Pink Bats and Army Men: On Toys, Girlhood and the Making of a Writer

She spins. That's it. Just spins.

   I’ve been taking in all the gender conversations lately. Identity. Names. Toys. Dress. These are important conversations with much-deserved pleas for acceptance of individuality and nonconformity. I never once questioned my own gender identity or my sexuality, yet I often think back to my own childhood and wonder. I was a tomboy, more comfortable in grass-stained jeans and Pro Keds, but I was a girl and have never imagined being anything else. Yet I never owned anything, well, pink. I hated girls’ toys. Barbie? Please. I got a Dawn doll fashion show once for Christmas (god knows why; I had asked Santa for a football helmet.) Eager to please, I pushed the little pegs on the base of the runway into holes in the dolls’ high-heeled feet and sent them twirling around once or twice. And…nothing. I didn’t get it. At all. 

I spent most days pitching baseballs, or in heated Wiffle or kickball games with my group of adventurous mixed gender friends. I had a jump rope. I guess that’s girly, but it’s also almost sports. I desperately wanted to try that double-Dutch thing I saw on TV, but we always had trouble scraping up two long ropes at the same time. Hopscotch was cool only in that you got to draw on the sidewalk with a rock. And I occasionally colored with crayons, but my art never seemed to match the image in my head. Jacks came with a nifty pouch, a bouncy little ball and a moderate challenge. I’m pretty sure my middle aged foot problems are traced to stepping on a diabolically shaped jack or two, but once you conquered foursies with pre-adolescent hands, it all felt kind of same-y.  

I remember being invited to a new neighbor’s house to play when I was quite small. She had olive skin, a mysteriously ethnic name and accent, a plastic kitchen set and baby dolls. As it was the only option, we played house. I vacuumed and was mildly, briefly, intrigued with the colored balls popping around in the Fisher-Price canister. We made tea and took turns feeding the kid. I remember being bummed that the baby doll didn’t pee. Or do anything. Quite honestly, neither did my new friend. So, bored stiff, I went home, grabbed my F Troop replica cavalry hat, cap pistol and holster and jumped onto my rocking horse and played all day as Sgt. O’Rourke. There were schemes to plan, guard towers to fell with comically errant cannon balls, and politically incorrect skirmishes to have with invading wild Indians. I suppose I could have been Wrangler Jane, but though she dressed like a tomboy, all she did was moon over clumsy Ken Berry. (I didn’t get that either. I mean Forrest Tucker’s O’Rourke was tall, ruggedly handsome, brave, clever and could safely dismount his horse without need for a medic.) 

Anyway, so playing house was out. What else did girls do? I honestly have no idea. Music maybe? I listened to records if I could find that weird little yellow plastic thing that went in the middle of 45s, but even my choice of music was a head-scratcher. Growing up, I wondered why I was drawn to the only NYC country station. I memorized the songs of John Denver and James Taylor while my friends were fighting over rock vs. disco. And why was I so enamored with old movie musicals? Not one friend was as excited to see My Fair Lady on TV as I was. I was different, that was for sure. My sitcom preferences never included the mellow blended family antics of The Brady Bunch and I never once mooned over Teen Beat pinup David Cassidy on The Partridge Family. I owned exactly one Teen Beat magazine, but only because it had an article on Kevin Tighe, the other fireman on Emergency. (I had an underdog thing.) My TV passions ran more toward the impossible love affair of The Ghost & Mrs. Muir and wartime adventures of Hogan’s Heroes or McHale’s Navy.

My friends and I would raid my director dad’s theatre costume trunks and play pretend scenarios of all kinds, and few, if any, of us girls selected female characters. Why? What was my problem? One pal later realized she was in fact gay, but were we all ‘questioning’? No. The simple fact was that in the early 1970s most female characters on TV and traditional girl toys and games were too passive. Worse, they were boring as hell. 

Traditionally male sports, on the other hand, are are full of stories. Wins. Losses. Heartbreak and heroics. I loved that. I won countless World Series games with my golden arm and Rico Carty wooden bat. I gave lengthy head starts and chased down slow-footed Bobby Holmes from behind in the nick of time to save touchdowns, occasionally tugging desperately at the fur-trimmed hood of his green parka so that the front zipper left a jagged imprint on his neck. 

