CHAPTER 12 - The Sex Symbol
mmI'm short. I've always been short. 5'3” on a good day. People think I'm tall because I spent six years standing next to Bea Arthur, who's seven inches taller, but this was the seventies - I was wearing platform boots and spike heels.
mmAnd I'm thin. I haven't always been thin. I was thin in junior high. I was a short, thin girl whose mother made her take a bath in Tide so she wouldn't leave a ring around the tub. I had cat's eye glasses and really ugly curly hair. I bought hair styling magazines and tried a different look every week. My favorite was the “Butterfly”. It involved a center part and a lot of pin curls. When that didn't work, I wore a “Brush Up”. That meant shaving the sides of my head to a quarter inch length and brushing the back up from the nape of my neck to the crown.
mmWhen I was a freshman in high school I dated a junior who said he'd played in the orchestra that had visited my junior high.
mm“I was 8th grade class president,” I told him, “I introduced your orchestra to the assembly.”
mm“No, you didn't,” he replied. “It was a guy. With dry skin and weird glasses and no hair.”
mmWhen I got to high school I bought contact lenses and Vita Bath. I was still short and I still had ugly hair but I no longer looked like a boy. I had large breasts. I carried stacks of medical books to hide them, used four syllable words whenever possible, and wanted the boys to like me for my mind. |
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