Who Is Kathy Becklin?

I think I needed to be Kathy...she was more outgoing, more mature and had much cooler hair than I. (These things - especially the hair - are very important to girls of that age as we try to figure out this whole "what it is to be a girl" thing.) I also thought she had a much cooler name than I did. Gina was just too unique a name for me when I was five...I longed to be more mainstream. It is only in recent years that I've embraced my "Gina-ness."

I know where her name - and probably everything else about her - originated...my sister Peggy's best friend, Kathy Bennigan. Kathy was beautiful...in my eyes an absolute perfect model of a young woman of 17 or 18. She was probably close to 6 feet tall, with long rich brown hair...so long, in fact, that she could gather it all up into a ponytail on the crown of her head, and it would still fall all the way down her back! She was sweet and attentive to me, too, not like my sisters who, by that time had decided that having a little sister around the house was more annoying than charming. I still have a doll Kathy gave me, too, and I count it among my most prized possessions.

I played the 'Kathy Becklin game' for a couple years, then, I guess, like so many things from childhood, I put her aside for new priorities. Or, maybe I absorbed her qualities into the woman I did become. After all, she really was just the personification of the qualities I wanted to attain...the me I wanted to be. She served me well, and I think Kathy Becklin is one of my favorite people because of how she helped shape me.