LEGO (13 page)

“How many numbers are there?”

“Well, dear. How many days are there before Christmas?” asks Kate. I stop asking questions.

She pops a minifigure out of window number 6. “This one looks like he’s been eating a lot of chocolate. He might be a policeman or an airport manager.”

“This is the municipal set, that’s what he would be,” I reply.

“Nope, he’s a luggage handler. There is a little suitcase.” She opens number 8.

“That makes sense. What little kid is going to be like, yeah, I finally got an airport manager?”

“What little kid is going to be like, yeah, I got a luggage handler?” huffs Kate.

“Some kid who has a dad for a luggage handler,” I suggest. She is not impressed by this retort.

Another minifigure in overalls appears in window number 10. “This guy looks like a miner or a policeman. At least he doesn’t have a scary chocolate mouth. But he does have weird hair,” she tells me.

“He’s a plumber.”

“Oh, look, another airport manager. I have to say, facial hair and LEGO guys—not so much. This one kind of looks like that critic...”

“James Lipton?” I suggest.

“Yeah. James Lipton as an airport manager.” She moves on to another minifig with a broom. “Oh, this looks like old James Lipton.”

“Do you think he’s fallen on hard times?”

In box number 22 is the final minifigure. “He’s a submarine operator,” Kate says confidently.

“How many municipalities own submarines?” I ask my wife, who actually works in city government.

“Oh, that’s a bullhorn. He’s a police officer. There’s the police officer.”

We sit there in pajamas, playing with the figures, the fire hydrant, and the trash barrel for the better part of an hour. Small pieces set up for a LEGO city. We’re playing like children, and right then it doesn’t feel weird that we have no children of our own to share this moment. Kate collected miniatures while growing up—furniture for a micro-size dollhouse and tiny porcelain puppies. I wonder if she is getting hooked, but I’m skeptical, because the odds of my wife turning into an adult fan of LEGO are about as good as her correctly identifying the occupation of a minifig.

 

 

The next morning I take Kate on a tour through the convention. We don’t have to wait in line to buy tickets. I just show my magnetic attendee badge, appropriately made of LEGO bricks, and her visitor pass.

Across from a re-creation of Jurassic Park, we see Dave and Stacy Sterling’s town and train display. They’re one of only a handful of couples who not only are attending Brickworld, but who actually build together. In fact, there just aren’t many women at Brickworld—only twenty-two attendees this year. LEGO is a boy’s club, seemingly from an early age.

“I think there is something that genetically skews us towards boys, but we can do better,” LEGO CEO Jørgen Knudstorp told Reuters in March 2008. “There is something about the idea of constructing and deconstructing or destroying which frankly is an important part of Lego play that is a very boys-type of activity.”

It is that idea that leads Esther Walner, the moderator and creator of the Belville competition I participated in the previous day, to lead a roundtable discussion, Female Fans of LEGO, on the second day of the convention. The main topic on the floor is how LEGO can attract more girls to the hobby. Esther puts the room at ease, standing with her hands clasped behind her back. She is wearing a simple blue dress, and her brown hair is neatly tied up in a scarf. A castle builder and steampunk fan, she’s actually applying her degree in medieval studies to her interest in LEGO.

“I was close to being an empty nester with only one little one left at home. For seven years, I played with LEGOs with him, not knowing that there were adults out there who played with LEGO. I happened to see an ad for Brickworld and was amazed to find a community of adults,” says Esther, who is attending the convention for the second year.

She lives in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, a ripe area for adult fans in the well-represented TWINLUG because of their access to the LEGO Imagination Center. The sixty-five-hundred-square-foot display was the first retail store to open in the United States, when it fittingly was built inside the Mall of America in 1992. Her story encourages the women around the room to talk about how they got started as builders.

“Like so many of you, I got involved with LEGO because of a guy,” says Virginia Alvarez, a wry smile spreading across her face. “I had to drive my son to meetings because he wasn’t old enough. But then, I wanted to build the things that guys build—I just wanted to build them in different colors.”

Tracy Dale, one of the judges from my Belville contest, suggests that Virginia might not be that different from the guys after all.

