I don’t remember the first time it occurred to me that I wasn’t pretty in any kind of powerful way.
It might have been when I was eleven and waiting absentmindedly in a children’s clothing section while my younger brothers tried on Easter slacks. An older woman approached the counter, and said, “My granddaughter needs a new Easter Dress. She’s about as tall as this girl here,” she said pointing to me as if I could not hear her, “But she’s not as chubby, and she’s got a prettier face.”
It might have been the time after one of my aunts couldn’t lose her postpartum weight that my father used her body as a cautionary exemplar for me (because I look just like her). I’d always have to watch what I ate because we Fosters were short and stout people, like Hobbits, he said, and we looked like turtles when we gained even a little weight.
It might have been the time after an afternoon play rehearsal in 8th grade when a boy I had a crush on told me, “You actually look pretty with stage makeup on. You should always wear it.”
It might have been the time that my seventh-grade best friend, when she was mad at me, informed me that a ninth-grade girl had told her I was the ugliest girl in our school.
It might have been all the times I sat in folding chairs on my high school gym floor being awarded good citizenship prizes and being nominated for “Eagerest” and “Friendliest” while the rest of my small class of girls (fifteen in total) were simultaneously paraded across the football field and auditorium stage in formal wear. Beauties and homecoming maids.
It might have been the time I made it through three rounds of auditions to play Sissy Spacek’s daughter, a role which would have gotten me my SAG card and would have propelled me for months out of my hometown just before the worst school year of my life, a year in which every fear and insecurity I had would be ridiculed and exploited by perceptive and painfully accurate bullies—a year that taught me, as much as anything else in this list, my place as a secondary character.
It might have been the moment when we got the call that I hadn’t gotten the part because I didn’t have features as delicate as Spacek’s.
It might have been the time my acting coach put an exclamation mark on that casting choice by explaining to me that because of my “large features,” I could most likely count on being cast in “best friend roles” and that I should always read the fine print on audition notices just in case that wasn’t what was being asked for.
It might have been the time I ignored this advice and showed up for an audition asking for a “young Ellen Barkin” anyway, only to have the casting director tell me that I didn’t have “the right face for a lead-girl role” (want to know who did have the right face and who did get this part, which was her big break, and later made her really famous? I’ll never name names, but it sounds exactly like Meese Fithersboon).
It might have been the time when after this audition, I told my father that I didn’t feel pretty, and he said, “I’ve always thought you were pretty. Not beautiful, but cute.”
It might have been the time my mother phoned me after I’d gained some weight and stopped wearing makeup in college to tell me she was worried about me and to remind me that men were visual creatures and then paid for me to have a session with a make-up artist and to get my hair cut at an expensive salon and to buy me five new outfits at the mall.
It might have been a hundred other things, many of them much harder, and I know so many other people have received messages that far surpass these for bodily trauma, but these messages were enough for me.
They told me where I belonged, and I believed them.
***
I’ve always resembled Judy Garland, not even just if you’re squinting.
Same auburn-brown hair. Same forehead. Same wide-set brown eyes. Same eyebrow shape. Same upturned nose. Same distance between our noses and lips.
In certain old pictures of mine, the resemblance is uncanny.
After I landed a bit part in a movie that was shot in my Southern hometown when I was ten years old, I spent the remainder of my adolescence going to auditions and rehearsals and acting lessons and weekend theater workshops.
I could never sing and dance like Judy, or act as well as her, for that matter, but nearly every casting director I encountered took one look at me and said, “Oh my God! You look just like Judy Garland!”
The comparison has its limits, of course, and I’ve never consciously affected Judy Garland’s personality or bearing, but I’ve always felt connected to her because there were so many moments watching her on screen when I’d think, “She looks just like me!”
Judy Garland spent much of her adolescence playing jovial “girl next door” roles. She looked younger than she was (she was 17 when she played Dorothy, a character meant to be pre-adolescent, in The Wizard of Oz). Several of her biggest adolescent roles were played alongside Mickey Rooney in the Andy Hardy series when she was in her late teens and early twenties. In those movies, she usually listens patiently as Mickey pines for more “conventionally” beautiful girls like Lana Turner.
Of Garland at that age, cultural critic Anne Helen Peterson writes, “In a studio filled with glamour girls, Garland was always the ugly duckling—unsexy, ungainly, and always too fat or too skinny, or so the studios, and the press, told her.”
In the old film magazine Silver Screen, Garland once told a reporter that she’d overheard a friend of one of her castmates saying (of Garland), “She’ll never be an actress! She just thinks she can sing. She’s too fat. Imagine her being a movie star!”
Once after she’d gained a few pounds after sneaking a month’s worth of chocolate malts from the MGM studio canteen, Louis B. Mayer, the studio head who initially mandated Garland’s use of amphetamines and barbiturates so that she could keep her weight down, reportedly took her aside and told her, “You look like a hunchback. We love you. But you look like a monster.”
And thus, she returned to her old lunches of three mouthfuls of vegetable soup, and the weight fell right off.
