American Girl Has a Nice Day

I used to smirk at my mother's complaints about Molly, the American Girl doll representing the 1940s. Molly has pigtails, glasses, plaid skirt, and of course a spunky wartime attitude. "They've made me into a doll!" Mom would say, though she's a few years less historical than Molly must be.

Then one of my sisters got glasses at a very young age, and the Molly doll was one of the few that came with glasses, too, so she became acceptable. But I digress.

This week American Girl Publishing announced that it will launch a new series of historical stories written by Megan (Judy Moody) McDonald about "Julie Albright, a lass living in San Francisco in the 1970s."

Yes, that distant era shrouded in mist and legend, "the mid-1970s"! The website takes us back: "America is trying to switch to the metric system, and school sports teams sometimes include a new kind of player--girls!" Copy for the Julie Tells Her Story volume promises, "The 'Looking Back' section explores school life in the 1970s," presumably with grainy photographs of a mimeograph machine and a 16mm film projector.

Soon we'll learn about such quaint old-fashioned pasttimes as memorizing all the ingredients of a Big Mac; painting fire hydrants red, white, and blue; and standing up to change the TV.

Okay, I'm not blonde, I've never lived in San Francisco, and I've never been an American Girl. But they've made me into a doll!