I Want to Be Her! by Andrea Linett

Author:Andrea Linett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams Image
Published: 2012-10-23T04:00:00+00:00

That summer, Dana’s best friend, Lisa, stayed with us after a trip to Paris, and we would sit in awe listening to her describe Parisian fashion and hip French words. Back in the pre-Internet days all we had were magazines and firsthand accounts. The biggest coup ever was if you had a friend going to Europe and they could bring you back what you could only get there, like Boy bondage pants from London, or Superga sneakers from Italy. That summer, all the French girls were wearing paper-bag-waist tapered jeans and calling everything “schwett” (cool). That was it—we had to have these new French jeans. I can’t remember how we got our hands on them, but we did (they must have gotten them in at Bloomingdale’s, or my NYC/East Hampton friend Abby may have picked them up on one of her many trips to Europe), and I explained to anyone who would listen that these were what all the French girls wore, in France.

When we weren’t scooping ice cream and fighting over who got to use the register, or frying ourselves on Main Beach on our days off, we were counting the hours till we could hit the clubs with our fake IDs. Every night there was something to get excited about—ladies’ night, employees’ night, you name it, we were (embarrassingly) first in line. I thought a lot about what would look best while I was dancing (if that’s what you call skipping in place) to songs like “What I Like About You” and “I Know What Boys Like.” This was definitely a time that called for an edgy hairstyle. The manager of Häagen-Dazs was a townie girl with a lot of gay friends and—just my luck—one of them was in beauty school. On my day off, I drove to his mobile home, where he transformed me with an of-the-moment asymmetric bob. I tucked the shorter side behind my ear, just like all the girls in Mademoiselle. (This often caused awkward long-hair-sneaking-over-to-the-shorter-side moments; I spent a lot of time pulling those strands back over where they belonged.) And then there was my stellar club outfit: a Bundeswehr tanktop that I only bought after checking with my dad first (“It’s just the German army after World War II, not the Nazis,” he assured me when I called him at work from a payphone outside Unique Clothing Warehouse), a black cotton tiered mini, black Zodiac wrestling-style boots, and a rubber belt. I nearly burst with pride when a vacationing girl from London complimented my style, until Dana said, “They’re not really known for their fashion sense over there. If she were from Paris, that would be another story.”

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