Senior Picture 1983

Just when I was feeling like I wasn’t looking so bad for a “woman of my age”(as my doctor likes to say) I ran across this picture.

Senior year of high school and I remember thinking I was fat and trying to lose weight.  What I should have been worried about was getting those eyebrows waxed and enjoying a nice Hostess cupcake!!

When I was growing up pedicures and manicures were for rich people.  I had never heard of anyone that had gone for a massage or had plastic surgery.  The most glamorous thing that happened to us on the farm was when the Avon www.avon.com stopped by.

It was always a treat to see her coming.  Ms. Martha would pull up in her nice car, all dressed up and knock with great authority on our screen door. She would sit in the living room and show my mother all her goodies and would leave us with a catalog that usually had a sample of some “smell good” as my grandmother called it stapled to the cover.

My favorite samples were the tiny lipsticks.  After my mother used them she would let me try and I felt like a princess with my lips painted red with the shiny sticky stuff.  I would rush to the mirror and  pucker my lips in all sorts of ways that made me look like a movie star, or so I thought.  I am sure to any outsider I would have looked like I was having a small stroke.

Ms. Martha would sit and visit and mother would order a thing or two just to keep her coming back.  We didn’t have a great deal of company so I am sure for my stay at home mom an adult bearing free samples was a welcome sight.

I always thought she had the best job in the world.  After all she had a suitcase filled with glamorous beauty products that she could use whenever she wanted.

Avon is still going strong but I don’t think they do house calls anymore.  That’s a shame.  Those little lipsticks were magic. They transformed a plain little farm girl into a princess.