Tuesday, June 4, 2013

Tales Told Out Of School 6.0: the professional teen model

(Sixth in a series of tales told out of school, both literally and figuratively, how my Swiss Cheese brain remembers such events which may or may not be accurate at all. Preface: I attended a girls' private prep school in the 1960s with a student body who often mimicked the creativity of that era with its own high spirits, a pendulum reaction to the heavy course load and voluminous homework from which many of us still haven't caught up on lost sleep some forty-plus years on and from which many of us still retain permanently stooped posture via carrying heavy textbooks. Well, it's not like there existed alternatives to those heavy textbooks. We didn't have personal home computers because no one on this particular planet in this galaxy had them yet. So let's roll back the roiling mists of time to The Pleistocene of my youth.)

I googled the name of a onetime Westlake School for Girls classmate, and found these. At the time I knew she was a professional teen model and she seemed quite worldly, as opposed to faux mature, with her sultry voice and scenester presence alongside known musicians on the Sunset Strip of the mid-1960s (a good place to be in the world then.) I admired her retaining her ultra-long-haired, hipster signature look in a business that mandated cookie-cutter similitude of ultra-square beauty queens thought to appeal to Middle America, even in the swingin' '60s (think teenaged Sally Field. Not her fault, Ms. Field wanted to work. And has.) 

It indeed is she, Denny Howard (not Sally Field,) in the above photo (photographer unknown) plus the first actor seen in this music video below and go-go dancing throughout. She sports brunette pigtails to look more "wholesome" although belied by the arched eyebrows over those smokey eyes and her longer than surfer-girl hair. Both the video star and subject matter remain, strangely after 47 years, still relevant. I have no idea what became of her after her singular semester at Westlake in 1966. Behold, a video starring a well-known Vulcan with Denny and the Malibu-ettes frugging and ponying their shingalings off in the tv show "Malibu U," a clip that is both groovy and awful...
 
Click:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BC35cQKHwzg
 


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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Denny went to Europe with a bunch of us in 1967. 'Think you were in France, we were in Durham, UK. I remember her as quite beautiful, and nice. Wonder what happened to her? Another mystery of someone who floated through our lives and brought interest and light.

Blaire Simpson Oslander

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