Since Montreal is home to what claims to be the world’s largest permanent Barbie exhibit, Martin Reisch thought there could be no better way to celebrate Barbenheimer with his girlfriend on opening day Friday than to pay it a visit.
The plan was meticulous and a trip to the exhibit would come first.
The couple would delight in viewing the 1,000 iterations of the famous and polarizing doll which the exhibit promises. Then, they would go to the Barbie movie at the Cineplex Forum. (Reisch had seen Oppenheimer at an advance press screening the day before).
“We planned it a week ago and it was, like: perfect date,” Reisch, 45, said over the phone. His mother had seen the exhibit years before and had already recommended it several times.
When Reisch and his partner entered Les Cours Mont-Royal shopping centre (part of Montreal’s underground network of malls) where the Barbie Expo is — or was — they were confused by signs telling them the Expo had moved to another floor and a security guard telling them it was, in fact, closed.
“It’s like this old weird mall with like so many weird hallways, and the exhibit itself is like tucked behind some fringe stores,” Reisch said.
Instead of a candy-coated dreamland full of plastic dolls, what Reisch and his partner found looked more like a bunker. The floor had been stripped to its bare concrete and pieces seemed to be missing from the ceiling.
One eerie display remained: a miniature moving runway carrying doll models was still working, accompanying music and all.
“And then the whole thing is empty where all the light boxes were and the whole main area is just crumbling concrete and waterlogged wood, and it’s super mysterious, completely bizarre,” Reisch said.
The impetus behind the permanent Barbie show, which opened in Les Cours in 2016, is also somewhat mysterious. Its website vaunts the brands, designers and celebrities featured among the Barbie dolls in the show, but there is no explanation of how it came about.
A message at the top of the main page announcing in capital letters that the Barbie Expo is temporarily closed is equally enigmatic.
“We genuinely apologize for any disappointment this may cause and appreciate your support and interest in the Barbie Expo,” it says, without giving a reason for the shutdown.
A phone call to Les Cours reveals the Barbie Expo’s bad luck. A burst pipe in the condo building above caused water damage, worsened by the heavy rainfall and flooding from that big storm on July 13.
“I know, I know, it’s a bad timing, I know,” said Valerie Law, the mall’s head of communications and marketing.
“Over the weekend, our team of social media, the phone messages were popping every minute. Bing! Bing! Bing! ‘Where is the Expo? What happened?'”
Law said the Expo is being moved to another floor of the shopping centre and will hopefully reopen in the coming weeks.
Reisch published pictures of the damaged room where the Expo had been on social media in responding to one person’s post that the Expo had “fumbled the bag” and that “having the whole thing indefinitely closed for the entirety of the Barbie movie’s promo run is a mistake of huge proportions.”
Reisch says he still thinks the people behind the Expo could have made some kind of acknowledgement of the irony of the situation.
The person who said the Expo had made a mistake followed up, saying, [sic] “omg this is tragic, sorry to the barbie expo for saying that you had fumbled the bag. it is, in fact, the anti-flood infrastructure of the peel suites building that fumbled the bag.”
As for the Barbie movie itself, Reisch says he loved it.
“I thought it was great. I’m a big Greta Gerwig fan,” he said, adding that he liked Oppeneimer, too. “I love that they’re riding off each other’s marketing in a whole kind of a cultural thing.”
More Stories
Fair share: the right office solution can take finding the right partner
Ontario faces crew shortages, aircraft issues in fight against wildfires | Globalnews.ca
Refugee attends open house at Downtown Eastside affordable housing facility – BC | Globalnews.ca