***
My college roommate, Lauren, was the Lana Turner to my Judy Garland. She was even a real ballerina, so if we were in a movie like Ziegfield Girls (as Judy and Lana were), she would have been able to do all the dance sequences, no problem. Unlike Judy Garland, I very much would not have been able to.
Lauren was all swan.
I was all duck.
Or at least that’s how I felt.
Lest you think I’m exaggerating about her, her husband, who later became a writer, used the pseudonym Grace Kelly for Lauren in his first book, a book that won a huge award and sold lots of copies. All of us who knew Lauren found his use of the Grace Kelly moniker perfectly apt.
Anyway, if we had been in Ziegfield Girls together, Lauren would have been the romantic lead, pursued by all and sundry, falling passionately in love, and I would have been chastely hopping off to pretend sip a chocolate malt with my sexless adolescent crush.
Imagine that you look a little or a lot like Judy Garland, depending on the day. You’ve put on 30 pounds in the last year, and most of it seems to have gone to your upper arms and your already round face. You know (intellectually) that you aren’t that far off the norm, the standard, whatever that means. You lose those 30 pounds. Maybe 40, and you’ll be a size you know is considered ideal. That’s not all that much, but it’s indicative of how powerful the standard is, that this relatively slight variation feels as though it consigns you to secondary status.
Beyond that, you’ve got cystic acne so deep you’ve begun taking Acutane to manage it, which means that now your facial skin keeps peeling off like wallpaper. You are attempting to be less complicit in global child slavery by never buying fast fashion, the only fashion you could afford, but what that means instead is that you are mostly wearing ill-fitting men’s pants purchased at thrift stores with an alternating series of silk tops from Express and Limited.
Now imagine that you are this version of Judy Garland, with scarred and peeling cheeks and old bell bottoms and a red silk blouse that accentuates rather than disguises an uncomfortable new layer of belly fat, and imagine that every day, three times a day, you walk to your college cafeteria next to a Lana Turner/Grace Kelly.
You know that Lana Turner/Grace Kelly’s dad is an asshole and that her mom has been diagnosed with terminal cancer and that she farts loudly in your room and that she sticks the antenna from your cordless phone into her nose in moments of reverie and that she snort-laughs and that she pees her pants when you watch that one Wings rerun together where William Hickey says, “Maybe it was Las Cruces!” and then you both recite it together at the same time. And maybe you already know, or you will, that she’s as lonely and lost as anyone.
You know all of this, which is to say, you know Lana Turner/Grace Kelly is just a person, just a regular person—a kind, funny, ordinary, smart person you like and love.
But.
Then you leave your room beside her and not a single boy you pass, not even the nerdy ones who are waiting to talk to you about how they stayed up all night playing Diablo, looks at you at first.
Not until Lana Turner/Grace Kelly has settled herself at a table full of soccer players, broad of shoulder and taut of calf, and you have brought your tray of cheeseburger macaroni or some other gray mush to the table full of gamers who suddenly feel like you are worth looking at.
***
Even at church, there were Judy Garland/Lana Turner distinctions, and the Bible did no great job of convincing me otherwise.
Growing up in church (four times on Sunday as well as twice on Wednesday and once on Saturday nights), I came to believe there were two general categories of women: there were Rachel women and Leah women.
My mother was a Rachel just as my roommate also was.
I felt like a Leah.
The Rachel/Leah distinction refers to the two daughters of Laban in the Old Testament who would eventually, along with their maids, mother the twelve tribes of Israel.
The story goes like this: After stealing his brother Esau’s blessing from their father Isaac, Jacob the patriarch ran away to his uncle’s house to find shelter. Upon his arrival, he saw his beautiful kinswoman, Rachel, coming in with the sheep. He told Laban that he would work for seven years to earn the right to marry Rachel. But Rachel had an older sister, Leah, the sight of whom did not inspire Jacob to love her. In fact, among the few biographical facts that the book of Genesis gives us, we hear only that Leah’s “eyes were weak” and that she was “hated” by Joseph for being plain.
Because Laban did not want to lose the financial benefits Jacob was helping him accrue, after Jacob’s seven years had been fulfilled, Laban decided to trick Jacob by presenting to him a veiled Leah on his wedding night instead of Rachel. He then would not release Rachel to Jacob until Jacob had worked another seven years.
My takeaway as a child?
Better to be a Rachel than a Leah.
Obviously.
Little in the rest of my life outside church—school, theater, auditions—contradicted this burgeoning belief. You could only do so much with what God gave you, and what God had given me was some Leah equipment with Rachel aspirations. Or to echo my earlier comparison, I was a Judy Garland with Lana Turner dreams.
***
My mother was a Rachel too.
On their second date, my father asked my mother to marry him. For five years, he continued to ask her, and she said no until she finally said yes.
My mother’s appearance might as well be the opposite of mine. She is tall(ish). She is blonde. She’s got green eyes. She’s got a thin slip of a nose and elegant, slender arms. She’s got high, pronounced cheekbones, and a willowy neck. Rachel-like, as a teenager, she collected suitors in droves. I spent most of my adolescence hoping (never successfully) to catch the eye of a boy who barely spoke to me.
