Growing Up (in pictures)

(RIGHT) I was a very happy baby, but almost entirely bald. I was actually born with a full head of thick, curly black hair, causing my mother much joy and happiness, because she loves curly dark hair. Unfortunately, my hair promptly all fell out, as if to spite her, leaving my poor mother little recourse except to tape bows upon my shiny cranium in some effort to announce my femininity to a world so cruel to new mothers. "Is ... it ... a boy or a girl?"

By the time this photo was taken, I had begun to grow a sparse crop of hair on my head again, but it couldn't compare to that first, newborn hairdo.

I had also, if you notice, already perfected my Michelin Tire Man impression, though it had only thus far progressed to my arms.

My mom was, of course, a major force in my life when I was little, but it's terribly hard to find her in any pictures, because she took them all! She always had a camera, so there are tons of photos of my brother and me, but few of her.

(LEFT) And now we have Halloween 1973, when my brother dressed as a baseball player and I dressed as an angel. In truth, we were both simply wearing pyjamas with a few accessories to make them into "costumes." My mom made a halo out of aluminum foil and thoroughly rouged my cheeks, then put a baseball cap on my brother's head and subjected him to the rouge treatment as well. I'm not sure why my mom felt that rouged cheeks should be a part of every childhood Halloween costume, but it continued for quite a while.

(RIGHT) This is my brother and me with Uncle Al, player of the Easter Bunny for me when I was little, rambunctious husband to Aunt Bev, who had long straight hair and played "Puff the Magic Dragon" on her guitar. Nally and I adored Uncle Al, though modern society would probably be suspicious of a grown man playing with two small children. That's kind of sad, actually. Uncle Al was a lot of fun.

(BELOW, LEFT) Ahh. Next we have photographs of the day on which I received my first kiss. I was almost 4. My cousin Bobby was 6. He was a charming older man ... how could I resist? Especially when we were sleeping under the same blanket? Our cousins Bobby and Denny had come to visit us for a few days ... who knew that romance would bloom?

A few things to notice. In the upper left, we have (left to right) Bobby on a Big Wheel, my brother Alan on a tricycle, Denny on a Big Wheel, me on a tricycle (with stylish streamers on the handlebars). Denny is pointing a squirt gun at my mother who is taking the photo. Bobby and Denny were pretty obnoxious with the squirt guns on this visit, actually. My 2-year-old brother couldn't figure out how to work the squirt guns, and so he would just take the gun to the spigot, fill it with water, then drink out of the squirt gun, then start the process all over again. Sort of unclear on the concept.

On the upper right, Denny is displaying an evil expression while I cover my mouth, giggling. In truth, what was happening here was that Denny kept bashing into the back of my tricycle, trying to make me fall off. I apparently thought this was terribly funny.

On the lower left, we see my cousin Bobby warming up for that first kiss, giving me some kind of line like, "Come here often?" I am once again giggling into my hand. On the lower right, we are rudely interrupted by Denny, who leapt upon us with no warning. The course of true love never did run smooth. Notice, however, that I am still giggling into my hand. I think I was just terribly embarrassed and excited by this whole "two cute boys in the house and one of them keeps flirting with me" situation. No shameless hussy, I.

(RIGHT) As a warning to any of you who might mean me harm, I now present this photo of me with a rifle. Okay, it might be more threatening if I wasn't topless, but the underpants are so awful that they alone might strike fear into the hearts of evil-doers everywhere.

My dad is in the foreground. We're down by the creek that ran behind his house in Silverado Canyon. This was when my parents were divorced, but Dad hadn't yet moved out of California, so we spent every other weekend with him. Alan and I had a lot of fun playing back in the creek (which Dad pronounced "crick," leaving me with an apparently permanent tendency to pronounce the word that way). Dad taught me to shoot rifles from a young age (as evidenced here), and we continued to shoot at bottles and cans together well into my 20s, at which point we became estranged for a while.

(LEFT: Lisa Hayton, Ernie Hayton, Billie Cline, Alan Cline, me) When I was about five years old, Mom, Alan, and I moved in with Ernie Hayton and his two kids, Carl and Lisa. Ernie and my mom didn't marry until a year or so later, but at that point his personality changed. Ernie was pure evil. Controlling, abusive, and just plain unpleasant. I didn't like him from the first time I met him, but I didn't say anything to my mom. She later said I should have said something, because maybe it would have made her think twice. Anyway, we were with Ernie for a couple years, until my mom just couldn't take it anymore and we ran away in the night. For years we had an unlisted phone number and my mom seemed afraid that Ernie would track us down, but I never saw him again. Years later, Mom saw him once in a store, but she hid until he was gone.

(RIGHT) Oh my. This is me and my brother at some sort of small festival run by the local Elks lodge. The first thing I'll have you notice is how incredibly terrible our clothes are. This was during the period of time when we were getting most of our clothes from the local CHOC (Children's Hospital of Orange County) thrift stores. My pants are obviously too small and Alan's t-shirt has a HONDA motorcycle on it (and he has gotten the shirt incredibly dirty, but he just tended to do that). Our outfits are saved, however, by the fact that I am wearing a candy necklace (always in style) and Alan is wearing vampire teeth and waving a back-scratcher. We're also both wearing some kind of cheesy medals, probably for three-legged races and such.