“You wouldn’t believe how many guys buy pink bricks from our store. I have no idea what they build with all of those pink bricks,” she jokes.

The concept of pink bricks drove LEGO to introduce the Paradisa line in 1991—a line that evoked Miami more than any particular theme. The idea was to create colors that might appeal more to girl builders. Pink, turquoise, and pastel-color bricks and elements were the most salient features of the sets (with names like Sunset Stables and Cabana Beach) that were produced for three years. Lackluster sales suggested that colors were not the way to engage girls, so LEGO moved into the world of role-playing with the introduction of Belville in 1994.

Mention of the name “Belville” brings groans from the ten women in the room, many of whom feel the sets aren’t designed to help girls be builders, but are just meant to be pretty.

“There are so many premade pieces and so much pink. Not every girl’s favorite color is pink or purple. I didn’t want to play with Barbie. She was blond and pink, but I was dying for a brunette doll,” says Alice Cook, a fellow member of TWINLUG.

Criticizing the LEGO Group for its color choices seems to be a general trait of adult fans, regardless of gender; the great “bley” debate raged among male and female builders alike. But within the arguments over pink or purple pieces, a bigger complaint seems to be under the surface: LEGO just doesn’t get girls. It’s a fact that LEGO itself seems close to admitting.

“There is genuine bafflement on their part how to attract female professional builders. I don’t know if it is because female builders tend to keep a lower profile or there just aren’t as many out there because they didn’t play with LEGO growing up,” says Joe Meno.

In 1963, Godtfred Kirk Christiansen drew up a list of ten requirements for creating a quality toy. The second on that list was that LEGO be good for both boys and girls. It was always seen as a unisex product, even if marketing or social norms unintentionally turned it into a toy for boys. LEGO’s approach didn’t change for nearly two decades.

Alice works in the LEGO retail store at the Mall of America. “It’s difficult because I’ll see a mom with a boy and a girl,” she tells the group. “And she’ll say to the girl, ‘You don’t want Star Wars, you want Belville.’ Or even worse, ‘We’re shopping for your brother now and we’ll get something for you next.’”

In 1979, LEGO unveiled its first set exclusively for girls: Scala, a line of buildable jewelry. Over two years, LEGO released nine sets that encouraged kids to customize a hand mirror, a bracelet, a necklace, or a ring with printed tiles. LEGO later expanded the Scala line to include dolls. These were figures larger than minifigures, with actual strands of hair, and they came with a range of accessories from hair dryers to puppies.

“Girls had become girls again, after the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s unisex period,” Lars Koelbaek, LEGO’s international marketing manager at the time, told the Associated Press in July 1995.

The company discovered in the 1980s that sales figures for girls were dropping. The challenge for LEGO remains today: How can the company make products that appeal specifically to girls?

“LEGO was such a big success that we didn’t really feel that there was a special need for girls,” Koelbaek said. “Recently, we had to admit that we had a wrong conception of it.”

Scala evolved into the line known as Clikits in 2003. And here LEGO showed how it had evolved from 1979. Clikits debuted after four years of market research, during which LEGO contracted out to discover that mothers believed arts and crafts led to the promotion of positive values. Suddenly LEGO was a tween toy, aimed at girls between seven and fourteen, and sold in the clothing retailer Limited Too.

LEGO was consciously marketing to girls, offering up marketing-speak to justify the interlocking pieces designed to create friendship bracelets, picture frames, and customized tote bags. The product line existed until 2008, when the trademark Clikits girls Daisy, Heart, and Star were discontinued.

That same year LEGO was accused of gender stereotyping by Sweden’s Trade Ethical Council against Sexism in Advertising when a product catalog depicted a girl playing with a castle in a pink-themed room and a boy playing in a blue room with a fire truck and airplane. The captions on the pages read respectively, “Everything a princess could wish for,” and “Tons of blocks for slightly older boys.” In attempting to change its marketing approach to girls, LEGO may have inadvertently reinforced the very idea that they were seeking to eliminate: that standard bricks are only for boys.