One friend had a couple of toy soldiers with parachutes that we spent hours throwing out the kitchen window of my grandmother’s upstairs apartment. Would the chute open? Would the soldier waft slowly and safely down to the yard, or crash in a heap of plastic and string? Life or death. I liked that. 

Who would choose a pink dream car
over THIS? This guy has
 places to go & things to do.

Sure, Barbie had a Dream House and a sports car, but she and Ken never got up to anything more interesting than driving around in tennis togs or taking a plastic elevator. GI Joe (before he shrunk to pocket size, thank you) had a mission. Tools. Enemies. Obstacles. In short, he had a storyline! I guess that was it all along. I needed a story.

I liked shows with a good inherent conflict, one not easily solved by having Davy Jones come to your high school prom. Heroic bands of Allied soldiers giving the Axis the what for. Loved that. And I loved that both Hogan and McHale had friends on the enemy sides. Conflict and complications, proving there are victims of evildoers on both sides. Hours of pretend scenarios abound, and with the added plus of an occasional morality play.  Same with those little green army men that made a comeback after being featured in Toy Story. There were trenches to dig, battles to fight, sneak attacks to plan, gruesome injuries to imagine and journeys to take along the dirt paths I made under a tree in the yard. I didn’t even care that none of the inflexible little men were posed to actually sit in the way-cool open jeeps. We made it work.The crouching radio guy could pass for sitting and drive. (Though he certainly flaunted opposition to the whole hands-free driving thing.)

I had a hundred Matchbox cars and a room of model trains. They went places. Those cars drove miles on the cement lanes surrounding our sidewalk flagstones. They occasionally crashed. Trains derailed. Barbie never derailed. Never got dirty. She had outfits, but she never had adventures. Maybe if there was a Coal Miner Barbie and I could imagine a daring cave-in rescue…but there wasn’t. 

I guess my female role model was my dear Mrs. Muir. She wasn’t just in love with a charming ghost, she was strong, smart, independent and she was a writer. My first pangs of wanting to write came from watching her. She had Martha to help bake cookies and tend the kids. Mrs. Muir was busy. She interviewed people, and wrote fiction and nonfiction. She stirred things up, but always made time to flirt with the spirit of a handsome sea captain. It seemed like the coolest life ever. 

Best toy ever

When I wasn’t playing sports or watching television, I built stuff. Plastic kit models of anything they had at the little store up the street; warplanes, battleships and Star Trek’s Enterprise and the Galileo shuttlecraft. I had a stash of balsa wood and model paint. I got sick on that orange-scented safety model glue that never seemed to dry—or hold anything together. I needed the good stuff. Real Duco Rubber Cement. I even built and painted a model of Spock fighting a three headed creature that I’m pretty sure wasn’t even in the show. (That model inexplicably ended up on a doily in Grandma’s bathroom where it sat for years beside the crocheted extra toilet paper roll cover. Grandma had eclectic tastes.) I never owned a Lego or Erector set, but I had a way-cool Girder and Panel Building Set and made skyscrapers and cityscapes that my King Kong action figure would terrorize. Stories. Like Carolyn Muir, I made stories. And I cared not whether there was a girl on the box. (There wasn't.)

God bless my parents for letting me explore the world my own way. With a beautiful cheerleader older sister and an artistic gay older brother, I was the rough and tumble wild card. We were as different from each other as you can get, but we were all allowed to be what we were. Dawn Fashion Show oddity aside, they never pushed toys on me, nor forbade me from others. (Though my dear grandmother did occasionally voice concern that if I continued to play sports I would never have children. I think she hung on until age 97 just to make sure I could actually reproduce. Nailed it. Twice.) 

The problem with Barbie isn’t her impossible to achieve body dimensions or that she’s in the pink aisle. (Though they don’t exactly help her cause.) It’s that her multitude of gender-bending professional outfits are just clothes; they still don’t inspire action. We need a personality, a backstory and a mission. It's fine if you are, but not all girls who play sports or with Lego building sets or Marvel action figures are questioning gender roles or identity. Maybe they are forming values, leadership skills or simply having imaginative fun. 

