Make up or make out

My mother's teenaged postcard from UC Berkeley 1939.

My dear friends, browsers, fellow stalkers,

Why is it that whenever my hard drives crash due to an army of trojans, I get an assignment? Thanks a lot, Susan (big 2020 eyeroll). Great timing. I thought I was in for a little vacation from all of this online yakity yak. Non. Me non. Meme chants.

When I was thirteen years old my objectives and goals radically changed when into the sphere of influence came a member of the Ahmanson family.  In what seemed like an overnight transformation, I changed from being the happy to be me geek girl to the vacuous Barbie numb nut. From a baby Einstein to a Madonna/Cher.  As a motivating factor, the discovery of boys. My new objective in life was to become an outstanding performer in modeling,  acting, and in social companionship. The new goal was to attract a boy (the most mysterious creatures on earth), and hold his attention. What a boy likes, wants, needs became my sole interest. Books were no longer for reading but for balancing on my head as I learned to descend long staircases gracefully. Many a banana was made to know the smoothness of my ways.  One must practice. Practice makes perfect. Eating but not eating. Self discipline. If one finds herself consuming edibles only to be used for educational purposes, one must learn to purge and check the scale at least three to five times  a day.

So, when the subject of mentoring young girls came up recently in conversation my memory began to flood. It’s not pretty. Well, it is pretty–maybe too pretty. I think it is a very serious thing. Young girls have much to deal with. Everyone seems to want a piece of them. There is such treachery met and more the girls visit upon themselves. It’s a subject and an activity that I tend to shy away from because it’s complicated.

Susan Kitchens posits the following:

If I could have met with a mentor on a weekly basis when I was a teenager, I….

She asks for four answers, and tags four other bloggers (4 x 4).  Watch for the answers from the other three (1 + 3) –sure to be a more interesting read (please see Burchard, Finnegan, & Russell). Ms. Kitchens is an impressive lady. She’s super-duper smart and a solid citizen to boot. Susan, among many other interesting pursuits, volunteers for an arts mentoring organization called, WriteGirl. This Sunday it’s billed as PlaywrightGirl at the Pasadena Playhouse.

My response: I don’t know what to say (that’s unusual). I had a mentor every week as a teenager but it was the wrong kind. In 2020Hindsight.com,  it would have been wiser, broader, more useful for me to have had the mentors of Berkeley, like my mother did. Instead, since our family had changed its location from Northern to Southern California, I was hooked up to the zen wisdom of Sunset Boulevard, more specifically to Caroline Leonetti, LTD. , school of charm and modeling. Nothing can really compete in the brain of a Tiger Beat crazed Brady Bunch lovin’ teen-aged girl like the glamour and seduction of Hollywood.  Hollywood! Rock stars! Lecherous studio photographers! And, besides I was naturally curious about how everything worked.

This modeling school was expensive, and it had clout. Connection to it was used in early pursuit of an acting career. I liked to act, pretend, dress up because that seemed to please everyone. It wasn’t the true self, my inner life that was to be nurtured and shaped–it was the gawky girl with big teeth, and the Roman nose. FAIL depth.  WIN narcissism. One cannot sustain that which does not come naturally from its core (What happened to fake it until you make it or make out?). My insides shut down. Why was it so important to my parents that I learn the proper way to select a man’s cigar? Why shouldn’t I put my elbows on the dinner table,  slurp my soup from back to front, use the word diastema to describe the gap in my front teeth? Why did I have to practice getting in and out of  small foreign cars without showing my buff puff? Was it really so wrong to spend every night mapping out on my bedroom wall the entire history of the succession to the thrown of England? (Actually, they liked that.)

I think much of what bothered my parents was cultural. My father and his brother belonged to a club for the sons of Italian immigrants. It was a civic minded group. Their strategy sessions were separate from the family meetings. It was men only meeting in closed session (in the bar) to discuss town politics. Women were relegated to the arts, crafts, philanthropy, and food preparation. All children were prized if they could play the accordion. There I was, strapped down to ten tons of accordion while dreaming of the cello. The sons of the Sons were attracted to my social status but were horrified by my obsession with technology. The women playing matchmaker for me threw up their hands. Each playmate scared off by my irrepressible statement of unending facts. Need for approval caused me to launch into a litany of lists of things. Like a defense attorney for the information data pool, I questioned and impugn everything springing forth from shy, squeaky voiced, chapped lip peers.  I was a natural success at disappointing everyone which only served to make me try harder to please.

As I progressed through my teens, emergency intervention via modeling school saved me from the potentiality of veering off the fulfilling path to pageant girl and political wife or mistress. Make up became the first thing I thought about in the morning, the last thing at night. Cosmetics, not the cosmos ruled my world. This was a starvation diet for my soul. It was anorexia of the spirit. Worse than a bird preening in a gilded cage–it was a slow dismantling of each tiny wing bone unhinged from having the possibility of flight.

I had wanted to learn how to fly when I ran away from home. I found out how to soar a few years later in the Judy Library at Caltech. There, no one seemed to care if the shade of blush I was wearing had the correct undertone for my skin color. These people were interested in what I thought about the problem presented to us, the mechanics of solving it. Sexiness didn’t count, or did it? This was a new kind of glamour for me, if only I’d have met Professor Sutherland before meeting Mrs. Ahmanson.

Thanks Susan, for telling me all about WriteGirl. It made me think of things long forgotten.

Sweeping the front porch for Mabel,

MG

How did you make out? I am tagging: Johnson, Carrier, Bugge, & Allee. Follow HER example, not mine.