Little girl bullied but transcendent
She and her mother were always a bit more sensitive, more artistic and, yes outwardly sweeter than the residents of the Brooklyn apartment complex along the bay. They were also more physically beautiful. The mom looked like a combination of Elizabeth Taylor and Natalie Wood. When she dressed up and went to Manhattan with her husband, they were often stopped for autographs. Her husband would nod knowingly when people asked about his wife, “Didn’t we just see you on Broadway?” Yes, he would say, this is the new ingénue Mandy Olsen, taking off on his wife’s first name, Amanda, and totally Anglicizing their German Jewish last name to sound like a legitimate actresses name. Then they would proceed to sign autographs. Her face was totally familiar and her beauty of the Hollywood kind. Little could they guess that she was just a housewife, a woman who married too young at a time when it was not common for a woman to know what gifts she possessed.
Her daughter combined her mother’s dark beauty with her dad’s sandy, Scottish-looking redhead complexion. Big hazel eyes, a big smile, long auburn hair, and freckles. She was in love with performing, possessing a voice with natural power, tone and range. She would dance and sing on the streets of new york, performing for crowds on the busses and subways, dressed sometimes in a tutu while pretending to be a prima ballerina of the New York City ballet. She was truly a female of the next generation, full of open-hearted zest and fully prepared to share her gifts with the world. All this was generously given until that one day on the bus when a woman yelled out, “Why don’t you tell that kid to shut up?” The girl cowered onto her mother’s lap, asking “why?” Mom said that some people are just mean.
Yet, somehow, they didn’t know this in their DNA. They didn’t know that people less complex, less nice, found their open sunniness to be a threat and wanted to quash it, actually looking for ways to diminish them and make them close in. Some people were meaner, and these thin-skinned women let them get inside, let them take their glow. They would kick themselves off and recover, only to be hurt again. Somehow they weren’t full within themselves, knowing that they could rise above the cousin who purposely stuck her foot out to trip the girl, or the neighborhood kids who called her “baby, baby stick your head in gravy”; or when they threw rocks at the poor stray cat the girl tried to save. Somehow they were always surprised, at first wondering if it was they that had done something wrong. They could never just say, what an asshole that person was and brush it off. It would stay with them, causing a very small amount of self-doubt about themselves to always reside within.
All through her life the girl would face these types of people. Her biggest lesson was to know who she was and to not seek praise outside herself. Vanity was, after all, one of the seven deadly sins.
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