When my mother was a sophomore in college, she became the DJ for an afternoon truckers’ hour on an AM country station out of Jackson.
She has always had a dusky alto voice, one with perfect pitch and range and vibrato, which she would use in countless church choirs when I was growing up. But this radio gig wasn’t a church choir. Instead, she used her dusky alto to sell sex by way of front-torsion-bar suspension systems for large vehicles.
The particular sponsor for this radio hour was the Velvet Ride Suspension Company, and so my mother’s online personality for the afternoon Velvet Ride Truckers Hour was “Miss Velvet Ride.”
When the radio hour would begin, there was a short jingle followed by my mother’s Southern-accented rasp (sounding a little like if Dixie Carter and Demi Moore had a baby) purring, “Hey, all you truckers out there. Mind if I climb into the cab with you for a while? It’s Miss Velvet Ride.”
My father told this story about my mother often when I was growing up—at church parties, at high school reunions, at work functions—and it never occurred to me until later to question why people always laughed at it: this recollected radio sex voice of my demure and responsible Christian mother, the one whose prayer life people were always coming up to me to compliment, whose low voice, by the time I was in high school, was used to instruct her second-grade class as well as her weekly Rubies and Pearls Senior Women’s Sunday School Class and to help my brothers and me every night with our homework.
My mother discovered her singing voice when she was in middle school in the mid-60s, around the same time a Catholic neighbor of hers first brought her to mass. It would be there, as well as in her mother’s car singing old hymns, that she would learn to sing harmonies with the songs that bridged the gap between Vaticans I and II. It would be at that Catholic Church, according to my mother, that God would save her from the hellish family life she’d thus far endured: a mother thrice married and too burdened with her own ghosts to offer my mother respite, and men who screamed and threw things and did much worse.
As a result, even as a young child, my mother planted the softness she did not receive inside herself and tended its light-starved photosynthetic shoots by retreating into books. From the time she learned to read she was never without one, and for all of my life, she has devoured them wholesale. There was never a week that went by when I was a child that my mother didn’t tear through two to three books. Never a week in which we weren’t coming and going to the library multiple times to pick up new ones.
My mother found that softness, once located inward after a brief retreat, could also be turned outward to great effect.
Her softness would become her calling card.
“Hi, Sweetie,” she would coo to anyone who ever called looking to talk to me, which never failed to make boys on the other end giggle. At the elementary school where she taught, any kid who needed a hug would run to my mom and get three hugs. Any kid who didn’t have breakfast or who’d forgotten their lunch knew my mom would have something squirreled away for them in the back of her room.
“Your mother is the gentlest, sweetest, godliest woman I’ve ever met. You are so lucky to have such a kind mother. I bet she never even yelled at you once,” the ladies of the Rubies and Pearls would often pull me aside to say.
And I would, accurately, agree.
She never yelled at me once.
But there was (as there always seems to be) so much more to my mother than her softness: her way of flipping my dad off when he annoyed her, her insistence that she was always right on any subject no matter what evidence could be provided to the contrary, her sheer bloodlust and obsession with dystopian films from Terminator to Aliens.
She’s never been a story I could tell simply, and I look nothing like her.
Even as an adult, more often than not, when I’ve shown a new friend a picture of my mother, they’ve turned to me in disbelief: “THAT’S your Mom?!” they say, as if it’s inexplicable that I was created in her body.
***
It shouldn’t have mattered.
I was constantly told physical appearance shouldn’t and didn’t matter.
“Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting” read the Bible verse I taped to my adolescent mirror.
It’s what’s inside that counts, said every well-meaning Bible Study teacher or TV special or school assembly speaker ever.
But the same youth director who read me the Bible verse about fleeting beauty also admonished the girls in your youth group that our pastor’s stunning and high-femme wife (who was America’s Junior Miss 1977) should be a model to us for how to continue to be attractive for our future husbands, who would only stay faithful to us as long as we stayed fit and well-groomed and lovely.
He was one of a hundred other voices, some even less subtle, telling us how very much looks mattered.
At the same time, I was also told I mattered because I was made in God’s image, whatever that meant, but God was faceless, which is what I most feared becoming.
For better or worse, looks mattered. Looks mattered when I was auditioning for a role. Looks mattered when I eventually gave up auditioning for roles. Looks mattered in every story of every happily married grown-up I ever heard. What did you first like about her? Someone would always ask. Her legs. Her mouth. Her eyes. Her face. Her hair. Someone else would always answer first before mentioning other things like personality or character.
The reality was that in the white evangelical South, I inhabited every bit as much as any film audition I ever showed up for, a particular kind of symmetry got you in the door or kept you on the stage or in front of the camera or in the relationship.
Were there exceptions?
Of course.
But only enough of them to prove the rule.
Or at least that’s how I felt when I was seventeen years old and desperately afraid my face and my body explained away my heaviest feelings, and if I could just “fix” my face and body, the magic that beauty bestowed might make me magic too—might make me brave enough to act again, might make me like boys who were kinder or healthier than the aloof ones I kept chasing.
