Sunday, May 5, 2013

Sunday Memories: Beauty Is As Beauty Does


This is what I remember:

The girls who wore a certain bright blue shadow with it were fast or tough or both, and they also wore high heels with their tight jeans way before it became a ubiquitous look.

The religious girls wore it post-shabbos with full-face on their way to Bernstein-on-Essex, the "soda" shop of the Orthodox Lower East Side crowd, which probably sold soda but it was known for its so-called Chinese food, which wasn't even close to the real thing for those who actually ate tref in Chinatown.

The political girls didn't wear it until maybe the last year of high school or first year of college.  Until then, they wore big, dangling earrings that could have been from Central America or Woodstock, New York.

A small bunch of girls never wore it, still don't.

I was told I wasn't allowed to, but I either borrowed a friend's brown, or stole enough money from some piggy bank, or maybe I even sprung for it myself from babysitting money.  So nervous I'd be caught, I wore my glasses over my new lashes, while checking every mirror we had to see if I had blossomed into a swan.