-law who grew up in the area, and who told us stories about going into the bar as a child to fetch his grandfather because women were not allowed to darken its door at the time. And hearing fascinating tales of a firefighter who worked in Manhattan on Sept. 11, 2001, and was thought to have died until several days later he walked back into the bar to the cheers and tears of the regulars.  

 

* Walking the several blocks where George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer and his colleagues and which has now become a memorial to the black Americans who have been killed across our country by law enforcement officers whose job it is, rather, to protect and serve. 

 

We all have our memories and moments. Travel may be a status symbol for some, or a notch in a globetrotting belt, but for most of us it is memories of sights and sounds that we have long wanted to experience for ourselves. Those visits make our daydreams and thoughts come to life. 

 

Mostly I travel for inspiration. Different sights and scenery make my wheels turn counterclockwise and ideas just spring forth. I visit as many bookstores as I can to see what the local writers are publishing and what the booksellers can recommend as “must-sees” in town. 

 

One of my favorite quirky books was found in Minneapolis, a city with some of the best bookstores I’ve encountered. Things That Are by Amy Leach. I love this book. 

 

“‘We are Trappists like the creek,’ thought the raindrops as they filled the pond with fresh cloud water, or mixed with the juice of a fallen cherry, or came to rest deep in the dirt, and everywhere neglected to introduce themselves.’” 

 

So thank you to Agnes Callard for sending me on a thinking tour of my travels, and my reasons for doing so. I wish it were possible to hear about the travel adventures of sea turtles and mountain lions and butterflies. 

 

It’s not. So I will be content to hear about yours. 

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Barbie

 

By Marilyn Moore

I didn’t have a Barbie.  That’s not a statement of woe, just a statement of fact. I suspect it was all a matter of timing.  Barbie was first introduced to the world in 1959.  I was nine, almost ten, and probably past the doll stage by then.  I don’t remember my friends, or younger cousins, having Barbies…but I could have just been oblivious.  Or maybe it took a while for the hype, and the dolls, to reach rural Nebraska.  For any of those reasons, or perhaps others, Barbie was not a part of my childhood.  

So when the movie was released this summer, it was of no particular interest to me – another movie based on a toy, or an action figure, or a comic book character, and there have been lots of them.  Not on my list of movies to see, far more interested in “It Ain’t Over ’Til It’s Over” and “The Miracle Club.”  Until I saw that far-right male politicians were bashing the movie, and some churches were warning parents not to let their daughters see it.  And most importantly, the writer, Greta Gerwig, credited Mary Pipher’s groundbreaking book Reviving Ophelia about the developmental lives of American adolescent girls with grounding her thoughts about how to portray Barbie.  At that point, it became a must see.

And so I did, with a good friend, also my age, who also did not play with Barbies.  And a half-full theater of mostly women and girls, though there were a few guys, too.  And I’m really glad I saw it….and I came away thinking all over again about growing up female and living as a woman in the real world.  Because in this movie, the action takes place in both Barbie World and the real world, with Barbie (and Ken, as a stowaway) living in both.

I won’t try to summarize the movie.  If you’ve seen it, you know it.  And if you haven’t, my thoughts about it may make sense without the whole plot as context…or not, in which case you can just create a context.  One critic faulted the movie for not having a rational story line at times…come on, it’s a movie about a doll, a whole cast of dolls, living in a fantasy world…who would expect rational?

It's a story about a dreamworld that comes crashing up to the real world…and the real world isn’t all Barbie had thought it would be.  Even though Weird Barbie had tried to warn her that would happen….  And doesn’t that happen all the time?  Our minds and hearts take us to a dream world…and then we go out the front door into real world, and reality smacks us in the face.  And we try to make it better, over and over and over, and sometimes we do, and sometimes we can’t.  And in trying, we find strength and skills and determination we didn’t know we had, and that’s a good thing.

