A few days ago Ruth Handler, who created the Barbie doll, died at age 85. Barbie is a pretty interesting icon of our times, hated by just about all grown-up women who can’t even approximate her incredible bodily dimensions, which would come out to 39-18-33 if she was normal sized. And loved so much by little girls that they spend billions every year buying an incredible range of Barbie products.

I went to the official Barbie website and looked at the stuff that’s for sale right now, in 2002. You can get Barbie as a doctor or a dentist, a skater, an astronaut, a model, a gymnast, or a ballet dancer. There is Barbie as an NSYNC fan, or Gothic Barbie (Goth music, not the bodice-ripper novels). There is Palm Beach Barbie, Princess Barbie, "Magic Jewel Barbie" (whatever that is), birthday Barbie, and Malibu Barbie, with actual tan lines. There is NASCAR Barbie, in a stock racing car. You can get Barbie with brunette hair. There are black and brown dolls. I wasn’t clear if these were meant to be actual Barbie variants or some of her many friends.

Getting fascinated, I expanded my search to a few of the 230,000 hits I got when I typed BARBIE into the box. I found a "family tree," consisting of mostly friends, since she apparently has no parents and---significantly?---no children. (There was a toddler, but I’m pretty sure this was a little sister.) There have been at least 50 Friends of Barbie, probably more.

Over the years she has owned and driven (if she can get Ken out of the driver’s seat) some pretty nice wheels: a convertible Mustang, a vintage roadster, a beach buggy, an SUV, a Jeep Wrangler, a Ferrari, and a VW New Beetle, to name just a few.

There are Barbie horses for her to ride, a Barbie kennel full of her dogs, numerous houses (Barbie furniture sold separately), a lemonade stand, a clubhouse, a pool, and a playground. There is a shoe store for her Imelda Marcos-level collection of fashionable footwear. There’s a summer camp for her, and even her own Pizza Hut.

I remembered going to the FAO Schwartz store in Caesar’s Palace mall in Las Vegas, where they have a whole Barbie room, and it’s not a small room. There I saw special edition Barbies selling for a lot of money. They bring out a new one every year, sometimes limited to only 35,000 copies, guaranteeing a rarity for collectors. (More about collectors in a moment.) At this store I saw Barbie and Ken dressing up as Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara, in a dress made from the shower curtains at Tara. There was a Rapunzel Barbie and a Swan Lake Barbie and a Peter Rabbit Barbie.

Online I found other spin-offs that, again, I’m not sure if they were meant to be other dolls with the Barbie imprint or Barbie herself, dressing up. There were Barbies of the World, dozens of them, in colorful traditional national costumes. You could buy Barbie as Lucy Ricardo. Not just one, but at least half a dozen costumes from specific "I Love Lucy!" episodes. There was Barbie as Dorothy Gale, skipping down the Yellow Brick Road with Ken as the Tin Man (sold separately).

If you go to eBay right now and hit toys/dolls and bears/Barbie you will find 22,013 items for sale. 442 screens of stuff, at prices that will make your head spin. There are special editions designed by Bob Mackie. There are OOAK Barbies and NRFB Barbies. (One Of A Kind; Never Removed From Box, if you were wondering.) One OOAK was a Centaur Barbie. People customize these dolls and sell them for a lot of money, apparently. My favorite OOAK is The Visible Barbie Project, satirizing the Visible Human Project, where some scientists froze a corpse and then shaved him away one quarter-inch slice at a time, and photographed him.

Do you think children are haunting eBay, buying 1961 NRFB Barbies at $500 a pop? No way. Do you think moms are buying stuff like that to let their kids play with? No kid is that pampered. No, this stuff is selling to Baby Boomers, the folks who have fueled most of the fads of the last 50 years.

Well. I’ve been mulling over it for a few days (you can’t spend ALL your time thinking about the novel you’re writing), and I’ve come to a few conclusions:

First, Barbie is a Baby Boomer. There seems to be some confusion as to her actual age. One source claims she turned 40 this year. Another says she was introduced in 1959. Okay, say she’s 40. But she was BORN at least 15 years old. That makes her 55, almost precisely my age, and I was born right on the leading edge of The Boom.

Second … and I know this will cause some outrage, but if you’ve been paying attention at all you will have realized by now that Other Citizens, both our elders and our offspring, were placed on this Earth mainly to provide us Baby Boomers with whatever we want, whenever we want it. Older citizens are here to enable us, and younger ones to fulfill us.

Think about it. One of the best selling books of all time was Doctor Spock’s Pampering Manual, telling the WWII generation precisely how to spoil us rotten.

When we were in college we glibly decided that we should not trust anyone over 30 years old. We didn’t intend to get old at ALL. Now that we have (gotten OLDER, anyway, though we’re not OLD yet), we have begun to fanatically fight off the adverse effects of aging, or to celebrate the process … sometimes both things at the same time. We didn’t invent plastic surgery, but we caused the market for it to explode, like every other area of human endeavor we have touched. Likewise, there has been a glut of books about how menopause can be a good thing.

