Body Images

It doesn't matter what our body shape is like, as long as we like ourselves.

The 'Elephant Man', saved from being a circus freak by scientists, was proud of the one arm which was free from his illness, and insisted that it be shown in all photographs.

And even if any of our physical characteristics seem to be inadequate to us, most of us do not suffer as much as the Elephant Man did.

Codger, a former friend, remembered as a one time Golden Youth, is very irritated by the world these days, particularly after a few drinks.

Last time I saw him he yelled at me about the Sixties, saying that I'd looked as good as Twiggy when I was young and why didn't I become successful in the way that Twiggy has done? An 'ugly duckling' as a child, the swan phase was unnerving when I was placed somewhere between Catherine Deneuve and Garbo!

OK, after several people suggested it, I tried. I saved up and went to modeling school. I was taught to apply false eyelashes and advised to try falsies. An older woman attended. It turned out that she was a Madame, hell bound for recruitment.

As to our modelling success rate, one very nice short gal with blunt heavy features and a stumping walk, gained the highest marks for the course. She came from one of Adelaide's wealthy families. Her old fashioned bouffant would appear in newspaper fashion shots for a few months.

I don't know, people in those days compared my looks to various people and so on, but I guess I tried too late and I was in the wrong place. Besides I just couldn't relate to the scenes around that modeling school.

Besides, Adelaide had apparently, even in the early seventies, not then noticed than slender framed gals with straight hair had been doing pretty well over seas for some time.

Twiggy? Well I can tell you quite a lot about her since I obtained her autobiograhy lately.

It was her fifty ninth birthday on September 19th and a local rag which features a 'birthdays column', stated that she was.. 'a well known model from the sixties who never succeeded as an actor because of her cockney accent'.

This is factually wrong and I note this because of the very different lives both Twiggy and I had even if we were born in the same year.

Twiggy came from a stable family and she learned to read music at school. She was a good dressmaker and wanted to work in fashion design. She was sewing fast enough to supply many local fashion shops with her designs in her mid teens. The suggestion that she try modelling came as a complete surprise. (Even in those days, five foot six and a half inches, (You work out the metrics), was considered to be too short.

She didn't want to cut her hair, but Vidal Sasson was a good choice. She'd barely made the papers when she was declared The Face Of The Year.

The clown-like caterpillar bottom lashes were her invention and, apart from the surreal make up for David Bowie's Aladdin Sane album, she always did her own make up.

She wasn't a cockney at all, she was brought up well away from the sounds of the Bow Bells in Neasdon. Her accent was London, although as her father became deaf, she increased her volume until she was once described as sounding like a 'demented parrot'.

Ken Russell spotted her early in the piece and decided that she had enough presence for him to feature her in a movie. The Boyfriend showed that she could not only act, she could also dance. Eventually she performed tap dance on Broadway for three years, attracting in her audience such awesome luminaries as Ginger Rogers, Gene Kelly, Sir Laurence Olivier and Joan Plowright.

She acted in Pantomine and also appeared in several plays. The Boyfriend wasn't her only film. She could be cockney if required and she adapted to accents because of her musicality. She's released several albums, (one which features Carly Simon as back up). Apart from that, she's also worked as a film producer and... so it goes.

Presently, she's appearing on our television screens in America's Top Model and is surviving very well in that particular shark pit.

Her face is softer and her figure is fuller, but she's still sane sweet gifted Twiggy.

Comparisons? I could sew, but not fast enough to sell clothes to shops. Noone we knew did that sort of thing back then.

My family was a disaster zone. True, I was sixteen when an older woman asked my mother if she could take me to Adelaide and coach me for modelling but my mother said no because she believed I should be a teacher.

I didn't want to be a teacher after I wasn't allowed to do Art at school (too useless) but I did eventually study drama, which I loved.

By the time I was twenty, I had liabilities such as Asperger's Syndrome and a fast encroaching Nervous Breakdown.

Above all, I hate other people messing with my hair and my face and my looks and if I don't get time to study and work at my writing, then I am uneasy and even clumsier than usual. I'm now casually designing garments and collecting fabrics and maybe I'll sell some to friends if I'm lucky. I've modelled for artists and for various friends who design and sew, but I never hit the serious prfessional scene.

