Gone with the....Sharpie?

My brother is in seventh grade at the middle school and has this crazy teacher. She made them watch Gone with the Wind and do a huge project with it: 2 songs that dealt with one of the themes from the book, 2 newspaper articles that dealt with a theme, and then a recreation of some part of the movie. Although she gave them a few weeks to do it, she continually handed out daily homework to complete. Naturally, my brother procrastinated until Sunday night before it was due.

This brings us to the fact that my brother wanted to recreate the scene where the little girl dies after her horse fails to make the jump. Of course, they wanted to use my old Barbies and play horses. Well, for some reason, 99.99% of Barbies are blonde. The little girl's hair was a dark brown nearing on black. Instead of doing the normal thing and making people stretch their imaginations, my brother as well as father told me that I was to color the doll's hair black with....a sharpie. Yea. So I sat there with my awesome sharpie and started giving the Barbie a color job. A few problems with this arrangement:

1. Barbies have thick, long hair in like a bajillion layers. So after you color the top, it looks like she's an emo Barbie with a reverse peek-a-boo hairstyle
2. After holding and twisting the doll so many times, the sharpie eventually winds up on hands where it then proceeds to stain any other objects the fingers touch, such as couch, clothes and random body parts of the Barbie.
3. When sharpie gets on a Barbie's face, spit doesn't wash it off so well.
4. Since spit doesn't work, acetone/nail polish remover is the next choice. Too bad it takes ALL of the paint off the doll's face.
5. Barbie winds up with no eyebrows, so then a brown eye pencil is needed to sketch a couple right above her blue eyes

So basically, I spent most of my Sunday giving Barbie a color job. Despite a couple of problems she actually looked really good and you would never be able to tell that she was actually blonde. Maybe that's a new career choice for me!