Girls Just Wanna Have Fun

When I was little, every time I watched a movie, I’d want to be it. Whatever the lead characters did, I wanted to do. For example, Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, where Sarah Jessica Parker enters a dance contest at the encouragement of a pretty young Helen Hunt? Every time I watched that as a kid, I’d spend the rest of the day dancing around, putting together various 80’s ensembles that involved knotted t-shirt ends, and jumping off couches to copy the freeze-frame final scene. I’d ask my mom if I could take dance lessons. Or take karate lessons, after watching The Three Ninjas. Horseback lessons, ice-skating lessons, I needed to become what I saw onscreen. Immediately.

This is probably a common childhood occurrence. I bet you’ve got a story in which you were going to become a wrestler, a ninja (maybe even a ninja turtle), or Gem, or a wizard, whatever.

I expected that this wouldn’t continue into adulthood. And yet, whenever I read something in the lifestyle section of the newspapers or in a tell-all, trashy memoir, I want to do it. I start making plans. Looking into schools, or at maps, or wondering where I could score some heroin. I read a memoir about a difficult time as a lesbian adolescent and wish I was gay.

Then I watch ‘America’s Next Top Model’ and think, ‘I could put up with being a model. I wouldn’t mind being treated like a sub-human. I could torment the other girls by scarfing pizza.’ And I make a mental note to check their website at work the next day, to see when the next ANTM auditions are. I add whitening strips and fake-tan lotion to my shopping list. I practice my runway walk in the reflective surfaces.

Then I read John Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley, his account of a lengthy American road trip. Naturally, I start checking out maps, looking into admission prices to Yellowstone National Park, and wondering how I could get three weeks or more off from work. ‘Who would I go with,’ I think. ‘Should I go by myself? With Mike and make it a romantic thing? With Ben and make it a literary thing? With Sean and make it a best-friends-forever thing? With Kelly and Jessica and Megan and make it a Woo Hoo Girls thing?

I’m reading a memoir about a girl who started stripping because her life was boring and she wanted to be wild before she turned thirty. So now I’m sitting here thinking about this personal essay I read in Intro to Personal Essay at Emerson. The girl wrote about how she worked at a strip club the year before, and made $3,000 in a month. She worked in nudie booths. I could do that – no contact, lots of money. I’m genuinely thinking of looking into it. If I made more money, I could shed my couple-with-a-third-roommate status. And there would be the added bonus of something to write about, and crazy stories to divulge in emails sent in the middle of the workday.

What keeps me from doing these things is that I don’t act soon enough. I lose the initial passion about whatever nutty thing I just read about doing. Just like when I was a kid, soon enough I’d find something else to fascinate me within the next day or so. I’d move on. And on again.

This makes me worry – am I unable to think for myself? Why do I latch so strongly onto these ideas? Does everyone do this? Still playing What I’ll Be When I Grow Up, the only difference being no parents to witness it.

Or, if it’s not an issue of thinking for myself, do I lack creativity to think of my own activities? Ballroom dancing, painting, photography? I saw it all on TV or in the movies. I’m not sure how we started playing poker years back, but I’m sure it was a direct influence of Rounders, or Ocean’s Eleven, or World Poker Series. We saw it on TV. And it looked so cool.

Am I just really suggestible? If kidnapped, would I get Stockholm syndrome in less than an hour?