I don't tap dance. Indeed, even my walking is difficult on certain days and in recent times.

I love clothes, but don't dress up very often. (This is admittedly boring, but Oh Well).

I love acting and anyone who wants to try me in a part may do so.

I've never been in a situation where I'd be likely to meet Noel Coward, Fred Astaire, Paul McCartney or even Fran Drescher.

On the other hand, people still put Twiggy down even if she's still recognised all over the world. They put me down because not only am I not recognised all over the world, but I wouldn't care to be!

I prefer Bob Dylan to Carly Simon.

Apart from all those differences and one or two vaguely similar inclinations, I'm no Twiggy at all and neither could I ever have been.

Bless her all the same, and I must say that if a girl or woman is naturally slender, then they should be inspired by Twiggy.

Asperger's & Bullying.

Last night I dreamed that I was back among the bullies, that there was one man who was sneering and denigrating me and taking away my means of working. It was depressing and unbelievable, yet very familiar. Those kinds of things have actually happened to me and as much as I hate it, I'm still trying to work out a pattern of getting beyond other people's rubbish and rubbishings.

Bullying is the sort of thing which can occur in response to a condition like Asperger's Syndrome. For the Aspergian, ordinary communicative signals may be difficult to read. Then, when misinterpretations flourish, inappropriate honesty is no help at all. Neither is any form of curiosity which ranges beyond a group mind.

Flying into Melbourne one evening long ago, I was met by a few friends.

It had been a long flight and someone asked me how I'd passed the time.

'I read the Book Of Daniel from The Old Testament,' said I.

They looked at me with what I realised later, was some horror.

It took me more than a year to realise I'd got myself mixed up with people who, while they were nice enough to meet me at the airport, inexplicably, they had no interest in Biblical Studies.

I suppose if I'd mentioned The Book Of Daniel to Nick Cave or Bob Dylan (had I known them) or to any number of mystically inclined folks, it might have been the start of a most interesting conversation but I hadn't encountered such folk back then.

It was also three years before my first encounter with Dr Norm Habel whose Comparative Religions study course would bring such joy and it was also a good three decades before I learned about Asperger's Syndrome.

Thinking back to those ancient Melbourne days, I'd have been better off lying. If I'd said that I spent the flight absorbed in various trashy magazines , that would have been acceptable, but even if I'd had the wit to think of that, my automatic corrector would have jumped up and stopped me.

I wasn't much bullied at school. Initially I was in a sort of daze, didn't hear or notice anything except my own thoughts which were basically about how I thought children SHOULD be treated.

We were at least read to at home and I remembered those stories better than I remember my first few clouded years of school, where I only ever woke up to find myself in Serious Trouble with some Teacher or other.

I was well into Primary School and considered to be Hopelessly Retarded before I finally learned to read for myself and that only came about because we had a sporty relative who'd got into the newspapers. Thus I learned that the written page wasn't solely fancy and talking toys.

Reading brought momentous change and suddenly my lack of social skills didn't matter so much.

The Library became my refuge, although every so often I'd emerge with an idea for a new Playground Game, teach it to anyone who would listen, and play joyously for a few weeks until my mind would again wander off of it's own accord and then I would follow the said restless mind back to its place in the Library.

Fortunately my Mother was a Teacher and she made sure that other staff members let me read what I liked.

When I was in my early twenties, I visited my Mother who was still teaching at that same School and I was astounded to note that two of my games were still being played by a younger generation of kids.

I felt that even if I hadn't studied what I'd wanted to study, that even if sport and injury took a great deal of my time and created far too much attention, that there were still ways I might one day fit in once I got over my breakdown.

Even without the Doctor's diagnosis and the horrid drugs he gave me, and despite my mind's different kinds of pacings, things had gone seriously wrong in my adolescent years and whether it was called Neurosis or anything else, I knew that things wouldn't work for me until I escaped my family. It's obvious that so strong an impulse will mean a necessity to re-discover the family later and I more or less did and have developed compassion for the kinds of messes which can skew the lives of perfectly nice people. In my teens and early twenties, I was chiefly aware of confusions and broken pathways.

I'd had no particular desire to perform at Sports. It just happened, an inheritance from a very sporty Grandmother I suppose, but suddenly there was all this attention and turmoiled feelings of all kinds abounded. My siblings were furious. Jealousies and rivalries seemed to pour themselves in front of me. I think that the first serious bullying I experienced was from my younger siblings and the more I tried to escape, the more relentless it all became.

