Today is Leslie Lawson's birthday, better known to me as Twiggy. For some time, my good friend JW and I followed the deaths of celebrities because, as is a known fact, they die in threes. When one of us would hear of the death of someone famous or infamous, we'd call the other and speculate on the two who were sure to follow within the week. Morbid, I know, and frightening to others when they discovered our game, so we switched to birthdays. More upbeat. More suitable for women of moderate intelligence. Just as shallow.So, today's honor goes to Twiggy. When I was a little girl growing up on 17th Street in Blue Collar Town, I was not given a Barbie. The neighbor girls had Barbies and Barbie houses and Barbie cars and little suitcases full of Barbie clothes. But I had a set of jacks, a box of crayons, and a pile of dirt instead. I'm exaggerating about the dirt--it wasn't a gift but the result of some road construction or something, and it provided hours of imaginative play time.
I'm not sure why I wasn't given Barbies. I doubt it was because she was a materialistic slut who gave impressionable young girls the wrong impression of the reality of adult womanhood or because she was grotesquely misshapen. I think it never occured to my mother to gift me with a Barbie, a creature that didn't exist when she was a child growing up in rural Alabama during the 30s--something that shaped everything in our home.
But oddly, even though I had no Barbies I did have a Twiggy doll, which I may have shared with sister #3. Our Twiggy was just like Barbie without the breasts. Her clothes were "mod" and out of reach for those of us who wore handmade* clothes (more like pictures from Butterick or McCalls and less like anything from our decade), but she didn't come with very many accessories. Maybe it's because she didn't have a house and cars and a boyfriend and a box full of shoes that she ended up on the floor of the mildewy, spider-infested, damp and dark and cave-like basement--hair chopped to the scalp, clothes ripped and neglected, long emaciated limbs dotted with mold.
One of my mother's favorite threats when trying to get us to vacuum the living room or make our beds was this: "If you don't do what I told you, I'll lock you up in the basement and throw you biscuits for dinner!!" The image of that kind of existence was horrifying, but I always knew that if I ended up in the basement, I'd at least have Twiggy for company, even in her sad state of disrepair. If only she had come with more shoes.
*My mother was always quick to distinguish between handmade clothes and homemade clothes. Handmade meant that time and skill were involved, and homemade meant you were poor and trashy. So our clothes were handmade.
Comments
Rich