Barbie's Bad Boy

I have a con­fes­sion to make: That’s me. It’s a photograph–I have no depth, wrin­kles, or nos­trils, and liv­ing with one-piece hair saves on con­di­tion­er (once in a while I ArmorAll it).

When Mattel was going to do a line of Barbie dolls called “Barbie: The College Years,” they built me to be Barbie’s bad boy boyfriend she’d take home to her par­ents in an act of defi­ance. When Ken began dat­ing G.I. Joe, though, Mattel scrapped the whole College Years line of dolls so Barbie could go back to him and reha­bil­i­tate Ken’s whole­some effem­i­nate but straight image (poor Ken had to go back into the closet).

With no doll career left (my hair was too long to enlist with mil­i­tary doll out­fits, and my super pow­er of draw­ing was­n’t flashy enough to get me a spot in the super hero toy corps.), I took my wind-up motor­cy­cle and moved to Oregon to start a career con­sult­ing and writ­ing about software.

Actually, that’s a 1‑minute self-portrait I drew in Illustrator CS2 to illus­trate a chap­ter on the new Live Paint fea­tures. With col­or­ing, it took almost 2 min­utes. I thought I’d share.