Even if appearances never mattered, even if facial symmetry was insignificant, even if it was only ever truthfully what was inside that counted, here’s what no one ever acknowledged: in pursuit of the gentle and quiet spirit women like me were exhorted by our elders to cultivate, it is every bit as easy to flay your insides raw as it is to flay your skin.
***
When I was eleven, I was cast in a movie about a Leah with Rachel aspirations.
The script was adapted from a Beth Henley play: The Miss Firecracker Contest. One of my mother’s closest friends at the time, Alice Decell, was a friend of Beth’s (she was a friend of everyone famous, even Amy Grant who I adored, so I was hitching my wagon to Alice’s star and never looking back), and introduced us as soon as the cast and crew arrived in town.
My mother, who knew how much I already loved being in plays and watching movies over and over again and how much I would mimic the voices of actors on television, took me to an open casting call for extras, and thus, I landed the part of Girl #1.
Miss Firecracker the film follows the divergent stories of two cousins played by Holly Hunter (who is this film’s version of a Leah) and Mary Steenburgen (this film’s Rachel). For years, Holly Hunter’s character, Carnelle, has entered the Miss Firecracker beauty pageant, hoping to emulate her cousin Elain’s win (Elain is Mary Steenburgen) from many years prior. The film is set in the last year of Carnelle’s eligibility for the pageant, her last ticket out of town, her last chance to make a name for herself.
Elain returns to town, from her glamorous perch in better locales—which we are meant to understand was made possible because of her pageant victory—for a reunion of sorts with other previous winners.
Long story short, Carnelle loses the pageant for the last time, and while watching the fireworks show afterward, learns to make peace with her life as it is: not Miss Firecracker, not Elain, not a Rachel.
In my appearance as Girl #1, Mary Steenburgen’s daughter Lilly and I brought roses to her mother.
In the scene, she’s leaning up against a wall talking to Tim Robbins, who plays her estranged brother with whom she has now made peace.
Lilly says, “Miss Elain, we brought you some roses.”
And then I say, “I love you, Miss Elain. And I want to be just like you.”
Mary Steenburgen then brushes her hand against both our cheeks in a maternal way and says, “Aren’t you sweet?”
She hands us back the roses and then says, “All beautiful girls deserve long-stemmed red roses.”
The scene was cut, but Mary Steenburgen actually mailed me a tape of it along with a kind letter explaining why the cut was made (editors felt it cut short the scene between brother and sister, secretly I worried it was because I was fumbled my one line so many times they just scrapped it) that I have kept all these years later.
The point of the story was that the Carnelle’s and Leah’s of the world could still make peace with their internal beauty, despite what they lacked, and that what mattered was your grit and persistence and zest for life, not whether you could be a graceful contestant in a small-town beauty pageant. And I cried when I saw the film, not because my scene had been cut, which I already knew, but because I felt so for Carnelle.
I felt just like her.
I wanted to run away to somewhere magic too.
I wanted to win the contest that would get me out of this small Southern town that kept telling me I was ugly and weird and awkward and whose critique of me I believed more fervently than any other gospel I was sold.
I wept through the entire film because I was so moved by it, so stunned to see so many daily sights—the Hastee Tastee drive-thru, the big white house on the corner of Grand and Canal—made magic there up on a screen that could be seen by anyone anywhere all around the world.
My scene was shot at sunset on the edge of a bluff overlooking the Yazoo River. Two of the crew members wrangled an enormous reflective screen that threw the gold and rose tones of the sunset back onto our faces. I remember being momentarily blinded by the screen the few times I glanced at it directly.
Sometimes the screen wavered in the wind, and I could feel the waves of its refracted bouncing off my cheek.
In the years to come, long after the movie had been packed up and all the famous people who’d descended upon my small town had returned to Hollywood, I would find myself glancing bluff-ward in the direction of that recollected incandescence. I focused my native fierceness toward burnishing that flash of gold that I knew lived inside me and which other people—casting directors and boys I wanted alike—would be able to see if I could only burnish it bright enough.
***
In 1954, Judy Garland mounted a huge comeback, after years of struggles with addiction and depression (struggles which originated in her studio-mandated use of diet pills to maintain optimal physical symmetry), in A Star is Born. Many critics consider this not only her best film, but her best performance. In it, she’s like a lit match aglow, her golden energy crackling through the screen. In 1955, she was nominated for a “Best Actress in a Leading Role” Oscar for this electric performance.
Everyone thought she would win. She’d been too magnetic, too charismatic, too emotionally raw in her performance as Esther Blodgett to lose. She was a shoo-in. Even the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was so convinced that Garland would win the Oscar that they dispatched a film crew to the hospital where she’d just given birth to her son, Joey, so that she could give her acceptance speech there live from her bed.
But as it turns out, there was never any need for cameras.
Judy Garland lost to Grace Kelly.