Wiffle ball, 1973

You don’t need to buy your daughter a pink softball bat just to make sure she knows she’s a girl. That won’t help anyway if she’s really feeling something else, just as I’m sure giving a boy a Tonka truck doesn’t necessarily guarantee you a future teamster. Also, I am fairly certain pink bats send the wrong message. Sport success is not pink or blue. It’s the color of sweat and mud and sometimes even blood and tears and broken bones. Children of both genders need permission to play hard and win at any activity they choose. Pink bats aren’t for the player. They’re for insecure parents who want to send a reassuring gender-conforming hug to a society that wants the world to color within the lines. I am all for equal rights and equal pay and equal everything. I still think I look like Fred Flintstone whenever I wear a dress. But I do also like a door opened for me once in a while. I'm complicated. I am also the most apolitical person I have ever met, ascribing to my dad's political philosophy of 'A pox on all their houses.' But I know that whether a child is a sports-crazy girl or a boy ballet dancer or someone who is figuring out where they fit in the world, we’d do best to trust them and let their stories develop naturally. I know that's much more important in the long run than worrying about what we call our bathrooms. I'm proud that my own sons are both athletic and creative.

Same swing, college 1983

I played with boys and girls. I pretended, climbed, fell, got up, learned how to win and how to lose. I problem solved. I knew and befriended straight people and gay people as long as they were cool with me. I created worlds to escape to when my real world frightened me or didn’t make sense, which was often. And though I got ignored or labelled because my interests or my hair or my clothes didn’t always fit other people’s expectations, I didn’t turn gay because, you know, that’s not how it works. Instead I developed a sense of humor and a hard shell to protect myself, but I never stopped being me. And I parlayed that young baseball obsession into a full college scholarship, and I met my wonderful future husband through softball, even though I never once had a pink glove or wore a ribbon in my hair. My being an athlete didn’t scare him then any more than my out-driving him on a golf course does now. It’s just part of our story, though I’m sure he’d want me to mention he has the better short game. 

Oh and the weird taste in music thing? I took a long time to figure it out, but I did. It's not the good ole boy wisdom, pickup trucks, bar fights, fishing, cheating, mommas or getting drunk that connect with me. (Trains are excepted, they do connect. In a big way.) It's that country music uses these topics to tell stories. Musical soundtracks are filled with stories told through song. 

It all makes sense now. I was not weird or challenging society’s gender roles. I was simply training to become the adult me. My sense of self didn’t really come from TV or magazines aimed at teen girls, or from fitting or not fitting into the clothing at the hottest new store. It didn’t even come from my friends, because I was more of a leader than follower. I didn’t need Barbie to tell me I could be a nurse or an astronaut. With a balance of solid parental guidance and the freedom to develop, I figured it all out. By creating, pretending, and manipulating controlled fictional situations and characters, I learned how to be in charge of my own mind, body and values. I learned what I thought about right and wrong, good guys and bad guys, life and death and fair play. I put myself into the bodies, hearts and minds of others, both fictional and real, and felt what they felt. I learned empathy. And I learned what I was interested in. I found the types of characters and stories I would be drawn to throughout my life as a consumer of literary, cinematic, musical and theatrical arts. 

And I learned to be a writer. I’m proud to say that unlike my crayon drawings, my stories do match the images in my head. So thank you to my parents, to Mrs. Muir, the Mets and Colonel Hogan, to the crew of Star Trek and the zipper-bruised neck of Bobby Holmes. Thank you to my husband for loving all of me. And thank you to whomever and whatever inspires the stories of the next generation.

Still climbing mountains

Writers work out personal issues on the keyboard. I have written a successful play called Tomboys, and four others that each challenge some of society's important questions and expectations. I teach my sixth graders a unit on Fa Mulan, Babe Didrikson and Avi's incredible book The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle. These are strong women who shopped outside the pink aisle of life to be true to themselves. Maybe I teach them for validation. I like to think I do it because I want students of both genders not to worry about where their interests take them or who they offend. The rest of life is like water, you can hold it back but it takes care of itself and eventually ends up where it belongs, whether people like it or not. 

Do your thing. Be brave. Go out and play. Your story is waiting.