The Beauty Diarist Speaks!
What I didn't mention in the first piece about this book is that Babs thoughtfully included several pages, separated by month and day, for her readers to use as their personal beauty diary, to keep track of what they discovered when they found their faces and whatnot.
And the original owner of the book did, in fact, use this book as a diary, although not for very long. I'm probably a real skanky hosebitch for revealing what she wrote, even if it did all take place before I was born, but I liked the few brief entries anyhow. I didn't notice them until after I'd already bought the book, but I now consider them an indispensable part of the book's campy appeal.
The diarist, a graduating high school senior, had the gift of brevity. When I graduated from high school, it was a momentous event to me, and I used up several pages of my journal scribbling about What It All Meant. (The endless navel-gazing in these pages and my message board is a habit developed over decades.) Here's what the diarist (whose name we never learn) had to say about her graduation:
"We graduated. It was nice and great fun walking through 'daisy chain.' Uncle Dean came - unfortunately, Dick couldn't." That's it. She graduated. No looking back -- and no looking forward.
Her senior prom a few days later excited her a bit more: "Senior Prom. Decorations were great - we walked in under canope. [sic] Good band and 'HOT' dancers. (Emphasis not mine.) Dick wasn't feeling too cool though."
Nor was our dear diarist given to much in the way of romantic angst: "Went over to Dick's. He is sick and has to stay off his feet. We played cards and watched TV. I was very depressed - I can't seem to see him enough and hate to leave him."
The diarist details a few more incidents of visiting the recuperating Dick and going to the fair and the beach with her friends Becca and Chuck ("Water was too cold to enjoy so we just concentrated on each other") before we finally get to the hot 'n' juicy stuff on Friday, July 16:
"At Dick's again. He seemed somewhat better today. Guess the change in medicine helped. The infection in his mouth cleared up too. Finally got to kiss him. On the way home his mom gave some words of wisdom on not getting serious. OH WELL."
So, how did it all turn out? Did our young diarist go on to college? Did she meet some hotshot college boy and realize that she and Dick had nothing in common anymore? ("All Dick ever wants to talk about is CARS. But Jeff cried for days when Kennedy was shot. He's DEEP.") Or did she find out through the grapevine that Dick had met some hot-to-trot coed at his own college, sending her into endless jags of pillow-soaking heartbreak? ("Becca said there's more where Dick came from. But it's not fair. He said he loved me. OH WELL.") Or did they get married and go on to have 2.5 kids? ("Gave birth to our daughter today. It was nice and great fun.") Perhaps she just skipped college altogether, believing that college wasn't the ladylike thing to do. We'll never know, because the diary stops there.
However, a few other things she wrote in (and did to) the diary offer tantalizing glimpses of another side of her personality, and indicate that maybe there was something else lurking under the bland paper-doll facade, after all. Evidence suggests that our diarist didn't think much of Babs' suggestion that girls form a "Charm Club" with other girls "interested in improving their looks and etiquette." Our diarist wrote "Get together" over the top of that page and then scrawled tic-tac-toe squares in pencil all over the text. It could have just been an absent-minded doodle while she was gabbing on the phone with Becca, or perhaps Dick. But maybe not.
Several pages later, on some more blank pages, our diarist scribbled something that sounds downright militant: "Leave the ones involved in the people alone." Whoa. But right after that on the next page, there's this: "All except - what happen to that lill piece of hair." What can successive generations say to that, except "Huh?" Both statements were scrawled across the pages in blatant disregard of the helpful lines and margins Babs went to the trouble of providing. Perhaps our diarist and Dick and Becca and Chuck broke into Mom and Dad's liquor cabinet when they were away, and this was the result. Or maybe our diarist was seized by one of those fits of angst that seems to hit all teens on the brink of adulthood: You're indignant about how much the world stinks and you want to be the one to save it -- but you want to look cool while you're doing it.
Anyhow, I liked the small glimpses into someone else's life. Hope you did too. And I hope I haven't bought myself Bad Diary Karma for posting the stuff here. You'd find out a lot more about me by reading my teenage journals, which is why I've buried them in a desert in Arizona.
