The Reluctant Debutante

I was the earliest to arrive at any destination from the time I could crawl to it. And because I was cursed with such abhorrence of tardiness, this meant I was necessarily then the one who would circle the block until she saw other cars securely parked so as not to be first to arrive—such visibility could reduce me to heart-palpitating pulp and only result in disaster. In fact, even if I was part of an already established gathering, to walk or talk in front of more than one other person required more courage than even Oz’s wizard could have endowed.

Instead of growing out of my fear, from the moment I was crowned Prom queen of Mayfield all-girls convent high school, I became even more reticent to take the stage. The senior-class nominee who felt she deserved the honor since I was a lowly junior, threw beer cans during the ceremony, and my blind date was so embarrassed he refused to utter a spoken word throughout the entire evening. I didn’t learn the truth until that summer: my best friend’s mother Betty Jo had stuffed four twenty-dollar bills through the slot in the fundraiser shoebox bearing my name (the boxes having been reserved for student voting-contributions only). Martha, if you are still out there and reading this, the cardboard bejeweled tiara is rightfully yours; come and get it.

As I continued to mature, being attention-central was downright dangerous. I practiced drifting down our front stairway at my mother’s urging (this, the “grand entrance” she considered a vital mating ritual) when my inborn penchant for speed sent me soaring off the edge of the carpeted top step and through the air until my head broke the fall and lodged in the plaster wall two steps from our front door. My father had to hand-saw a larger hole around my skull to set me free, and although my mother felt temporarily thwarted in social-skill home schooling, I was only relieved to abandon such spotlighted scenarios. Before I’d even begun my death-defying descent I’d warned her: I never could see the point in purposely keeping someone waiting.

Undaunted, Mama enrolled me in the John Robert Powers School of Modeling in Pasadena so that I might yet stand a chance at wielding the feminine wiles.

“Drawing attention is a good thing!” she emphatically averred.

Easy advice from one who, as a girl, had exuded the magic potion which naturally fashioned boys out of thin air whenever she cracked open her own back door.

The initiation walking class to critique ambulatory artistry resulted in such a paralyzing attack of stage fright that I diagonally crossed the room like a wind-up toy soldier. I was like Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove who had no control over his saluting arm, except my arms locked stiff at my sides or swung in sync with my legs—same arm, same leg, until I crashed nose first into the wall. Mein Furher—I can’t walk! The ninety-year old former-model instructor merely nodded and asked that I try again, this time please alternating limbs. I was spared when facial swelling caught her eye, and was ushered to the kitchen for ice packs.

For years my “Before and After” picture assaulted me every time I drove past the window on Colorado Boulevard—the hopeless loser metamorphosed into possible Rose Parade Princess. Once again, I suffered the humiliation of center stage when all I longed for was to be a relaxing member of the audience.

Younger sister having uncategorically declined all maternal invitations to improve, my firstborn duty-inclination escalated into granting Mama free rein for the most ghastly of all public exposures—the dreaded debutante ball. She had dedicated her entire “sinking fund”, the stash of money saved for emergency until it appeared nothing was actually going to sink, to me so that I might access what she had not. It was up to her eldest to live the dream: I was presented not to Pasadena society, but to the Cardinal of the Catholic Church.

Such archaic assembly celebrating the readiness of twentieth-century young ladies seemed redundantly ridiculous and in this case, I was making my debut to a panel of vestmented celibates seated onstage at the swanky Beverly Hills Hotel. The ironies were too numerous and overlapping to unravel as I dressed for professional photos in the equivalent of no wedding gown I would ever wear to marry, then faced the horror of the ballroom-length runway dead-ending at a priestly line-up. Arm-in-arm with my agnostic father to the orchestra’s rendition of Younger than Springtime—past 500 people staring up at me, could I overcome skyrocketing panic and grant this favor to the woman who bore me?

Luckily Daddy was there to remind me how to walk the natural walk (“Alternate, Kathleen, alternate.”), and since I had inherited my abhorrence for applause from him, we were in this terror together. When the music started and we began to process, I felt an out-of-body experience, a third-world epiphany as I gazed around me at the outrageous opulence and thought about the ways a church should be channeling such excessive spending. Parading above the banqueting elite, I considered breaking out of my mousey-mold and making a wild political statement by grabbing the microphone and announcing that I would donate the entire buffet to Biafra. Sort of a Jane Fonda/ feminist/Papal-protest/Cardinal coup d’etat.

Wouldn’t rebellion, however, catapult me even further into the limelight? Instead of being the “Runaway Bride”, I would have had to mount my stallion, head West on Wilshire Boulevard to some small suburb, and claim the identity of the “Derailed Deb”. Such an escapade would only serve to splash my picture across all the supermarket tabloids.

In the end I decided acquiescence was the only course of action that would keep visibility to a minimum. Until, during a moment of stone silence, while nervously kissing Cardinal McIntyre’s ring on bended knee just as I had been instructed to do, my trembling lips froze in a pucker and emitted a loud smooching sound picked up by his undercover mike. After this high-pitched sucking echoed off the walls of the vast ballroom, there was nothing to do but take my proper place on stage and consider the very real possibility that I might only be marriage-marketable to Catholic bachelors or kissing bandits--this far too limiting a potential dating pool. Out of the corner of my eye I saw my mother’s head hit the tablecloth. There was always the nunnery, which would solve my desire for anonymity as well as atonement.

And no sooner was the grueling gala complete, my mother having recovered and now languid in a state of parental peace, than I bee-lined for my 1965 red Mustang to head back to the college dorm and vanish until graduation when I would have to come up with a plan for accepting my diploma without fanfare. Having removed all my belongings before the vacation and now planning to transport them back to school, I uncannily found my car had been violated and every article of clothing I owned stolen. Seems that while I was “coming out” someone else had been breaking in—a perfect finale to the curse that followed me whenever I had to step anywhere within visual range of the public eye.

But instead of deeming it yet another side-effect of the grizzly grand-entrance, beneath the surface layer of criminal inconvenience, this time I recognized an accidental blessing in disguise: perhaps my wish to contribute conspicuous consumption had been granted most remarkably from a parking structure instead of a publicized gala, and maybe to someone who had been destitute, reduced to robbery.
Shedding the self-conscious skin of a sheltered childhood, I was inspired to start from scratch; in lieu of the unconscionable same skirt in four colors I would purchase only one—just the necessities. Instead of dressing for the next embarrassing encore, I could hang it up; no longer struggle to fit into the uncomfortable fabric that precluded attention.

Instead, I would try on the wardrobe of a substantive woman whose milieu was backstage—the accidental worthwhile waiting in the wings.