I was invited by the Pacific Northwest’s Pin-up Queen and car model extraordinaire, Kitty Mansfield. She’s the pretty lady wearing the traditional Barbie bathing suit in the photo below.

It was fun posing with all the Barbies (and a Skipper, shown above), and I got some updated shots for my portfolio as well.

All photos were taken by Stacey Ryan Farrar, best photographer ever and all around amazingly sweet and wonderful guy.

View all the pictures!

Buy it here!

…followed by a delicious Dessert After Drive. Yum!

View all the pictures!

(By the way, most of these were taken with my iPhone 4. Although it has many a megapixel, camera phones always fall short of the real thing. I’m hoping one day the wonky colors and weird reflections end up lending a quirky, vintage feel that future generations dare to emulate as they mind-edit photos taken by their retina implants.)

I think this video gives a nod to just about every contributor to the horror community—past, present, and future. Hmmm, perhaps I’ve overlooked a possible career as a scream queen…

Not because I get flowers (but I did)

Not even because it’s an excuse to consume exorbitant amounts of chocolate and buy more at a discount after the day has passed…

I do it because it’s the best way to awkwardly induce sheepish “thank yous” from my all-male team at work.

(We’ll see how this rose wreath looks after I spend an hour hurtling down I-5.)

We were a bit early, so we hung out up front and welcomed the usual gawking from party-goers outside. What I wasn’t expecting, however, was a visit from the KOMO4 roaming reporter and cameraman. They started out by interviewing a couple of my customers, and I let them record the inside of the car, despite its lack of camera-readiness (as it would be anytime after I drive a big group of people around).

They didn’t ask me many specific questions, but seemed willing to film me until I stopped talking, so I gave the quick creation story and launched into my “Barbie doesn’t have to be tall, blond and fake anymore!” mantra. After they interviewed me, they took a bunch of shots of the hearse, ending with one of me pulling away. I always figure if something were to go wrong, it will happen on camera, so I was extra nervous. I even stopped at the end of the EMP driveway and came back to talk to the crew one more time to make sure they got everything they needed and humbly beseech them to shed my Barbie Dream Hearse in the best of light.

Then I hightailed it back to Capitol Hill to tell my friends the good news…. about being on the TV news. So far, all of the hearse-related coverage has been fantastic, but I’ve been burned by bad journalists pre-Barbie. The window of time between leaving the EMP and the airing of the news segment was a little nerve-racking, since the crew had enough footage to go either way. Luckily, the short segment was better than I could have hoped. They showed me, showed the car, named me, named the car, broadcast my brief glimmer of eloquence, and cut away with me driving off into the night.

Sadly, the story did not appear in web form and ran only once (to my knowledge) on the 11 o’clock news. Of course, almost all of my target demographic was out partying by then, but everyone I know over 40 saw it and thought it was a great piece!

A picture in the Barbie Dream Hearse is worth at least a thousand words, and I don’t feel like typing that much, so I’m going to share some snapshots from the last few months and call it a night.

I turned on iPhone’s special “glowing eyes” camera feature for this birthday party shot near the Fremont Troll:

Just a random guy and his dolly we ran into (figuratively) while making a pit stop:

Just married:

Fifty years old and not giving a f*ck what her friends make her wear:

Barbie party girls:

Funeral directors preparing to get crazy:

Oh hi:

Come on, Barbie, let’s go party:

I happily ended the year with some nice folks and a short news segment, and I’m looking forward to another year of even more good times!

Hi there, Brown Bear!

I visited your self-serve location on 15th Avenue last week to wash the Barbie Dream Hearse. I put $5 into the change machine to receive the equivalent amount in quarters, but instead I received $4.75 in US currency and the coin in this picture:

The coin was later identified by several of my more worldly friends as a Thai baht. It was so similar to the US quarter, I didn’t even notice it at first.

Baht wait, there’s more.

I attempted to insert it into the car wash machine and it was repeatedly returned to me. It was then that I realized what the mix-up was all a-baht. I was still able to wash my car thanks to your fine establishment, baht I would like inform you of the discrepancy between the scanner in your change machine and the scanner in your car wash machine.

Unfortunately, I did not fair too well from this error. According to the current exchange rate, 1 USD is approximately 31 baht. This means the non-quarter that I received from your change machine is worth roughly 16 cents.

In exchange for the 9 cents I was forced to give you, I am interested to know how one machine was able to read the foreign currency, baht the other wasn’t. If you can give me some insight abaht how this happened, I will drop my claim for monetary damages as well as the terrible puns.

Thank you!

Kat Taylor
Barbie Dream Hearse