Kelly Foster Lundquist
Stage Makeup
This essay is excerpted from her upcoming memoir, Beard published by Eerdmans Publishing Co.
I don’t remember the first time it occurred to me that I wasn’t pretty in any kind of powerful way.
It might have been when I was eleven and waiting absentmindedly in a children’s clothing section while my younger brothers tried on Easter slacks. An older woman approached the counter, and said, “My granddaughter needs a new Easter Dress. She’s about as tall as this girl here,” she said pointing to me as if I could not hear her, “But she’s not as chubby, and she’s got a prettier face.”
It might have been the time after one of my aunts couldn’t lose her postpartum weight that my father used her body as a cautionary exemplar for me (because I look just like her). I’d always have to watch what I ate because we Fosters were short and stout people, like Hobbits, he said, and we looked like turtles when we gained even a little weight.
It might have been the time after an afternoon play rehearsal in 8th grade when a boy I had a crush on told me, “You actually look pretty with stage makeup on. You should always wear it.”
It might have been the time that my seventh-grade best friend, when she was mad at me, informed me that a ninth-grade girl had told her I was the ugliest girl in our school.
It might have been all the times I sat in folding chairs on my high school gym floor being awarded good citizenship prizes and being nominated for “Eagerest” and “Friendliest” while the rest of my small class of girls (fifteen in total) were simultaneously paraded across the football field and auditorium stage in formal wear. Beauties and homecoming maids.
It might have been the time I made it through three rounds of auditions to play Sissy Spacek’s daughter, a role which would have gotten me my SAG card and would have propelled me for months out of my hometown just before the worst school year of my life, a year in which every fear and insecurity I had would be ridiculed and exploited by perceptive and painfully accurate bullies—a year that taught me, as much as anything else in this list, my place as a secondary character.
It might have been the moment when we got the call that I hadn’t gotten the part because I didn’t have features as delicate as Spacek’s.
It might have been the time my acting coach put an exclamation mark on that casting choice by explaining to me that because of my “large features,” I could most likely count on being cast in “best friend roles” and that I should always read the fine print on audition notices just in case that wasn’t what was being asked for.
It might have been the time I ignored this advice and showed up for an audition asking for a “young Ellen Barkin” anyway, only to have the casting director tell me that I didn’t have “the right face for a lead-girl role” (want to know who did have the right face and who did get this part, which was her big break, and later made her really famous? I’ll never name names, but it sounds exactly like Meese Fithersboon).
It might have been the time when after this audition, I told my father that I didn’t feel pretty, and he said, “I’ve always thought you were pretty. Not beautiful, but cute.”
It might have been the time my mother phoned me after I’d gained some weight and stopped wearing makeup in college to tell me she was worried about me and to remind me that men were visual creatures and then paid for me to have a session with a make-up artist and to get my hair cut at an expensive salon and to buy me five new outfits at the mall.
It might have been a hundred other things, many of them much harder, and I know so many other people have received messages that far surpass these for bodily trauma, but these messages were enough for me.
They told me where I belonged, and I believed them.
***
I’ve always resembled Judy Garland, not even just if you’re squinting.
Same auburn-brown hair. Same forehead. Same wide-set brown eyes. Same eyebrow shape. Same upturned nose. Same distance between our noses and lips.
In certain old pictures of mine, the resemblance is uncanny.
After I landed a bit part in a movie that was shot in my Southern hometown when I was ten years old, I spent the remainder of my adolescence going to auditions and rehearsals and acting lessons and weekend theater workshops.
I could never sing and dance like Judy, or act as well as her, for that matter, but nearly every casting director I encountered took one look at me and said, “Oh my God! You look just like Judy Garland!”
The comparison has its limits, of course, and I’ve never consciously affected Judy Garland’s personality or bearing, but I’ve always felt connected to her because there were so many moments watching her on screen when I’d think, “She looks just like me!”
Judy Garland spent much of her adolescence playing jovial “girl next door” roles. She looked younger than she was (she was 17 when she played Dorothy, a character meant to be pre-adolescent, in The Wizard of Oz). Several of her biggest adolescent roles were played alongside Mickey Rooney in the Andy Hardy series when she was in her late teens and early twenties. In those movies, she usually listens patiently as Mickey pines for more “conventionally” beautiful girls like Lana Turner.
Of Garland at that age, cultural critic Anne Helen Peterson writes, “In a studio filled with glamour girls, Garland was always the ugly duckling—unsexy, ungainly, and always too fat or too skinny, or so the studios, and the press, told her.”
In the old film magazine Silver Screen, Garland once told a reporter that she’d overheard a friend of one of her castmates saying (of Garland), “She’ll never be an actress! She just thinks she can sing. She’s too fat. Imagine her being a movie star!”
Once after she’d gained a few pounds after sneaking a month’s worth of chocolate malts from the MGM studio canteen, Louis B. Mayer, the studio head who initially mandated Garland’s use of amphetamines and barbiturates so that she could keep her weight down, reportedly took her aside and told her, “You look like a hunchback. We love you. But you look like a monster.”
