Rocking the Pink Read Free Page B

anything.
    â€œWhat?” I asked innocently.
    Brad reached over to me and picked something out of my (perfectly coiffed) hair.
    â€œYou’ve got lettuce in your hair.”
    Apparently, that last head dip had collided most indelicately with my Caesar salad.
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    When college came a-calling for Brad, I still had my senior year to go, and I was worried.
    â€œWhat if you meet someone else in college?” I asked anxiously as we sat, hand in hand, on a low beach wall, watching the setting sun merge with the shimmering ocean.
    But Brad had decided to stay in town for college , and he was confident we’d survive. “Don’t worry, Buddy,” he assured me. “We’ll be fine.”
    Out of nowhere, I felt an electric current zing right through my body. I’d never felt anything like it before. It was almost . . . supernatural.
    â€œOh my God,” I gasped. I looked at Brad. “Do you feel that?”
    His face registered shock, too. “Yes. I feel it.”
    We continued holding hands, this strange energy coursing between us. I looked around. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary for anyone else on the crowded beach. I looked at our hands. They looked completely normal.
    â€œThis is really weird,” Brad whispered.

    I started to cry, feeling overwhelmed with this indescribable electricity. Brad didn’t ask me why I was crying. He could feel it, too.
    After a few minutes, when the electric current had faded, Brad and I got up from our perch on the beach wall and made our way down the boardwalk, the whole time exchanging looks of disbelief.
    There was no question from that day forward: We were meant to be together.
    And yet when college came a-calling for me a year later, I could not escape the pull of my lifelong destiny to become the next Judy Garland. My destiny was bigger than me—bigger than Brad and me.
    And I knew I needed to go to Hollywood, by way of the theater school at UCLA, to make it happen. And so Brad, the boy I loved so much, drove me to college to settle me into my dorm room.
    It was my first giant step toward Judy-dom.
    My heart had belonged to Judy Garland, the Most Beautiful Girl in the World, since I could remember. Judy, Judy, Judy. My Favorite Movie in the Whole World was The Wizard of Oz. I languished in eager anticipation of the movie’s airing on television, as it did once a year around Easter time.
    When the day I’d been waiting for finally arrived, Mom and Dad surprised me with the news that they were taking my older sister, Sharon, and me out to see a movie called Rocky. Sharon was thrilled, but I was beside myself with grief.
    â€œ The Wizard of Oz is on tonight!” I wailed, pulling at my hair.
    Sharon rolled her eyes. “You can see it next year.”
    But I was adamant. I could not, would not, miss my beloved Dorothy and Toto. It was out of the question. It would kill me!

    Mom and Dad had not intended to shatter their little girl’s hopes and dreams; they’d just been in the mood for a movie. They lined up a baby sitter—Belinda, a heavy set teenager from down the street, whose jaw had been wired shut as part of her weight-loss plan—and off they went with a gloating Sharon to see Rocky.
    Good riddance.
    I sat, glued to the small TV in the family room, mouthing every line and singing along to every song. When Glinda asked Dorothy, “Are you a good witch or a bad witch?” I answered, in perfect mimicry of Dorothy’s tone and inflection, “I’m not a witch at all!” My “lions and tigers and bears, oh my!” was a dead ringer for Dorothy’s, too. In a film biography about Judy’s life, I thought, I was a shoo-in to portray her as a child.
    When my family returned home from seeing Rocky, Sharon could not stop yammering about the movie. She told me Rocky had spent a lot of time punching hanging meat. “And when he finally finished,” she said, “he knew he