All is Fair in Love and Legos

The 1980s were about a lot of things: fighting Communism, hanging out at the mall, and making sure girls played with girl toys and boys played with boy toys. In that respect, my brother and I were reliable gender consumers. My room was full of Barbies, Cabbage Patch Kids dolls, Strawberry Shortcake figurines, and Fashion Plates; I especially loved this toy. Fashion Plates was a kit that consisted of assorted plastic plates with raised designs on them depicting women in different fashions. The idea was to put the individual plates into a little tray, mixing and matching the combinations to design your own stylish figure. Next, you placed a piece of paper over the plates. Using a pencil, you rubbed the design ensemble to make a transfer. The kit also came with colored pencils allowing you to add color. It was like a paper doll AND coloring sheet all in one! I can only guess at the marketing meeting for this one:

 “Hear me out: It’s tombstone rubbing for girls! But with dresses and none of the creepy graveyard part.”

“I don’t know, Steve.”

“What if we made it pink!”

“Sold! Diane-give me manufacturing.”

“Pink” seemed to be the main criteria for distinguishing girl toys from boy toys along with “Can you put it in a dress?” and “Is it horse and/or pony related?”

The funny thing was I never minded playing with my brother’s toys, whether he liked it or not. I was right along with him in the couch “trenches” setting up green plastic army battalions. We turned his room into a giant Matchbox car race track with a set of those orange plastic strips, which, according to the commercial, you could fashion into an exciting loop-de-loop configuration. Ours looked more like a flattened Greek infinity sign. We discovered the tracks were better for sword fighting and whipping each other than they were for racing, anyway. I played Star Wars--early-1980s trilogy Star Wars action figures. I’m glad the young girls of today will not know what it was like to “always be cinnamon bun hair Leia” or “every Storm Trooper.” It’s gratifying to know this generation will never lie awake at night haunted by the phrase “girls can’t be Wookies,” because that is marrow-level trauma that no one should ever have to carry.  

My brother, on the other hand, would not have been caught dead playing with my Smurfs or My Little Pony ponies. No. The only reason he breached my fortress of solitude was to deface my Ken doll with magic marker or drown my Lisa Frank unicorn stickers in the toilet. It was always upsetting, but I got retribution: I married one of his friends. You know what they say: revenge is a dish best served with a binding contract that makes everyone family.

Lego was one of the few outlier toys in all this rigidly gendered nonsense. I would add Nerf products and Mr. Potato Head before the arrival of his Mrs. to the list. The sets at this time were fairly basic: a house and yard; a whole Lego city with individual sets for a police station, a fire station, a service station; a castle; space exploration themed sets and vehicles. The fact that gender equality was limping along in the real world had nothing to do with the Lego universe of any kid’s imagination. The company was founded in the 1930s by a Danish carpenter who called his endeavor leg godt that means “play well.” And my brother and I definitely did. We colonized any surface we could find for our sprawling Lego metropolis. At first we were purists, trying to keep the sets discrete and organized. But as anyone who comes from a Lego household knows, that practice is very short lived. Before too long we had taken over a large, old plastic tool chest my dad no longer used to house our brick booty. I don’t remember anything specific in how or what we played, only the doing of it—the making, unmaking or, in some cases, busting, creating, repurposing, for hours. Like most kids, we had more brain and imagination power than space to contain it.

My brother has two kids. Tim is nine; Teddy is seven. Both have been fully indoctrinated into the cult of Lego. Blissfully, willfully. They are both enormously inventive, sharp, playful, and focused. The sets in the 1980s were nowhere nearly as sophisticated as they are today. There is a Lego Titanic that clocks in at 9,000 pieces (iceberg sold separately). The boys dump a pile out from one of the many, many bins in their house, pushing a mound of brick my way. In what seems like 15 seconds they’ve each made sub-aquatic stations armed to the teeth for “bad guys.” In the same amount of time I have made a red square on a sheet of green “grass.”

The last few holidays have been “very Lego Christmases” and this one was no exception. Teddy received the Delorean time machine car from the Back to the Future movies. It is labeled “18+,” with 1,800 pieces that painstakingly recreates the car down to the flux capacitor (which lights up) and series of tubes and hoses that make up the engine. Teddy assembled it in about four days over holiday break, without much help from anyone. He would put it on the floor and lay down next to it, marveling at the tiny details and his own fine craftsmanship. A regular Leonardo da Vinci of Legos.

One afternoon in the winter I was babysitting and took the boys to the library for a book resupply mission. This is the language of young boys in this generation—gamified. There is a Lego corner in the children’s reading room. Both boys sprinted for that section. In addition to bins of random pieces, they had two boxes of themed set. One was blue and had pieces and booklets for building monsters; the other was green with pieces and booklets for building dinosaurs. Tim dove into the monster bucket, choosing to free style it, affixing together an oblong yellow body in less time than it took me to shed my coat. His brother is more discerning and methodical. Teddy tucked into the dinosaur box, carefully paging through the instruction booklet, fishing around for the pieces he needed.

We weren’t there too long when a woman came over with two little blonde girls about the same age as my nephews. I relayed to them about the bins with the sets in them as opposed to the other containers with assorted bricks. One of the girls kneeled down next to Teddy and also began sifting through the bucket of brown and green dinosaur blocks. Like athletes, these kids seemed to be in “the zone” with their Lego constructing.

Suddenly I heard Teddy say to the girl:

“You know I did the Delorean time machine Lego, like, all by myself. In like, four days. No help.” The girl continued to swish around the pieces. Maybe she hadn’t heard him.

“It’s, like, 18-plus build,” he continued. The girl glanced over her shoulder at him. She could hear him, alright. She kept pawing at the blocks.

“So, I’m VERY experienced,” Teddy concluded, trying to seal the deal and impress the pants off this girl with his obviously superior Lego skills.

The little girl remained intent on what she was doing. She sort of eyed him again and half-shrugged. She scooped up her pile of bricks and carried them back to the table where her sister was building.

See? Lego: leveling the gender playing field for eighty years and counting.

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Lens Zen!

I don’t know about anyone else, but I am limping through this “bad news on the doorstep” kind of week. By this I mean news from THE WORLD. So here is some of my own personal Zen/reset/exhale/centering: A recent image of a sweet Saturday afternoon in the city I love so much taken from The Longfellow Bridge that spans the Charles River. Boston you’re my home.

@SheilaMoeschenPhotography