(LEFT) In fourth grade I joined the Girl Scouts, which involved such activities as learning morse code and standing in a circle singing songs. I'd been a Brownie when I was younger, but in Girl Scouts I started earning badges. I was good friends with a couple of people in my troop (Amanda Griffin, Linda Nocella, etc.), but didn't like the cliquishness of many of the girls.

At the end of fourth grade, I skipped fifth grade entirely and moved on to sixth, which suited me fine. In fourth I had been in a "combination class" consisting of both fourth- and fifth-graders, and the people who became my friends were all fifth-graders, so I was moving on with my friends. I think the administrators expected me to have a tough time adjusting -- it seems like they were always checking on me -- but it all worked fine.

(RIGHT) Holy mackerel! Welcome to my really really awkward stage I went through around 11-12 years old. I had a really bad perm, gigantic plastic-frame glasses, and a number of teeth that fell out at the same time, leaving me with a Bugs Bunny sort of effect.

You should also note my red-and-white striped pyjamas. I loved these and wore them often, partially because my two best friends had matching pyjamas and we wore them whenever we spent the night at each other's houses.

The reason this photo was taken, however, was to spotlight the new headphones I had received for Christmas. Check them out. They're as big as my head. And my stereo is a happenin' bit of technology, if I do say so myself. I particularly like the gargantuan radio tuner on the right-hand side. Stylin'!

(LEFT) Luckily, my hair grew out, my teeth came in, and I stopped wearing the striped pyjamas. You can't really see me very well here, but I was a pretty hot and happenin' babe, though I was incredibly shy and still wore the plastic-framed glasses. The gentleman playing cards with me on my bed is John, my best friend and first love for whom I pined for some 10 years, from junior high into college. I'm still in sporadic contact with him. He's now very happily married and has 5 kids.

If you look closely, you can see in the background a unicorn calendar, a picture from the movie The Last Unicorn, a feathered roach-clip (these were all the rage for a year or so, though I didn't wear mine clipped in my hair like the cool girls did), and extremely ugly curtains. John and I played cards all the time, sometimes in my room, sometimes in the kitchen, sometimes outside, just basically everywhere. Mostly not at his house, though, because his older brothers liked to rag on us.

(RIGHT) Well, we've had the first kiss and the first love, now we have the first date. Guy Carpino asked me to the Homecoming Dance freshman year, when I was 13 and he was 14. My mom wouldn't buy me a new dress, because we couldn't afford it, and so I wore the same dress I'd worn to 8th-grade graduation. Luckily, Guy wasn't too dressed up, either, so we matched pretty well.

At the dance, we didn't actually dance very much, because I was too shy and he was wearing his father's shoes, which were too big for him and hurt his feet. The one song I remember us dancing to (possibly the only song we danced to) was Spandau Ballet's "True." I'd hated the song previously, but then went into a stage of going all misty eyed and embarrassed whenever I heard it.

In the photo, you may notice the attractive dead plant in the upper right, displayed in a hanger made of shells. My mother was one hell of an interior designer! Go Mom!

(LEFT) Some people reading this will look at the photo and nod and smile and have fond memories. Others will blink and peer and wonder, "What the hell is all that crap on her walls?" This was my heavy-duty Duran Duran phase. All of the photos on the walls are Duran Duran pics, all of them gotten as fold-outs from teen magazines whose names I can't even remember.

The kitten I'm holding was named Nigel ... after John Nigel Taylor, bass player for Duran Duran. Make jokes at your leisure. She (yes, she, despite the name "Nigel") was a very sweet cat and I missed her a lot after I moved away. I cried a lot when Mom called me to tell me they'd had to put her to sleep.

What you can't see in this photo is that I'm also wearing a green-and-white Duran Duran t-shirt. I'm not joking, either. I had a serious obsession thing going on.

(RIGHT) Boy. Does this photo even require any explication? Yes, I did own some faux-Madonna clothing in the mid-1980s. I'm not sure if you can tell in this photo, but my hair is also partially dyed "blonde" (it was really pretty much orange, actually) in front. I think I still had a "tail" at this time, too, dangling down my back. I wanted simultaneously to be Madonna and to be one of the Thompson Twins (I had a huge crush on the red-haired lead singer, whose name I once knew but have now forgotten).

Notice my lack of accessories, though. Even as a teenager I was impaired in that department, though I did during this time have a tendency to wear very long, dangly earrings. I had both ears pierced twice. Now, about 20 years later, all 4 holes have closed up. I'm no longer chic. Darn.

(LEFT) This is me and my brother with a few of our cousins (no Bobby or Denny, though, as indicated by my loopy handwriting when I was 15) up at Griffith Observatory. I'd gained some weight at this point and was very sensitive about it, and so was trying to look as small as possible in this picture.

Things to notice: I'm wearing a Depeche Mode t-shirt. My cousin Misty is wearing the little plastic shoes that were so popular during this time period. Alan is wearing slip-on Vans, which had pretty much gone out of style.

(RIGHT) I have a lifetime habit of growing out my hair very long, cutting it very short, growing it very long, cutting it very short, etc. This was one of the shortest haircuts I've ever had which still managed to suit me. Usually, short hair makes me look like Charlie Brown. I liked this haircut, though.

This photo was taken when we were at a Parents Without Partners gathering. A hay ride, I think. We'd shown up early (my mother is always incredibly early for everything) and so my mom forced us to pose for some pictures while we waited for everyone to show up. "Pretend you like each other!"

Go forward to my adulthood