Yesterday, the younger’s friend, O, came over, and they played with Barbies for an hour or so. I was in the next room trying to get some writing done while they were preoccupied. It was going pretty well but then snippets of their dialogue kept floating in from the next room and they were so tantalizing that I got totally distracted. I ended up writing down verbatim some of what I heard, which was mostly from A because her voice carried, ahem, rather more loudly than O’s.

A, ventriloquizing “Ben”: “that’s my Mom’s prom dress and if you ever put it on again I’m gonna throw you out the window.”

A few minutes later.

A, ventriloquizing a doll whose name I didn’t catch: “He threw me out of a window and I broke my back and my neck and my arm and my nose.”

Later Ben invites Alison to prom. Alison says yes but she’d rather go with Ken because, A declares, “Ken has a better personality. He would never throw someone out of a window.”

A, referring to Ben or possibly Ken or possibly Denny: “Pretend he’s never had a girlfriend before so he watches all these romantic movies at night. Romantic horror movies.”

A, ventriloquizing Ken or possibly Ben: “‘As well as a car I’m giving you a makeover.’ And then pretend he has a bucket of pink paint and he just paints her face pink.”

A: “Pretend she was like I’m gonna go to this five star couples restaurant.”

O: “Who’s she gonna go with? Denny?”

A: “Denny got run over by a truck five days ago.”

A, ventriloquizing whichever Barbie is at the “five star couples restaurant”: “I’ll order the sushi … no, actually I’ll order the pumpkin soup with chicken and gravy on the side. And a side of spaghetti.”