Hating Farrah

"Growing up in Texas, I knew a lot of girls like Farrah Fawcett, and I hated them. They had everything I didn't: blond hair, blue eyes, the power, seemingly, to get anything and everything they wanted in my small public high school -- boys, head cheerleader, the ability to decide, in a twinkling, who was cool and who wasn't."

That's how my friend Mimi Swartz begins her essay about Farrah Fawcett and Farrah Fawcett types in this morning's New York Times. Mimi grew up in San Antonio, Farrah Fawcett in Corpus Christi, but, as Mimi writes, she didn't have to know the blond beauty to know her type. Farrah Fawcett in the 1970s had plenty of imitators, plenty of admirers (if that's the word for those young men who had THE POSTER taped inside their high-school locker or tacked to their dorm-room wall. Read Mimi's evocative essay this morning, particularly if you, like Mimi, were a "dark, brooding teenager" during Farrah's reign.