Stephanie Says.. Take a walk inside my head

I am not sophisticated in the least.  I’m not even a girly-girl, not really.  I’m clumsy, I haven’t worn a dress in
ever, and I take too much pleasure in discarding things to be a collector of rainbows or unicorns or stuffed
animals.

Something glamorous, however, must eek out of me in certain situations.  The first time I really thought
about this was in tenth grade.  I had been invited to a mystery dinner.  This remains the only mystery dinner
I’ve ever been to, so I have no way of knowing if all work like ours did, but to me a mystery dinner is one where
the menu items (including the silverware) are labled by some other name. Our theme was “The Farm” so the fork might
have been labeled as a shovel and corn as slop and so on and so forth.  (I somehow snagged a copy of the menu if
you’d like to see it.)

The courses each teenager were served depended on the numbers written beside each menu item.  So, if we picked
numbers 1, 14 and 27 for our first course, we might end up being served peaches, hamburger and a napkin first and
soda, chocolate cake and a spoon next.  If we guessed wrong and selected an order that didn’t include any kind of
flatware, we were out of luck.

Most of us ended up sticking our faces into our plates at some point during the evening but no one commented on it
until it was my turn.  I was seated across from a girl named Elisabeth who was everything I was not.  Elisabeth
was popular, but not in any vulgar kind of way.  Elisabeth had Class, with a capital C.  Apparently, she believed
that I did too, because she stopped me as I was about to individually pick up my beans and finger feed
myself.  She was the first person to ever say “You’re not the kind of girl whom I ever thought would eat with
your fingers.”

I realize this could have been meant as some kind of snotty insult, but I don’t think so.  Like I said,
Elisabeth was nice.  She had Class.

The second conversation in which someone decided to mention my hidden depths of mysterious elegance was around
the time that “Portrait of a Lady” was released.  I was in college and my friends and I tended to take long lunches
during which we would sit in the cafeteria for hours and talk about whatever we were thinking about that day.

One of our favorite games was to play “If your life were a movie, who would play you and why?”  It was Natalie who
suggested Nicole Kidman should play me.  (Keep in mind this was fifty pounds and three hair colors ago.)   At
the time, Nicole Kidman was the most beautiful actress we could imagine. For Natalie to suggest her was high praise
indeed because I am many things, but ladylike is not one of them.

I don’t know if I appear to be glamorous.  I suspect that I do not as I am continually spilling things into people’s
laps and tripping over my own feet.  But while I’m stumbling around, it’s nice to think of myself as someone
else.  Someone with class.  Someone with sophistication.  Somone whom Nicole would like to portray.