blonde hair that never went limp, and “of-the-moment” clothes straight out of a Guess catalog. I, on the other hand, was plagued with ghostly pale skin, frizzy brown hair, hopelessly crooked teeth (and thus three miserable years of braces) and a disturbing ineptness at making my outfits look even remotely trendy.  At that point in my life, I had never been described by the opposite sex as “hot” or “pretty”.  The most I could hope for was that guys would label me as “nice” and want to be friends with me.  But a large majority of them used me as verbal target practice.  They could sense my insecurity and found great delight in pouncing on it. 

I still remember walking home from school one May afternoon, my skinny legs revealing my glowing white skin beneath a knee-length skirt.  A car-load of high school boys suddenly drove by and one of them yelled mockingly, “Get a tan!”  I was deeply mortified.  (I will spare you the story of my subsequent attempt at using self-tanning cream, which ended up making me look strangely akin to one of those garishly orange Uumpa-Lumpas from that Charlie and Chocolate Factory movie back in the eighties.)

It had been easy enough to feel like a princess when I was eight, watching Walt Disney princess movies and then twirling around the backyard in a frilly dress.  But the older I became, and the more of the real world I experienced, the more I began to feel like an ugly stepsister instead of Cinderella.

It didn’t matter that my parents had repeatedly told me, “You are beautiful just the way you are!”  My youth leader’s lesson on “Accepting your own inner beauty and getting comfortable in your own skin” had not helped.  And my school counselor’s lectures on the importance of self-esteem hadn’t made even the slightest difference in my life.  The bottom line was that I wanted to be beautiful  - not with some vague “inner beauty” that had no value in the

real world, but with the kind of sexy, alluring, culture-pleasing appeal that I saw on billboards and T.V.  Somewhere between playing with my frilly dress-up clothes and doing the fake Maybelline commercial shoot, I had become convinced that this was the one road to true happiness and the only way to find real love.

        I’m not sure if modeling school made any real difference in my physical allure.  I certainly did not look like a model by the end of it.  One thing I do know; I spent nearly every waking moment of my life for about two years trying to make myself more appealing to the culture and to the opposite sex.

Eventually, all of my efforts did achieve a measure of outward beauty, and I finally began to gain guys’ attention.  But the ironic thing was that I still felt hopelessly ugly.  The first time a guy asked me out, I thought he was joking and started to laugh.  And when another guy told me I was pretty, I was shocked.  I looked at him in confusion and then blurted, “Really?” 

For all the time I spent chasing after the culture’s beauty standard, I never seemed to actually “get there.”  Sure, I might have graduated out of my frizzy-haired, pale skin, gangly and awkward phase.  But no matter how much make-up I put on, I still didn’t look like the cover of Seventeen or Vogue.  No matter how much I deprived myself of fries and milkshakes, my thighs never seemed to get as skinny as the girl on the Abercrombie poster.  And no matter how many guys showed interest in me, there were always scores of other girls that got far more male approval than I did. 

My search for feminine beauty, marred and tainted by modern society, had led me to an existence entirely centered upon myself.  Instead of pursuing the elegance and nobility that my fictional childhood heroines exuded, I was pursuing the sensual standard of pop-culture...

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