![]() ![]() I'm the one stuck in the past, role-playing at being a doll who doesn't really matter anymore, trying to keep up in my adults-only Barbie skates. She's skating full-speed ahead with a blinky rubber duck in a sea of neon. ![]() She doesn't need a campy film to escape into a fantasy neon world with a leggy blonde glamazon as her guide-she already lives this life. I love these skates, but unlike the kid that I was, my kid … doesn't really want, or need, to pretend to be Barbie. Like playing with Barbie, inline skating was what everyone did in the 1990s, along with wearing a waist pack and not getting gay-married. While I fully embraced the pandemic quad skate boom, quads are something I discovered later in life. Neon colors and questionable branding aside, I am having a lot of fun. My ankles feel secure, and I can go as fast as I want to while still feeling stable when I hit a piece of gravel or a stray bark chip. The skates feel great while cruising around on asphalt. The brake also feels hefty and substantial. You can also swap them out for bigger wheels. The included 70-millimeter, 84a-durometer wheels are pretty round, without the faster beveled edges some skate wheels have. It also comes with a straight alignment-all four wheels are on the ground-although you can switch to rockered, which is when only the middle two wheels are on the ground for faster turns, like a hockey skate. There’s one optional heel brake that you can install on one boot pretty easily with the two included Allen wrenches. (Spoiler alert: This didn't happen for most of us.) Even though we prepared for our future roles as working women who drove convertibles and had romantic relationships, we also all waited for our legs to become disproportionately long and our breasts to become alarmingly torpedo-like. ![]() She was a role model, but she was also a terrible influence. A woman who had cool, exciting jobs like being an astronaut or a doctor. She wasn’t a Cabbage Patch Kid or an American Girl doll, a big-headed baby where your only option was to role-play being a wife or a mother.īarbie looked like a woman that you might conceivably become. What does Barbie represent, anyway? When I was a kid growing up in the 1990s, Barbie was interesting and aspirational. “I just don’t like what she represents.” There’s a lot competing for my kid’s interest, so she stops listening to me and rolls off again. “It’s not that I don’t like Barbie,” I say, sweating. “I thought you didn’t even like Barbie,” she says. When I pull the skates on, my daughter frowns. In fact, I don’t know any kid my daughter’s age or younger who plays with Barbies. You have to be pretty big-well, adult-sized, anyway-to wear these skates. The Impala Lightspeed rollerblades, on the other hand, start in a size 5. The quads come in sizes as small as 1, which is what my 8-year-old wears. They’re fun and versatile for both rink and outdoor skating, but the boot on the quads is a little stiff and takes a while to break in. I have to disclose here that both my daughter and I already owned Impala quads before these special-edition versions arrived. Impala was a natural pick for the movie collaboration the Melbourne, Australia-based company specializes in beautiful, entry-level skates with a sweet retro appeal. The Impala Lightspeed skates are the exact same ones that you can see in the movie trailer. No one even notices my hot-pink skates are here. She smiles, says thank you, names him Wilmer, and skates off as fast as she can. Two women in neon onesies pass us, swing back around, and offer my kid a blinky light-up rubber duck on a stick. We are, by far, the least conspicuous people here. However, I’d forgotten that tonight is Neon Night at the roller disco. She’s wearing a visor! She’s so conspicuous!Įven though I don't look like Margot Robbie at all, I was expecting a similar reaction. To her slowly dawning horror, Barbie notices that everyone is staring and laughing at her. In the trailer for the Barbie movie, directed by Greta Gerwig and starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, Barbie and Ken skate down the boardwalk wearing Barbie’s iconic neon yellow and hot-pink skates. “Do you know who this is, sweetie?” I say as I lace up my daughter’s quads and pull the Impala Barbie skates out of my bike box. A DJ in a tie-dye tent blasts music from my childhood. My 8-year-old hops off the back of my bike and thrusts her foot out for me to help put her skates on. ![]() A friend skates toward us, eating a vegan ice cream Chipwich, as we lock up and get ready. On a warm Thursday evening, our neighborhood bike caravan-parents, kids, and three electric bikes-rolls into the weekly roller disco night. ![]()
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