And thus, she returned to her old lunches of three mouthfuls of vegetable soup, and the weight fell right off.
***
My college roommate, Lauren, was the Lana Turner to my Judy Garland. She was even a real ballerina, so if we were in a movie like Ziegfield Girls (as Judy and Lana were), she would have been able to do all the dance sequences, no problem. Unlike Judy Garland, I very much would not have been able to.
Lauren was all swan.
I was all duck.
Or at least that’s how I felt.
Lest you think I’m exaggerating about her, her husband, who later became a writer, used the pseudonym Grace Kelly for Lauren in his first book, a book that won a huge award and sold lots of copies. All of us who knew Lauren found his use of the Grace Kelly moniker perfectly apt.
Anyway, if we had been in Ziegfield Girls together, Lauren would have been the romantic lead, pursued by all and sundry, falling passionately in love, and I would have been chastely hopping off to pretend sip a chocolate malt with my sexless adolescent crush.
Imagine that you look a little or a lot like Judy Garland, depending on the day. You’ve put on 30 pounds in the last year, and most of it seems to have gone to your upper arms and your already round face. You know (intellectually) that you aren’t that far off the norm, the standard, whatever that means. You lose those 30 pounds. Maybe 40, and you’ll be a size you know is considered ideal. That’s not all that much, but it’s indicative of how powerful the standard is, that this relatively slight variation feels as though it consigns you to secondary status.
Beyond that, you’ve got cystic acne so deep you’ve begun taking Acutane to manage it, which means that now your facial skin keeps peeling off like wallpaper. You are attempting to be less complicit in global child slavery by never buying fast fashion, the only fashion you could afford, but what that means instead is that you are mostly wearing ill-fitting men’s pants purchased at thrift stores with an alternating series of silk tops from Express and Limited.
Now imagine that you are this version of Judy Garland, with scarred and peeling cheeks and old bell bottoms and a red silk blouse that accentuates rather than disguises an uncomfortable new layer of belly fat, and imagine that every day, three times a day, you walk to your college cafeteria next to a Lana Turner/Grace Kelly.
You know that Lana Turner/Grace Kelly’s dad is an asshole and that her mom has been diagnosed with terminal cancer and that she farts loudly in your room and that she sticks the antenna from your cordless phone into her nose in moments of reverie and that she snort-laughs and that she pees her pants when you watch that one Wings rerun together where William Hickey says, “Maybe it was Las Cruces!” and then you both recite it together at the same time. And maybe you already know, or you will, that she’s as lonely and lost as anyone.
You know all of this, which is to say, you know Lana Turner/Grace Kelly is just a person, just a regular person—a kind, funny, ordinary, smart person you like and love.
But.
Then you leave your room beside her and not a single boy you pass, not even the nerdy ones who are waiting to talk to you about how they stayed up all night playing Diablo, looks at you at first.
Not until Lana Turner/Grace Kelly has settled herself at a table full of soccer players, broad of shoulder and taut of calf, and you have brought your tray of cheeseburger macaroni or some other gray mush to the table full of gamers who suddenly feel like you are worth looking at.
***
Even at church, there were Judy Garland/Lana Turner distinctions, and the Bible did no great job of convincing me otherwise.
Growing up in church (four times on Sunday as well as twice on Wednesday and once on Saturday nights), I came to believe there were two general categories of women: there were Rachel women and Leah women.
My mother was a Rachel just as my roommate also was.
I felt like a Leah.
The Rachel/Leah distinction refers to the two daughters of Laban in the Old Testament who would eventually, along with their maids, mother the twelve tribes of Israel.
The story goes like this: After stealing his brother Esau’s blessing from their father Isaac, Jacob the patriarch ran away to his uncle’s house to find shelter. Upon his arrival, he saw his beautiful kinswoman, Rachel, coming in with the sheep. He told Laban that he would work for seven years to earn the right to marry Rachel. But Rachel had an older sister, Leah, the sight of whom did not inspire Jacob to love her. In fact, among the few biographical facts that the book of Genesis gives us, we hear only that Leah’s “eyes were weak” and that she was “hated” by Joseph for being plain.
Because Laban did not want to lose the financial benefits Jacob was helping him accrue, after Jacob’s seven years had been fulfilled, Laban decided to trick Jacob by presenting to him a veiled Leah on his wedding night instead of Rachel. He then would not release Rachel to Jacob until Jacob had worked another seven years.
My takeaway as a child?
Better to be a Rachel than a Leah.
Obviously.
Little in the rest of my life outside church—school, theater, auditions—contradicted this burgeoning belief. You could only do so much with what God gave you, and what God had given me was some Leah equipment with Rachel aspirations. Or to echo my earlier comparison, I was a Judy Garland with Lana Turner dreams.
***
My mother was a Rachel too.
On their second date, my father asked my mother to marry him. For five years, he continued to ask her, and she said no until she finally said yes.
My mother’s appearance might as well be the opposite of mine. She is tall(ish). She is blonde. She’s got green eyes. She’s got a thin slip of a nose and elegant, slender arms. She’s got high, pronounced cheekbones, and a willowy neck. Rachel-like, as a teenager, she collected suitors in droves. I spent most of my adolescence hoping (never successfully) to catch the eye of a boy who barely spoke to me.
