There’s no one in this world exactly like you. That’s terrific. Because it gives you a particular advantage over everyone else. You’re unique. But it also raises some very important questions. How do you combine the way you look, the way you move, the way you speak, the way you feel so it all comes together and reflects your own personality?
The opening paragraph on the first page of the Sears Discovery Charm School three-ring binder handbook was already becoming anachronistic when I took the class in 1972. But, my mother seemed to think I required some polishing and finishing, and in our Indiana town, this was as good as it got.
The class itself was predictable in terms of what we teenaged girls were supposed to discover about ourselves in order to become perfectly naturally ourselves. The topics included:
• Exercise
• Diet
• Voice/Speech
• Modeling
• Skin Care/Grooming
• Make-up
• Fashion
• Manners
I’m not going to get into the utter nonsense of the notion that make-up, fashion, and modeling, to name a few bullet points, would lead us to being naturally ourselves, but I am going to tell you about the woman who was our instructor and what sort of impact this class had on me.
Lyn Wilde Cathcart was all of 50 years old when I was in her class. She was beautiful and poised, and I’m sure she truly believed that she was perfectly naturally herself. She was to a great extent her own creation, albeit one based on the norms expected of a woman born in 1922.
Lyn and her twin sister, Lee, were known as the Wilde Twins and appeared in nine movies together. Lyn’s 2016 obituary in the New York Times read: “The Wildes were probably best known for befuddling Mickey Rooney in the 1944 movie ‘Andy Hardy’s Blonde Trouble.’” Lyn went on to appear in 10 other films, mostly uncredited roles, including as a chorus girl in the 1951 musical, “Show Boat.”
Though Lyn was not famous, in the 1960s and 70s, she parlayed her movie star looks and Hollywood resume into a career teaching teenage girls how to look and behave. She taught us how to act at a dinner table, walk like a lady, apply a sensible amount of make-up, choose clothing that fit properly, and basically be mannered and polite. The overall aim was to teach us girls how to live our lives as proper young women, packaged up to be beautiful examples of females who knew their roles and stayed within the confines of society’s definition. Lyn did a very good job. She was a paragon of what the ideal woman should look like.
The problem, of course, was that there was nothing perfectly natural about any of this so-called training. In point of fact, the whole thing was a paradox. There’s no one in this world exactly like you, stated the first sentence in the handbook, but Lyn then went about wedging us all neatly into the same mold. I was 14 years old when I took the 10-week long class. It took me three decades to shed the outer layer of this indoctrination. In so doing, there were many times when I felt I was doing something I shouldn’t—like I was being perfectly unnatural.
Becoming perfectly naturally yourself means bucking some norms. When you buck norms, you often get punished for daring to do so, making it very difficult to attempt. But it’s absolutely worth it because being truly perfectly natural is so much easier than role playing and acting a part. That is, unless you’re in a Hollywood movie.
Copyright DJ Anderson, 2019
