Because every girl had a Rayanne Graf in their life.
This is: half-true, half-made-up, in the way that many stories are.

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  12:48 pm  |   July 25 2011   |  35 notes  

I wasn’t allowed to watch My So-Called Life when it first aired due to the fact that it had a gay character (Way to go, parents! That one sort of backfired, didn’t it?).  Once a week I would pick up a VHS tape of the current episode from the twins who lived down the cul-de-sac. I’d take the coveted tape to my friend Courtney’s house where we’d watch it in her basement. Courtney’s favorite character was Angela, because she could relate to her commentary, peppered with ‘likes’ and ‘whatevers’. I, on the other hand, was infatuated with Rayanne. Impulsive, loudmouthed, hedonistic Rayanne, saying whatever popped into her head and satiating her oral fixation with a cigarette, a beer, a joint, a pill, whatever. She reminded me of every ‘bad’ girl I’d attached myself to since preschool.  Did I want to be them or be with them, or could the two bleed into each other to form some kind of delinquent feedback loop? I was  in awe of women who confidently did and said things that were considered ‘wrong’ and who did so seemingly without the obsessive hemming and hawing I tended to apply toward every single decision to the point of paralysis. Rayanne fit the bill perfectly as the archetype of energy that could temper these tendencies.

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  12:44 pm  |   July 7 2011   |  45 notes  

I recently turned twenty, so I’ve been spending a lot of time (some may say too much) ruminating on adolescence.  As a child, I was fascinated by representations of the cool adolescent girl. The day I picked up a copy of the Just Nikki catalogue at Claire’s Accessories in the Willow Grove mall with my mother and grandmother will be forever seared in my consciousness. Each page was filled with carefree teenage girls wearing space dye sweaters and cargo pants. I was hooked.

Every time Just Nikki came in the mail, I’d excitedly flip through it over and over and think about how cool those girls seemed. They seemed so far removed from me, but at the same time, I thought I would magically morph into one of these cheerful beacons of late 90s fashion as soon as I possessed the all-important “-teen” suffix. Just Nikki inspired me to make my first collage- a big piece of white board on which smiling girls in crop tops appear as though in suspended animation.

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  1:00 pm  |   June 15 2011   |  15 notes