When my mother was a sophomore in college, she became the DJ for an afternoon truckers’ hour on an AM country station out of Jackson.
She has always had a dusky alto voice, one with perfect pitch and range and vibrato, which she would use in countless church choirs when I was growing up. But this radio gig wasn’t a church choir. Instead, she used her dusky alto to sell sex by way of front-torsion-bar suspension systems for large vehicles.
The particular sponsor for this radio hour was the Velvet Ride Suspension Company, and so my mother’s online personality for the afternoon Velvet Ride Truckers Hour was “Miss Velvet Ride.”
When the radio hour would begin, there was a short jingle followed by my mother’s Southern-accented rasp (sounding a little like if Dixie Carter and Demi Moore had a baby) purring, “Hey, all you truckers out there. Mind if I climb into the cab with you for a while? It’s Miss Velvet Ride.”
My father told this story about my mother often when I was growing up—at church parties, at high school reunions, at work functions—and it never occurred to me until later to question why people always laughed at it: this recollected radio sex voice of my demure and responsible Christian mother, the one whose prayer life people were always coming up to me to compliment, whose low voice, by the time I was in high school, was used to instruct her second-grade class as well as her weekly Rubies and Pearls Senior Women’s Sunday School Class and to help my brothers and me every night with our homework.
My mother discovered her singing voice when she was in middle school in the mid-60s, around the same time a Catholic neighbor of hers first brought her to mass. It would be there, as well as in her mother’s car singing old hymns, that she would learn to sing harmonies with the songs that bridged the gap between Vaticans I and II. It would be at that Catholic Church, according to my mother, that God would save her from the hellish family life she’d thus far endured: a mother thrice married and too burdened with her own ghosts to offer my mother respite, and men who screamed and threw things and did much worse.
As a result, even as a young child, my mother planted the softness she did not receive inside herself and tended its light-starved photosynthetic shoots by retreating into books. From the time she learned to read she was never without one, and for all of my life, she has devoured them wholesale. There was never a week that went by when I was a child that my mother didn’t tear through two to three books. Never a week in which we weren’t coming and going to the library multiple times to pick up new ones.
My mother found that softness, once located inward after a brief retreat, could also be turned outward to great effect.
Her softness would become her calling card.
“Hi, Sweetie,” she would coo to anyone who ever called looking to talk to me, which never failed to make boys on the other end giggle. At the elementary school where she taught, any kid who needed a hug would run to my mom and get three hugs. Any kid who didn’t have breakfast or who’d forgotten their lunch knew my mom would have something squirreled away for them in the back of her room.
“Your mother is the gentlest, sweetest, godliest woman I’ve ever met. You are so lucky to have such a kind mother. I bet she never even yelled at you once,” the ladies of the Rubies and Pearls would often pull me aside to say.
And I would, accurately, agree.
She never yelled at me once.
But there was (as there always seems to be) so much more to my mother than her softness: her way of flipping my dad off when he annoyed her, her insistence that she was always right on any subject no matter what evidence could be provided to the contrary, her sheer bloodlust and obsession with dystopian films from Terminator to Aliens.
She’s never been a story I could tell simply, and I look nothing like her.
Even as an adult, more often than not, when I’ve shown a new friend a picture of my mother, they’ve turned to me in disbelief: “THAT’S your Mom?!” they say, as if it’s inexplicable that I was created in her body.
***
It shouldn’t have mattered.
I was constantly told physical appearance shouldn’t and didn’t matter.
“Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting” read the Bible verse I taped to my adolescent mirror.
It’s what’s inside that counts, said every well-meaning Bible Study teacher or TV special or school assembly speaker ever.
But the same youth director who read me the Bible verse about fleeting beauty also admonished the girls in your youth group that our pastor’s stunning and high-femme wife (who was America’s Junior Miss 1977) should be a model to us for how to continue to be attractive for our future husbands, who would only stay faithful to us as long as we stayed fit and well-groomed and lovely.
He was one of a hundred other voices, some even less subtle, telling us how very much looks mattered.
At the same time, I was also told I mattered because I was made in God’s image, whatever that meant, but God was faceless, which is what I most feared becoming.
For better or worse, looks mattered. Looks mattered when I was auditioning for a role. Looks mattered when I eventually gave up auditioning for roles. Looks mattered in every story of every happily married grown-up I ever heard. What did you first like about her? Someone would always ask. Her legs. Her mouth. Her eyes. Her face. Her hair. Someone else would always answer first before mentioning other things like personality or character.
The reality was that in the white evangelical South, I inhabited every bit as much as any film audition I ever showed up for, a particular kind of symmetry got you in the door or kept you on the stage or in front of the camera or in the relationship.
Were there exceptions?
Of course.
But only enough of them to prove the rule.
