Ken, Barbie, and Amie

When I lived in Talkeetna, Alaska in 2007, a young woman there kept calling me Ken. My name is Al, so I tried to correct her several times, but every time I saw her she called me Ken. She had blonde hair, so naturally I started calling her Barbie.

One day we were with some other people who knew my real name, and they called me Al. At one point Barbie looked at me and said, “Who’s Al?”, to which I replied, “I am.”

“Who’s Ken?”, she asked.

“I have no idea,” I replied, starting to laugh so hard that I was crying.

She paused for a few moments while it all sank in. “So that’s why you keep calling me ‘Barbie’”, she said, laughing hard.

I just thought of this story because a song named “Amie” just came on. For a little while when I lived in Alaska in 2010 it seemed like every woman I met was named Amy, so this became a theme song. This is Amie, by the Pure Prairie League: