Mary Sanchez: Barbie’s Dreamland needs Ken after all

My talking Ken doll took a tumble.

He’d arrived at my childhood home safely enough, snuggly encased in a Mattel box. He also arrived with instructions about how not to yank too hard on the cord that controlled his speech at the back of his plastic neck.

Didn’t matter. And I don’t remember what phrases he’d been programmed to say.

Shortly after he joined my Barbie, Ken was unceremoniously decapitated and tossed down the basement steps through the rambunctious and sometimes violent play of a boy. That would be my older brother, the younger one of two boys in our