Or at least that’s how I felt when I was seventeen years old and desperately afraid my face and my body explained away my heaviest feelings, and if I could just “fix” my face and body, the magic that beauty bestowed might make me magic too—might make me brave enough to act again, might make me like boys who were kinder or healthier than the aloof ones I kept chasing.
Even if appearances never mattered, even if facial symmetry was insignificant, even if it was only ever truthfully what was inside that counted, here’s what no one ever acknowledged: in pursuit of the gentle and quiet spirit women like me were exhorted by our elders to cultivate, it is every bit as easy to flay your insides raw as it is to flay your skin.
***
When I was eleven, I was cast in a movie about a Leah with Rachel aspirations.
The script was adapted from a Beth Henley play: The Miss Firecracker Contest. One of my mother’s closest friends at the time, Alice Decell, was a friend of Beth’s (she was a friend of everyone famous, even Amy Grant who I adored, so I was hitching my wagon to Alice’s star and never looking back), and introduced us as soon as the cast and crew arrived in town.
My mother, who knew how much I already loved being in plays and watching movies over and over again and how much I would mimic the voices of actors on television, took me to an open casting call for extras, and thus, I landed the part of Girl #1.
Miss Firecracker the film follows the divergent stories of two cousins played by Holly Hunter (who is this film’s version of a Leah) and Mary Steenburgen (this film’s Rachel). For years, Holly Hunter’s character, Carnelle, has entered the Miss Firecracker beauty pageant, hoping to emulate her cousin Elain’s win (Elain is Mary Steenburgen) from many years prior. The film is set in the last year of Carnelle’s eligibility for the pageant, her last ticket out of town, her last chance to make a name for herself.
Elain returns to town, from her glamorous perch in better locales—which we are meant to understand was made possible because of her pageant victory—for a reunion of sorts with other previous winners.
Long story short, Carnelle loses the pageant for the last time, and while watching the fireworks show afterward, learns to make peace with her life as it is: not Miss Firecracker, not Elain, not a Rachel.
In my appearance as Girl #1, Mary Steenburgen’s daughter Lilly and I brought roses to her mother.
In the scene, she’s leaning up against a wall talking to Tim Robbins, who plays her estranged brother with whom she has now made peace.
Lilly says, “Miss Elain, we brought you some roses.”
And then I say, “I love you, Miss Elain. And I want to be just like you.”
Mary Steenburgen then brushes her hand against both our cheeks in a maternal way and says, “Aren’t you sweet?”
She hands us back the roses and then says, “All beautiful girls deserve long-stemmed red roses.”
The scene was cut, but Mary Steenburgen actually mailed me a tape of it along with a kind letter explaining why the cut was made (editors felt it cut short the scene between brother and sister, secretly I worried it was because I was fumbled my one line so many times they just scrapped it) that I have kept all these years later.
The point of the story was that the Carnelle’s and Leah’s of the world could still make peace with their internal beauty, despite what they lacked, and that what mattered was your grit and persistence and zest for life, not whether you could be a graceful contestant in a small-town beauty pageant. And I cried when I saw the film, not because my scene had been cut, which I already knew, but because I felt so for Carnelle.
I felt just like her.
I wanted to run away to somewhere magic too.
I wanted to win the contest that would get me out of this small Southern town that kept telling me I was ugly and weird and awkward and whose critique of me I believed more fervently than any other gospel I was sold.
I wept through the entire film because I was so moved by it, so stunned to see so many daily sights—the Hastee Tastee drive-thru, the big white house on the corner of Grand and Canal—made magic there up on a screen that could be seen by anyone anywhere all around the world.
My scene was shot at sunset on the edge of a bluff overlooking the Yazoo River. Two of the crew members wrangled an enormous reflective screen that threw the gold and rose tones of the sunset back onto our faces. I remember being momentarily blinded by the screen the few times I glanced at it directly.
Sometimes the screen wavered in the wind, and I could feel the waves of its refracted bouncing off my cheek.
In the years to come, long after the movie had been packed up and all the famous people who’d descended upon my small town had returned to Hollywood, I would find myself glancing bluff-ward in the direction of that recollected incandescence. I focused my native fierceness toward burnishing that flash of gold that I knew lived inside me and which other people—casting directors and boys I wanted alike—would be able to see if I could only burnish it bright enough.
***
In 1954, Judy Garland mounted a huge comeback, after years of struggles with addiction and depression (struggles which originated in her studio-mandated use of diet pills to maintain optimal physical symmetry), in A Star is Born. Many critics consider this not only her best film, but her best performance. In it, she’s like a lit match aglow, her golden energy crackling through the screen. In 1955, she was nominated for a “Best Actress in a Leading Role” Oscar for this electric performance.
Everyone thought she would win. She’d been too magnetic, too charismatic, too emotionally raw in her performance as Esther Blodgett to lose. She was a shoo-in. Even the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was so convinced that Garland would win the Oscar that they dispatched a film crew to the hospital where she’d just given birth to her son, Joey, so that she could give her acceptance speech there live from her bed.
But as it turns out, there was never any need for cameras.
Judy Garland lost to Grace Kelly.