Unintentional Hilarity

It's a little late for tears, ISN'T IT BARBARA!? If it were just the horrid narration, it would fall a little flat, but it's much more.

We start off with the young slattern, Barbara, bawling her eyes out while the narrator berates her mercilessly. Then starts 14 minutes of relentless Barbara-bashing, detailing painfully just how every single aspect of Barbara's being is wrong, socially unacceptable, and icky. Her obsessive-compulsive neighbor, Helen, is held up as the acceptable, approved version of girlhood. Barbara is informed that her every single day starts out WRONG and goes further wrong from there...and that all her neighbors are laughing at her for it.

Some of it's just too funny - her sweater has "spots" on it - try a huge 7-inch diameter gunshot stain directly at the neck. Instead of grabbing a different sweater she ineptly covers it with a scarf, except she's so stupid she keeps letting the scarf hang to the side so everyone can see her filthy top. Oh, the shame she's bringing to her mother.

Then she and Helen get invited to the popular girl's house for an after-school get-together; they both pretty much wet their pants at the prospect, but this is clearly not Barbie's crowd. These girls are sitting around knitting, discussing literature and high culture, while Barbie sits around pondering how not to gouge out her eyes at the prospect of what her future looks like in Stepford. She plans how she might bomb the men's association building before she forgets the meaning of the word "archaic" and doesn't bleed next time someone stabs her. Her sense of boredom and impending horror grow until, beaten by the fact that not one of these kids is anything less than anal-retentive and obsessed, she goes home to weep at what society has wrought.

In the end she is admonished to "root out the poor accidental habits and establish in their place the good habits approved by custom, accepted by society" and that is the final straw. She dutifully picks up her discarded robe, and turns out the light, then begins planning.

Tune in next time when Barbara turns on, tunes in, drops out and joins the counterculture, returns with a fully-automated Uzi to shoot up the school and the ladies' society luncheon, starts a co-op and learns macrame, and eventually fully self-actualizes in "Looking for Mr. Goodbar."

Barbara and her life-partner now