Dark Roots

She was born in Texas as Vickie Lynn Hogan and died yesterday in Florida as Anna Nicole Smith.
Vickie Lynn grew up a poor girl who was married at seventeen, a mother at eighteen and supported herself by serving Jim's Fried Chicken and taking her clothes off for patrons of a Houston strip club. Anna Nicole was the quintessential pin-up girl who rocketed to international fame, and supported herself by marrying a billionaire, and taking her clothes off--this time for Hugh Hefner.
Anna Nicole is, in part, why we love blondes, why we love breasts, and in a way, why we love beauty. Really the only thing she gave to the world was a big, neon-lit package of almost unattainable gorgeousness. But being that gorgeous proved difficult, even for her. Her slurring, overweight grumblings on her cringe-worthy reality show were both highly watchable and desperately sad. Her sweet, breathless cooing to her little dog Sugar Pie was almost tear-inducing. And her solid but dejected son always looked adoringly at his child-like mother--however emotionally abandoned he seemed to have been. I think we expected a lot from Anna Nicole. We expected her to live our dreams for us. To be beautiful for us. To show us what larger than life can mean. Humble beginnings, a suspicious marriage, a dead son, a motherless baby daughter, and now her death at 39 years old--Anna Nicole Smith's iconic status is finally secured. I think maybe, in another life, she instead could have been our Eliza Doolittle--had she only met her Henry Higgins.
With every streak of blond we put in our hair, and every plumper we swipe on our lips--whether we know it or not--is, in a funny way, our own, strange search to look like that bedroom-eyed bombshell on the cover of Playboy in 1993.