Tea. Courage. Continue... Repeat.

My god, I had black hair — it was photographed blue-black it was so dark — and thick bushy eyebrows. And my mother and father had to stop them from dying my hair and plucking out my eyebrows. The studio even wanted to change my name to Virginia. They tried to get me to create a Joan Crawford mouth when I first began using lipstick at fifteen. They wanted, you know, Joan Crawford, the ‘40s and everything. Every movie star, Lana Turner, all of them, painted over their lips: and I’m sure that some of them had perfectly fine, full lips — but thin eyebrows were the fad…and God forbid you do anything individual or go against the fad. But I did. I figured this looks absurd. And I agreed with my dad: God must have had some reason for giving me bushy eyebrows and black hair. I guess I must have been pretty sure of my sense of identity. It was me. I accepted it all my life and I can’t explain it. Because I’ve always been very aware of the inner me that has nothing to do with the physical me.