And all that time our Daddy was out drinking and gambling all our family money including the money that was supposed to have taken me to Private School to learn Classics and Art and so forth and, as I'd imagined it, to quietly compete only if I felt like it!! A small Country Area School offered no such opportunities. I was the only one in my Intermediate class to pass English after our Teacher taught us the wrong books. I was the only one who had (accidentally) come across the books and poems we were supposed to have studied.

We may all know and begin to understand the extent of our own problems without really comprehending the situations of those close to us. Thinking and writing of those times makes me realise how much our Mother suffered then. It wasn't simply that she'd lost the life of Culture that she craved and was working three jobs to keep food on the table. The worst part of it was that the person she loved was a bit of a Bounder.

It's strange how love may anaesthetise the obvious. It was us kids and especially me, the gawky grump who she blamed for her unhappiness. I've had my spell of work in schools. I came home glazed by Personality Onslaught, she came home with her armour still bitterly intact.

As the psychological tensions increased so my temper shortened and the only way I could make people leave me alone was to think of nasty things to say which, while they were things I didn't mean, were fairly striking on account of my rapidly increasing literary repertoire, so I was branded with the bully brush too and that was odd because any occasional experimental skirmish into bullying ways was always a failure for me. (My timing was always frightful, there'd be an older sister around the corner or my chosen victim would just laugh and jeer back.)

The one or two times I accidentally succeeded at being truly mean I regret utterly.

Yes I was bitterly jealous of some children, but after one or two bouts of name calling, even those feelings faded into my curiosities about behaviour and it was as if my Schoolmates and Teachers were all characters out of someone else's book.

As a small child our brattish next door neighbour beat me up regularly. She was smaller than me but she had me terrorised. I ran to my mother crying one day to say that Little Miss had threatened to bash me again and my Mother said,

'Well, bash her back!' I was astounded. Such an idea never occurred to me.


In the end I didn't bash her. I got myself a coat hanger to help me face her off and tremblingly told her that I would bash her back if she took one more step. Arming myself probably wasn't a good idea because she was aggressive and I wasn't. It could have been very bad but I was unexpectedly lucky.

Just as I got ready to throw down the coat hanger and run for my life she backed off. I was astounded.

A Counsellor I've been seeing recently explained to me that all bullies are in fact cowards, so maybe that's our explanation here. (I think it should be said here though that not all cowards are bullies. For some of us peace-loving souls, bullying is too risky. As an older person though, I do argue back in the face of attack these days.)

(Question, is the early cowardice and basic urge to flee one reason I found I could run at speed in later days?)

Anyway, my life's path was pretty much set then. Retreat back to the Ground of Knowledge at every opportunity. Emerge renewed. Try something else. Talk with people who understand. Try not to explain too much. When people look glazed, it doesn't mean they are interested. If you find a good game, then you might be able to talk others into playing it. In the meantime, keep learning.

I guess the point of going back to the family is important, because by now there have been several occasions when I've got to the point of loving another person very much and suddenly again I'm under attack. There also came particularly strange times during the Nineties and beyond when I was seriously endangered.

That has been a very strange set of experiences especially if I've brought my verbal talents to bear because then the bully will claim it's them that's being bullied and well they are more convincing these so-called 'normals'.

I've learned more than I ever expected to know about Psychology in the meantime because of course there are plenty of books about Domestic Violence and so on.

To consider how a person constructs meaning in their lives one must focus on notions of Good and Evil. I thought that sort of thing to be clear cut and decided for myself that such forces are a sort of continuum relative to circumstance.

But if someone bashes or begins a campaign of slander and if they assume that my only good is to acquiesce, then I must disagree and I must get beyond the situation that those kinds of precepts landed me in. I wish it was as easy as a coat hanger backed up by bluff, but it isn't, so I'm searching through my options.

I've had a phase of reading the Biographies and Memoirs of successful people. That is satisfying. Recently I pulled out some of the more mystical books from the Seventies. My Library is a bit of a shambles after the violent incidents and much of it is lost but I still have some books on the Kabbalah.

Now there are a few interesting pathways there!