In her amazing book, Kinky, writer Denise Duhamel shares poem after poem imagining how Barbie would express herself were she in any number of strange professions or situations. It's an incredible book filled with laughs as well as deep thoughts (a perfect combination!), and I'd highly recommend it to every human everywhere!
I first read the book, and met Denise, while taking a poetry course at Manhattan College. She was married at the time to my professor, the brilliant poet Nick Carbo, so her book became part of our fun syllabus that semester.
And within this unique collection of poems is one called, "Sister Barbie", which tells a funny tale of Barbie as a nun.
In my senior year of college, my last semester before graduating, and just a few months before I left the religious life, a classmate asked if he could borrow Denise's book. He left his copy at home or something, I forget, but I happily loaned him my copy, and he was to give it back to me later that day.
But something very odd happened as he was reading the book. While he had the page opened to this poem of all poems, "Sister Barbie", a bird flew right over his head, and promptly excreted its waste onto the page! He returned the book to me later that day, explained what had happened, and then politely suggested with a smile that Someone might be trying to tell me something!
I'd been suffering with clinical depression, and was thinking very seriously about possibly leaving the order, but was still very much trying to make it work, so the sign from above was not lost on me! I wound up leaving the order some twelve weeks later. On the day I left the monastery, though many of my belongings would stay behind, I knew my copy of Kinky was definitely leaving with me!
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