In looking purely at aesthetics, LEGO may have forgotten the value of play for girls. The women gathered suggest that LEGO should instead be focusing on how the bricks will be played with rather than what the bricks look like.

“I think LEGO should look at things that are either historically based or relate to real life. Each construction event is solitary; you’re super in your own element. I wonder if they could reinterpret LEGO as social or interactive, it could allow women to play together,” says a woman named Jacque, her voice rising from beneath a mass of black curls.

A large part of me wonders if the boy builders are the ones barring the door to the club. Even at the Female Fans of LEGO roundtable, the three guys in the room contribute a disproportionate amount to the discussion, seemingly telling women what they want. When you combine that with an entirely male atmosphere, it seems that it would be difficult to find acceptance as a female builder.

I know just whom to ask. “Does anybody ever bug you about bringing Stacy along?” I say to Dave as Stacy shows Kate the goth record store she designed and built for their joint display.

“Nope, they’re just happy I found somebody who loves LEGO as much as I do,” says Dave.

This is a couple we would hang out with on a Friday night, if they lived near us. Dave and Stacy seem to love each other as much as they love whatever they’re doing. In 2002, Dave hit the Midwestern rallying circuit in his 1986 Dodge Omni GLH. Stacy was there as his co-driver. But when you blow a part or bust up a car, you can’t reuse the pieces. The investment in rallycar racing didn’t make sense compared with the cast of the Star Wars and Harry Potter sets they were buying. LEGO can always be dismantled and turned into something else.

Now they create joint displays in the basement of their Trempealeau, Wisconsin, home that has been converted for LEGO storage, building, and photography. Dave’s trains run throughout a building layout designed by Stacy. He points to a helicopter that sits on the roof of a brick structure.

“Jamie gave this to me. He was just here. He wanted to know about my building techniques.” Dave has a huge smile because he’s just been complimented by one of the adult fans who has reached the promised land.

Jamie Berard, from Metheun, Massachusetts, is a bona fide set designer living in Billund, Denmark, and working at LEGO headquarters. He is part of the company’s contingent attending Brickworld. The blue-and-white LEGO helicopter he has given Dave is one of the city sets he has designed.

As Kate and I travel between the two display rooms, I introduce her to Kathie Bonahoom, Bryan’s wife. Her red hair pulled back into a ponytail, she is directing people toward the second ballroom of LEGO creations.

“Be careful,” Kathie jokingly warns Kate. “It seems like Jonathan is starting to enjoy himself.”

Kathie is teasing, but finding a partner who understands their addiction to LEGO is a real concern for adult fans. At best, your partner can see why LEGO is so important—that it is not a child’s toy and you are not an overgrown child. Most adult fans would even settle for a girlfriend who is neutral toward the hobby, who just files it into the nebulous category of “man activities.”

“My fiancée keeps a tight rein on me. Since we got engaged last year, I’ve made just four BrickLink orders,” joked Adam Tucker near the end of his architecture lecture on the first day of the convention —a comment that drew laughs and commiseration from the married guys in the audience.

LEGO has come between spouses and ended a number of marriages. Some adult fans hide the costs of their habit, and financial struggles can devastate a healthy relationship. In addition, there’s the constant reminder of an AFOL’s collection, as set boxes and loose bricks begin piling up around the house.

I’m telling Kate about Duane’s collection as he and Joe say good-bye to us on our way out the door.

“Make him have a LEGO room,” says Duane, when Kate asks for advice.

“Be careful,” Joe says to Kate, echoing Kathie’s warning. “LEGO has led to a lot of divorces.”

Kate laughs, but it is the laugh where I can tell she’s not amused. “Well, I’m here... right?” she answers.

I’m leaving the convention early and with genuine regret, but a friend has just had a baby and I’m not allowed to leave Chicago without a visit. In the car, I put my newfound LEGO powers to the test. It’s not quite
Searching for Bobby Fischer,
but it’s close. As I peruse the passing scenery, LEGO elements stand out like misplaced Tetris bricks.

A mailbox appears blocky or a Toyota Scion rumbles by and you see how it is basically just a rectangle on wheels. Before you know it, you’re looking at everything and thinking, “I could build that out of LEGO.”