Junior High Beauty

I was a pretty nondescript girl at Hazel Park Junior High School in 1963. My hair was dishwater blonde and my clothes, while not the worst, were just ok, too. I wanted to be cooler. Prettier. Dress more stylishly, but it just didn't happen. I did have lots of friends because I'd gone to school with them since the third grade. There were Rosemary, Alice, Jackie, Mary Jo, Karen, Kathy and a host of others. I was in love with the Beatles and Motown, but mostly the Beatles. Paul McCartney was my favorite of all times. I thought he was the most beautiful guy I'd ever seen in my whole 13 years. Sigh.

Much of what my friends and I talked about during these couple of years were the Beatles and boys...and our hair...and other music boys...and boys at school. Are you seeing a pattern here? It was all about the boys and how to attract the boys. We grew our hair out. We wore mini-skirts. We studied boys and analyzed our every interaction with them.

"What'd he say?" "How'd he say it?" "Why did he say it?" "When did he say it?"

"What'd you say?"

Boys were magical creatures and I had no clue about how to get one of them to like me. In fifth grade, Butchie Osterhout asked me to go steady and gave me a little silver colored ring with a round light green stone without ever even talking to me first. Out of the clear blue he decided he liked me. I didn't even know how it happened, just that it did. When I didn't know which finger to put the ring on, some girls in my class laughed at me and told Butchie how dumb I was, and that was the end of the budding romance. It didn't matter too much to me, after all, I didn't even know how I'd gotten him to like me in the first place! It stayed an unsolved mystery.

Mom wouldn't let me wear makeup in 7th grade so I sneaked around and did it. I found an Avon sample lipstick in red at Aunt Wanda's house and she let me keep it. I hid it in my pencil case and took it to school. The first thing I did when I got there was paint up those 13 yr old lips in this garish red lipstick. I was gorgeous! All day long I felt grown up with my scarlet mouth. On the way home from school I'd wipe the stain off my lips as best I could so my mother wouldn't know I'd been wearing it. Everything went along peachy keen until the day I forgot to wipe my mouth.

I walked into the house one afternoon with my bright red mouth and Karla spotted it immediately.

"Suzy, you got lipstick on?"

I started wiping my mouth furiously.

"NO! I DON'T!"

"MOM! SUZY'S GOT LIPSTICK ON!"

"Suzanne! Do you have lipstick on?"

"NO!"

"You better not lie to me, little girl. And you better quit sneaking around putting on lipstick, too!"

"Yes, Mom."

I was so mad at Karla I could have eaten her for lunch, but I didn't get into as much trouble as I thought I would. I had to lay low on the lipstick wearing for a while. That's when I concentrated on secretly shaving my legs. I wore my dad's red long johns to sleep in so Mom never noticed. Then I'd scoot out the door in the mornings before her eyes were open enough to catch sight of my new smooth legs. It worked for quite some time even though Dad was complaining about his razor being dull even though there was a new blade in it. Nobody said anything to me until the warm spring day when I was wearing shorts.

"Suzanne. Are you wearing hose?"

"No, Mama."

She bent down and felt my legs.

"You've been shaving your legs?"

"Sometimes."

"Well, once you start you know you can never stop it, and you better be careful. Don't cut yourself. That razor's sharp."

"OK, I'll be careful."

There was little to no battle over that issue. I was safe.

As mythical and magical as boys were, beauty was also an illusive thing for me at age 13. The model of beauty my friends and I set our sights on came from 16 Magazine. All the girls were from England so they had long straight hair, heavily made up eyes and white lips. They were beautiful, but mostly they were cool! I wasn't sure how to go about finding my own personal beauty, so I took various measures trying to capture the Mod English look as my own. I wore red lipstick, secretely shaved my legs, dyed my hair green with food coloring, cut my hair, rinsed my hair through with beer to straighten it, used Curl Free to straighten it, and wore Peppermint Pink lipstick that tasted good, but made me look like a corpse.

Studies were secondary for me in Jr High. I did a mediocre job with my classes. Bs and Cs with the occasional D. Had it been possible, I'd have gotten an A in History of Paul McCartney, or What Not To Do With Your Hair if those had been two of my classes. Let's suffice it to say that not too many of these efforts succeeded for me, so I'd surely have gotten an F in Nabbing That Cute Jr High Boy.