Free Target Underwear and a Vera Wang Gown by Adena Halpern Page A

remember a time in my life when I didn’t hate my height. At my high school graduation, out of three hundred kids, I was the first to graduate in my class because they lined us up by size. The laughs that came from the crowd when the principal asked for the shortest first.... I still have nightmares. I had been called the dreaded “Teenie Weenie Deanie” way too many times to mention. By the time I finished college, I was sure that I had spent more money on alterations than I did on my tuition.
    I fear the day I have to go to a foot doctor and he tells me I can’t wear high heels anymore. I will never stand again. I’ll be one of those divas who lounges in bed all day, and friends and fans can all come to me. I’ll have to buy pink boas to wear over my night-gowns and turn my bedroom into a lair of lust with peacock feathers and satin. If I have to go to the bathroom or run to the fridge, I’ll wait until everyone leaves. Then again, I’d miss too many great parties. Maybe I can persuade Mr. Louboutin to make orthopedic heels.

Los Angeles-Just One Look
    n the summer of 1991, I graduated from college and moved to L.A. to be with my college sweetheart. Since Adam was a year ahead of me in school, he had already moved a year before. I did not want to move to Los Angeles. I had come to love New York and all the fashions it had to offer. Although I had visited Adam a few times during the year, fashion had not been on my mind. He was. At that point in my life, if Adam had wanted me to join him in the Hare Krishnas, I would have found a way to work with my bald head and toga.
    I really loved my style in the early nineties. I was really into tight-as-could-be Levi’s paired with Lycra ballet tops that fit my twenty-year-old (never-been-to-a-gym-and-didn‘t-need-it-and-should-have-relished-the-experience-more) body, and of course, my six-inch platform sandals. I had become a hip chick. SoHo and any piece of clothing it sold was my utopian paradise.
    As I headed out of the airport terminal to wait for Adam, I took out the small wire-rim Ray-Ban sunglasses he’d asked me to pick up for him that he couldn’t find in Los Angeles. As cool as we were in New York, we’d be cooler in L.A.
    When I saw Adam drive up to the terminal and get out of his beat-up Volvo, a voice I’d never heard before popped into my head.
    “Go back into the airport, get back on the plane, and go back to New York,” the voice inside me said as my taller-than-tall boyfriend in the yellow-and-orange-flowered Hawaiian shirt grabbed me and kissed me.
    “Tell him it’s for your own good, and go back into the airport and go right back to New York,” the voice said again as I ran my fingers through the greasy gunk that compressed his luscious locks of dark curls.
    “Your hair,” I said, wiping the grime off my hand and onto his Hawaiian shirt. “What’s with your hair?”
    “You like it?” he said, smoothing it back. “It’s the look here.”
    “Go back into the airport! Just say you made a mistake and go back!” the voice shouted in my head.
    “It’s OK, I guess,” I said with a face that told him just the opposite.
    “It’s different here because of the weather,” he said, taking my suitcase and throwing it into the trunk. “It’s nothing like New York.”
    As we drove back to the apartment we’d now call ours, the voice inside me had calmed down long enough for me to hear Adam say, “So guess what? How would you like to go to a movie premiere tonight? My boss gave me his tickets.”
    A movie premiere? I suddenly loved Los Angeles. My next thought, what to wear, was immediately followed by the. voice in my head starting to rant again.
    “Can it!” I told the voice.
    This was 1991, a few years before E! Entertainment Network, so the closest I got to seeing a movie premiere was either seeing it on Entertainment Tonight or watching the old clips of stars like Lana Turner and Frank Sinatra get out of long limousines and adjust their