by Lisa Mitchell
In the 1940s, when I was a little girl growing up in Hollywood, my family lived in a bungalow in back of a large rooming house, which meant that because I happened to be the only child among many adult tenants, I received a lot of attention. One Sunday when I was six, some visiting relatives of one of the boarders brought a baby along, over which everyone fussed for what seemed to me a very long time, and suddenly I felt invisible and, I think, a little scared. Now my first, my very first explanation to myself for why I was no longer the apple of eyes, why the grown-ups were no longer pinching my cheeks was this: I must not be dressed right. I swear to you, I spent that interminable Sunday afternoon going in and out of the house, changing clothes I don’t know how many times.
Ours was a very unposh and ordinary street without a single grand house on the block, yet down at the El Adobe corner drug store, I’d sip malts next to extras and bit players, would-be movie cowboys in ten-gallons, occasionally employed dancers wearing off-the-shoulder peasant blouses and enormous hoop earrings. You could find them all over the city, because this was a company town. They were fairy-tale princes and princesses, and what they wore was wonderful.
If you grew up in Hollywood and its environs, you osmotically became just more aware of how people look than kids did in most any other place. This is where the handsome people come and the not-so-handsome can be metamorphosed — or at least embark on a personal quest to resemble their dream. It’s where you come to search for the perfect wave of approval. This is a land where many, though they may never have read it, share a belief in the Kurt Vonnegut line: “We are what we pretend to be.” Some will follow trends, some will make uniforms out of them, some will just go on as we always have, wearing whatever we thinks works best for however we choose to dream the dream.
Excerpt reprinted with permission from Westways magazine/Automobile Club of Southern California