We decided that War Is Not Healthy For Children And Other Living Things, so we just sort of … gave up in Viet Nam, something this country had never done before. Now that we’re older we recognize that War Is Sometimes Necessary To Ensure The Maintenance Of Our Lifestyle … so we fight wars, but since it is our children fighting the wars and burying one’s own children is a major bummer (even though you can join a support group of Survivors of Losing Your Children in Combat), we have found ways to fight wars that are almost bloodless. For our side, anyway.

We decided that we would never be victims of violence or disease. Victimhood is a drag. So we are rape "survivors." We are not "AIDS victims," we are PLWAs (People Living With AIDS). We as a generation have found a way to put a positive spin on just about everything. I’m sure you can think of a dozen examples easily, from the "differently abled" to the "visually impaired." Or how about the incredible litany of "gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered"? Gay Boomers decided to use faggot and queer as terms of pride. Black Boomers rejected "colored people" and "negro" in favor of "African-American" and "people of color." I’ve never figured out that last one.

I know, it’s sickening, our excesses. But … you ain’t seen nothing yet. Pretty soon we’ll be OLD, and we will begin DYING … and I guarantee you we will find ways to make it a positive experience, to celebrate mortality. Take Timothy Leary (too old to be a Boomer, but we have always had our older gurus and heroes, from the Maharishi to Herman Hesse to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.). Not long ago Leary passed away (and I dread the euphemisms we BBs will come up with for THAT euphemism), live on the Internet … well, he started OUT alive, anyway. He seemed to groove on it.

Anyway, since Barbie is our creation and our reflection, I think the folks at Mattel ought to start looking into Barbie variants that will more accurately reflect Boomers’ new aspirations and concerns.

Several opportunities have, tragically, already been missed, such as Pregnant Barbie. How could they have neglected that one? Think of the ancillary toys you’d need … Morning Sickness Barbie: fill her with pea soup and squeeze her, she blows lunch. Barbie and Ken’s Lamaze Birthing Classes. Barbie’s Maternity Ward, plus all those maternity outfits by Gucci. Barbie’s Delivery Room. Nursing Barbie. Stretch-mark Barbie, with her own get-back-in-shape gym, comes with a Jane Fonda doll to lead the aerobics. (There was a rumor that Mattel test-marketed a PMS Barbie, but none of the other dolls could stand to be around her.)

Was there ever a Wheelchair Barbie? I couldn’t find one on eBay. Never too late to bring out that one. Many of us will be spending some years in the damn things, pre-mortem.

The time is more than ripe. Here are some dolls we’re going to be needing soon, if not already:

Facelift Barbie. Take her out of the box, she’s got a mug like a Shar-pei. Pull strings behind her ears and she ends up looking like Phyllis Diller. Sold separately, a Liposuction Barbie kit: poke a plastic syringe up her butt and siphon out the cellulite. And why not a Botox Barbie? Inject her with ersatz botulism toxin and watch her face go slack as a catatonic. It’s all the rage in New York.

Blue Hair Barbie. Comes with a cherry one-owner ’59 Eldorado with Florida plates, that will only go 40 mph in the fast lane, with its left-turn blinker permanently on. ASK ME ABOUT MY GRANDKIDS bumper sticker sold separately.

Bag Lady Barbie. Nobody needs empowering more than the sanity-challenged, and let’s face it, not all Boomers meet with success all their lives. She would push an Eddie Bauer Limited Edition shopping cart piled and festooned with Hefty bags full of the clothes cast off by all the other Barbies and her friends.

And don’t you think it’s about time these dolls were made anatomically correct? That way we could have:

Viagra Ken. Put a little pill in his mouth and his … well, you know what Viagra does. (So, if they are anatomically correct, does that mean correct as Barbie is "correct," that is to say, with outrageously overdeveloped sexual characteristics? If so, Ken would be hung like … whew! Then maybe when guys looked at him they’d get a taste of what women have been feeling for 40 years when they look at Barbie’s bust.)

Survivor Barbie. Not the TV show, that’s mostly young folks. What we’re talking about here is mostly the Big C. Doctor Ken solemnly reports, "Sorry, Boob, but that barb has got to go … I mean, sorry, Barb …" Detachable breasts? (I sense I’m flirting with unforgivably bad taste here.) This Barbie has no hair of her own, from chemo and radiation therapy, but comes with half a dozen wigs.

Lee and I also came up with Nursing Home Barbie (colostomy bags by Abercrombie & Fitch) and Alzheimer's Barbie … but I’m not going to go there. God, how depressing. Wasn’t it Bette Davis who said getting old isn’t for sissies? Of course, the ultimate Barbie will be:

Dead Barbie. Included are floral wreaths, a Styrofoam tombstone, a Barbie-pink hearse and pink coffin, and a shovel. You can bury her every evening, dig her up in the morning and do it all over again. Spin-off sales would include black mourning clothes for all Barbie’s friends to wear to the Barbie Funeral Chapel.

But it doesn’t really have to end there. Maybe an Angel Barbie, or a Ghost Barbie in a satin sheet, or a Reincarnated Barbie, depending on your religious views …

On second thought, it DOES have to end here.