volume 9: bratz rock angels

"when I grow up, I want to be sexy"

hii babies! look! i’m keeping my promise. i’ve been thinking about you alllllll month and i have so much to tell you.

I often call upon a very ridiculous memory I have of one of my childhood best friends, Sara. Then, affectionately called Sadie. Sadie Inez. Her twin sister, born Maggie Mae Ilabelle, but was always Lili. Ironically, it was Sara who looked like Rod Stewart as a child. It’s London, Ontario, but apparently it could be Louisiana. Or Florida, or more accurately, Grand Bend.

She used to sport this torn and greying pair of teeny tiny green Crocs™ and was deep in a state of, upon reflection, almost certainly trauma-induced “rainbow-order” childhood OCD. Those crocs and that one stretched-out lilac halter top she used to yank to her ankles to show off the nodes of her pearly white spine to the boys should be preserved permanently in The Archives. For the girlhood annals!

We need to talk about the way writers are using “annals.” We simply cannot be throwing it around the way we do. Let this be a lesson.

She was 6 or maybe 7 and no more than 3-foot-something. She never did grow past 4’11”. Lili, 5’7”, hoarded all the nutrients in the womb, unfortunately consuming their triplet, Nassau, who never was. Sara has the bloodwork to prove it.

She’s so tiny and she’s so blonde. And in my memory, she has the choppy, shitty haircut from the sticky strip of unfortunate kindergarten photos that used to hang on their fridge. Somehow, she feels even smaller under the childhood sun. Amidst some sort of “when I grow up” sidewalk symposium, Sara says, “When I grow up, I want to be sexy.” She struts the concrete catwalk as to lead by example.

Note Sara’s rainbow top and our collective skirt modesty. (2008)

If you’re wondering, Sara did turn out to be sexy. There were a couple of school photos that made it look like the dream was just out of reach, but things really picked up circa King Kylie, babysitting our Lubavitch (the kind with the hats) Rabbi’s children in motocross t-shirts she DIYed to more visibly display her Aritzia bralettes.

All hail, King Kylie.

Sara wasn’t the only sexy baby in my sphere growing up. I often think back on my friendship with my next-door neighbour, Brittany. Particularly when I think of Easter eggs. We once spent an afternoon painting them in her dad’s carpeted (I know) kitchen. A haunting interior design feature I can only attribute to divorce. It was my first time painting an Easter egg. I can’t remember much else about that Sunday, but a few days later, I was told that her mom decided she wasn’t allowed to see her dad anymore, and just like that, she evaporated into a painful memory that her dad would sometimes inappropriately hot potato to me when I happened to catch him mowing the lawn outside.

I never did paint an Easter egg again, but when I trace my girlhood, I realize Brittany is the reason for so many things about me.

She was the kind of friend I would only ever make in London, and she had access to a flavour of Girl that only girls with dads who made up for lost time at the mall did. Nobody owned a Barbie Dream House, but Brittany did. My mom wouldn’t let me touch a Bratz doll with a 10-foot pole, but Brittany’s dad did.

She’s the reason I’m afraid of leeches, nail guns, tanning beds, and sometimes the subway. Divorced dads will let you watch anything when you’re 9, especially Final Destination 3. She’s the reason I love Ruffles All Dressed Chips, Coca-Cola, Rihanna, and Mean Girls.

As prescribed, every other weekend and every Wednesday we would park ourselves in front of her lumpy brown couch, undoubtedly purchased in one of those furniture sets from Leon’s or Lastman’s Bad Boy (I imagine they only make those for man caves and divorced people trying to rebuild), and choreograph to albums like P!nk’s Missundaztood, Avril Lavigne’s Let Go, and Gwen Stefani’s Love. Angel. Music. Baby., flipping through the album inserts and noting all the standard marks of Sexy.

Until Brittany, I knew other girls wanted to be sexy. But watching her, internalizing the richness of a life almost entirely opposite to mine, I learned that maybe I did too.

Learning about the power of sticking out your tongue…

Six months into my archeological mining of Bravo TV, I seem to be picking up where I left off. Somewhere between the sidewalk with Sara, Brittany’s brown couch, and eventually soft grunge Tumblr, revisiting the biblical definition of sexy as thin, white, bangable, and frankly, stupid. And I don’t feel any more immune to its allure than I did then, despite my efforts to re-parent myself by unfollowing Bella Hadid and the Carlson sisters on Instagram.

I pick at the scab of girlhood, and my desire to be thin, white, bangable, and stupid still bleeds. I witnessed a decade of shrinking and swelling of the Witches of WeHo on Vanderpump, and I feel self-conscious of my own shrinking and swelling. My body, an emergency. What I thought I had escaped in some sort of post-secondary idealism has creeped back in, and I’m left asking, naively: Didn’t we already figure this shit out? Didn’t I already figure this shit out?

I humbly admit to the possibility that monitoring the life-cycle of Housewives and SUR-vers this closely could indeed be dangerous to my health. My mom always told me not to sit so close to the television, but I always thought that was about my eyes.

It has become apparent that sitting so close to the TV could, in fact, give me an eating disorder.

I must have listened to “body” by Gia Margaret (which samples the lecture “Overcome Social Anxiety” by the British philosopher Alan Watts) over a hundred times. Every time I do, I hear something new.

speech expresses this all the time; "life is a drag!"
"I feel I am just dragging myself around."
"My body is a burden to me."
To whom? To whom? That's the question. You see?
And when there is nobody left for whom the body can be a burden, the body isn't a burden
But so long as you fight it, it is

The line “To whom?” sticks with me, particularly as I try to understand this very familiar regression. I look to point fingers and instead find myself overwhelmed by options, modelling one of those kitschy trail signs at a rest stop, with arrows in every direction, pointing to Algonquin Park, the lake, the equator, Kalamazoo, McDonalds, and the moon. The only thing clear? The body of a girl is a burden unto us all.

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Thanks for reading! This month, it felt appropriate to take you on a journey through Brittany’s living room. Here are the songs that truly transport me:

Let me leave you with a passage by another great philosopher, Jemima Kirke (Jessa from GIRLS—but who’s based on who?):

If you made it this far, I love you dearly.

Thanks for being an earth angel.

xoxo

shupi