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When I was twelve-years-old, I had a subscription to Seventeen magazine. I had Tiger Beat posters of C. Thomas Howell, Matt Dillon and Rob Lowe all over my bedroom walls. This was back in the day when The Outsiders was the popular movie (and book -- I must have read it five times). It was the time of drop-waisted mini-skirts and Sarah Jessica Parker was just a teeny-bopper on Square Pegs --my then-FAVORITE show!
All I wanted was to be a typical American teenager. But somewhere in the back of my pre-teen brain, I knew there was never a chance for me. I was too fat. I was not pretty enough. I wasn't able to make my hair look right. I would steal my mother's Dexatrim. I stole it from my older sister, too, but all I got for my sticky fingers was a hollow, gnawing pit in my stomach and a dizzy feeling as I walked down the hallway of the middle school.
I wasn't thin enough, and the evidence wasn't just between the covers of the magazine. It was printed on the label on the back of my jeans -- that label that told you the waist size and inseam length right there on the waistband -- behind you, where you couldn't see when people were reading it. But they were ... I knew that they were. My friends' waists were in the 20-24 inch range. I bulged out at 28 inches. I was fat. Seventeen confirmed it.
I would be so excited when my Seventeen magazine would arrive in the mail. Those girls were beautiful. And skinny. I would read each issue cover-to-cover, with the hope that if I just followed the right trends, and bought the right Cover Girl eyeliner, and applied it exactly as instructed, that I might be pretty too.
I wanted to be a model. I wanted people to pay attention to me. All I had to do was to get beautiful. After all, isn't that what Lisa Greene (the most popular girl in my school) had? Boys thought she was cute (we didn't say "hot" then), and girls alternated between hoping to be her friend, and despising her for being the object of the boys' attention.
When I'd get to the back of the issue, there would be those classified ads, which gave me hope that, one day, I too could be beautiful. Enter Barbizon and the John Robert Powers School of Modeling. All I needed was to be discovered, and I could be a model! I fantasized about photo shoots, and getting to wear fashionable, cool outfits, anything other than hand-me-down clothes from my sisters. I imagined what it would be like to have someone behind the camera, snapping shots of me, telling me how gorgeous I was -- so very perfect -- and how easy I made the photographer's job because of it.
So I sent in to Barbizon and JRP, and got "more information" from them. They sent me packets with shiny brochures, showing me how for a few hundred dollars, I could take classes to be a model. I could have them help me to develop a portfolio (more money). Everyone knows that a good portfolio is the key to getting the modeling gigs. I needed a portfolio.
My mother humored me at first, and then flat-out told me that these companies were a scam. That what I looked like didn't matter to them if they thought they could part me from cash while dangling me along with the ever-elusive modeling dream. I didn't believe her -- she just couldn't see my modeling potential. After all, she wasn't a fashion or advertising professional. She was just a mom who read grown-up versions of Seventeen, was forever on a diet, and purchased special concoctions to smear on her face to reduce wrinkles, give a smoother appearance