It's a story about boxes.  After finding, with relief, the Mattel headquarters in real world, Barbie crashes the executive board meeting, to let them know that the real world needs attention…dream world is not making real world better.  Rather than listening to her, the execs (all white males in black suits and white shirts) tell Barbie she needs to get back in the Barbie box and return to the dream world…if she just gets in the box, (and in your mind’s eye you can see them patting her shoulder and telling her not to worry her pretty little head about this), everything will be just fine.  She gets in the box…and then uses that wonderful ruse, need just a quick stop at the restroom, to run away, to be rescued by Ruth, and by Gloria, and by Sasha.  Never, never, ever get in a box not of your own choosing because someone tells you it will be better for you…and always look for women to help you.  

Barbie returns to dream world, with Gloria and Sasha, to discover that Ken has discovered patriarchy during his time on real world and has taken advantage of her absence to turn Barbie World into Ken World, populated with Kens and horses and beer…and subservient women.  In sheer frustration, Gloria, the real world mom of Sasha, the real world teenager, explodes with the soliloquy of the summer, “It is literally impossible to be a woman…..You have to never get old, never be rude, never show off, never be selfish, never fall down, never fail, never show fear,  never get out of line....I’m just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us…” (Find the whole soliloquy; it’s just spot on truth.  Like a dagger.  Or a laser.  Or a hot, hot flame. The most-quoted part of the movie, from women of all ages and stages of life.)    

This soliloquy, which the previously mentioned critic (male) labeled “boilerplate,” pulls Barbie back from despair over Ken World, and Barbie, Gloria, and Sasha de-program the Barbies away from servitude and back to knowing and claiming their own power.  Through a brilliant plot, the Kens are first distracted, then turn upon one another, and while they are fighting each other, preening their masculinity as it were, the women hold an election, affirm the Constitution, restore the previous President Barbie back to power, and confirm the Supreme Court filled with nine Justice Barbies.  While the Kens are fighting among themselves, the Barbies are going about the business of governing.  If that sounds like a metaphor for today’s political parties…. well, you wouldn’t be the first to think of it.

Near the end of the movie, Ruth, the wisdom figure, invites Barbie to walk with her, to think about who she is, and who she will be, and for what she is made.  Barbie has a choice, to stay in Barbie World, or return to the real world.  If you’ve seen the movie, you know the decision.  If you haven’t, I’ll not tell the ending.

Barbie is right, of course…the real world is not the dream world.  And for women, it’s especially not.  By many measures, especially economic ones, women are not on parity with men at all.  Women with similar education, similar jobs, similar experiences, earn less than men.  Women do way more of the caregiving, of both children and elderly parents.  Women’s lives and appearance and clothes are scrutinized far more than men’s, especially when they run for public office or seek highly visible jobs.  And the scrutiny of women’s health care…we don’t even need to go there.  Suffice it to say I’ve seen no proposed legislation regarding erectile dysfunction or vasectomies….  

But in one way, at least one way, women’s lives are better than men’s; we live longer.  And that is in part because of women’s friendships.  Recent research cites strong social connection as a leading factor, even more so than exercise, diet, and not smoking, in quality of life and length of life as we age.  And women know that.  We all have a village of Barbies, a Gloria and a Sasha, and a Ruth…. women who care about us, who hold us when we’re ill and who celebrate when good things happen, women, women who know and care about our stories, women who laugh and cry with us, women who walk with us when we’re facing life’s big questions.  And women who join together to get things done, to make things better.  For me, that’s the most powerful message of Barbie.

So why, I wonder, are the right-wing political characters and commentators so upset about Barbie?  Perhaps, just perhaps, because the Barbies are courageous and kind and smart, and because they persisted, and persevered, and prevailed. 

(A final word about pink…there’s lots of it.  Bubble gum pink, which I understand has been patented; it’s an exclusive Barbie shade.  I don’t know how it came to be that pink is associated with little girls, and all things female, but it is. It’s seen as frivolous, or silly, or weak.  I have memories of not wearing pink as a professional woman in the 1990’s.  And I always smiled when Rick Collura wore pink shirts as he coached the Lincoln Northeast Rockets to three state basketball championships – that pink was powerful.  If Barbies can reclaim the Constitution, and the presidency, and the Supreme Court, perhaps we can reclaim pink as a power color.)