The summer before 9th grade I went to the State Fair with my father. Every word in that sentence drips with meaning that is hard to convey on the dry, arid surface of language.
The summer before my freshman year was especially challenging. Shortly before the end of eighth grade my father and I had a fight. He called my mother and told her that she could finally have custody. The divorce had occurred when I was two, and while my father had gotten custody he immediately relinquished it to his verbally (rarely physically) abusive mother. The entire scene was a replay of getting kicked out of my grandmother’s shortly before the end of sixth grade. My father made it almost exactly two years.
Two weeks before the end of junior high I moved in with my mother and stepfather across town. I would be starting in a new school in the fall. I didn’t know anyone, not at the school, and not in my new home. My relationship with my father was tenuous to put it mildly.
That summer he continued to see me with weekend visitation, and decided that it would be fun to go to the state fair.
When I think of state fairs, my first thought is Some Pig, and Wilbur taking credit for Charlotte’s talent. Livestock is shown, perhaps folk art, et cetera.
California has 58 counties, and I doubt any California really knows all of them. Due to the sheer size of the state, the California State Fair is held at and colloquially known as “Cal Expo.” This year-round location in Sacramento is nearly 400 acres, and during the state fair employs 2000 people. People sometimes underestimate the importance of agriculture to California’s economy, and the vast expanse of livestock, fruits, vegetables, and crafts are hard to imagine. There is a year-round monorail. It’s like 4H got funding to make their own Disneyland.
I did not want to be there.
I was old enough to be allowed to wander off on my own, at least by 1991 standards, and ignored my father as much as possible.
At some point a woman approached me and asked me if I was a model.
I was visibly repulsed. At this point, I wasn’t even sure I was a human. At my grandmother’s I’d dressed in hand-me-downs from my uncles (and the 1970s), which, when combined with my enrollment in gifted programs and interests in reading and computers, made me a social pariah. I’d spent most of the 2 years I lived with my father trying to understand the puberty I was going through and reconstruct what it meant to be A Cool Girl. I wound up somewhere on the burgeoning goth spectrum, as a “Mod” (aka Modern Rock Girl.)
No. I was not a model.
“You could be,” the woman said, and handed me a business card from Barbizon Modeling School.
There were many Barbizons in the 1980s and 1990s. I was familiar with their ad campaign that ran during MTVs alternative show, “120 minutes.” Their slogan was “Train to be a model, or just look like one!”
She insisted I schedule an audition in San Francisco in a few weeks.
In a few weeks I found myself on a BART train with my mother, taking the hour plus ride to downtown SF. I wore a halter dress I’d recently purchased, black with white dots too small to polka. I stopped wearing halters a year or two later when my breasts really came in and it was harder to avoid wearing a bra, but at thirteen or so it wasn’t an issue. Finding heels was harder.
We arrived at the nondescript building in downtown and went upstairs where I was interviewed and asked to do runway walks. My mother and I participated in a charity auction for the adoption agency that had arranged my mother’s adoption as a child, so I had some amateur experience walking in front of people. I flounced and turned, and hoped for the best.
After the interview I was accepted, and the handlers moved on to business. They passed us pamphlets about the program, and brochures about the school. In this packet was a form with the request for tuition, at the time around $1500.
We did not have $1500. We were unlikely to ever have $1500 to burn on modeling school.
We rode home on the train, somewhat dejected by our poverty, but somewhat proud of our accomplishment. I had been “scouted” after all, even if it was for a scam that just wanted our non-existent money.
Shortly after, a family friend heard the story and offered to pay for the school. Suddenly this was a real opportunity.
I had started school by this time. I was struggling to make friends. I was struggling to keep the friends at my old school. I was struggling with class work, with family, with my self. In short, I was struggling.
I thought about modeling school and what that might entail. I envisioned class after class scrutinizing my walk, how I talked, how I held my hand, how I tilted my head.
I thought about my life with my grandmother, then my father, and now my mother. I thought about the endless scrutiny I faced every day, and how each volatile legal guardian could react to the slightest misphrased sentence, how the criticized my weight, my hair, my clothing.
I declined the offer.
A few years later on a vacation road trip, when I was 15 and trapped in a car with him for 150 miles, the same family friend told me he was in love with me, tried to feel me up, offered to run away and get married.
A few years after that I learned about the concept of abusers “grooming victims.”
I never regretted not learning how to look like a model.