The Facts of My Life

After having a very frustrating argument with my sister last night (not even worth mentioning…but she was wrong!), I hunkered down and reread one of my favorite books (The Diary of Anne Frank). It got me thinking that my blog might not be very interesting because I haven’t told you anything about me, and it’s hard to be interested in a story when you don’t know the main characters, so this might be a long blog, but it should be a particularly interesting one!

I am Sam, Sam I am (hee hee). Seriously, my name is Samantha Sue Devine. I love to read and I love to write. Someday I will be a great author, but for now I’m happy to practice writing by keeping this on-line journal. In this blog, I plan to write about my life, my dreams, and (at least for the near future) how much I wish Robert Ruebens would get a clue and quit being so evil to me (more about that later).

I love horses and plan to also be a famous equestrian. My family nicknamed me Little Bit (a name I used to love but now I’m thinking is way too “little kid”) because I used to run around the house pretending to be a pony. I’ve been working my whole life (okay, since I was eight) at the SuAn Stables, over in the fancy part of town. Mucking out stalls is pretty gross, but each wheelbarrow of horse poop I remove gets me a whole hour of riding time. For a kid with no money, that’s been a great set-up.
But I’m not a kid with no money anymore. This is where I need to introduce you to the rest of my family, my mom Rose and my big sister Danni.

My mom is beautiful. Sometimes it’s hard to believe that she’s so old (she’s like 37) because she looks so young and wears clothes you’d never expect somebody’s mom to wear. I don’t look a thing like her. Mom has shiny dark hair; I have average brown hair. Mom has blue eyes; I have green eyes. Mom adores the color pink; I despise it, I love purple. Mom is very petite and graceful; I’m a tomboy who is always tripping over my own two feet. Mom tells me all the time how much I looks like my dad, but he died a long time ago, so I can only try to find the resemblance through a bunch of old pictures.

Mom grew up winning all the beauty pageants her mother entered her in, and there were a lot of pageants! In fact, Mom was supposed to be in the Miss America contest, but she ran off and got married instead. This is why I’ve never met my grandparents; they weren’t too happy about my mom “throwing her life away”, so they disowned her. Mom didn’t care, she was really happy being married to Mr. Daniel Devine. He was a soldier, so he and Mom got to go and live in Germany. That’s where Danni was born.

My big sister Danni (Danielle Ann) was a beautiful blue eyed, bald baby girl who grew up to be a beautiful blue eyed, blond kid (she eventually got some hair). Today my sister is a wicked beautiful sixteen-year-old! She’s the girl other girls seem to want to be, at least, that’s the way it looks from my perspective. Danni isn’t brain surgeon smart, but she’s not dumb either. She just has a tough time thinking things through for herself. I’ve never understood that. If somebody tells me something, I think about to make sure that it makes sense. Danni pretty much believes whatever people tell her. I worry that if she does become famous, this will make it easy for people to take advantage of her.

Anyway, back to my life story, so my mom is living in Germany with my dad and sister, when she finds out she’s going to have another baby (me). This is where the story gets sad.

My dad told my mom that she should make-up with her parents, so he bought a ticket for her and Danni to fly back to the United States to see my grandparents. He took Mom and Danni to the airport and kissed them good-bye. That was the last time they saw him. He died in a car crash that night. Mom got the news when her plane landed. She says she sat down in the middle of the airport, hugged Danni, and cried for about two hours.

After she stopped crying, Mom decided she wasn’t going to run home and let her parents rule her life again. She opted to stay on the local Army base until I was born, but she had no idea what she would do next.

See, my mom had graduated high school, but she hadn’t gone to college. She could ride a motorcycle, that was how she and my dad met, and she could look pretty, but neither of those things could lead to a well paying job. Mom decided that once I was born, she would become a model, not one of those skinny, fake-looking models strutting down a runway, but the smiling mom model you see in a laundry detergent ad.

So, I grew up on that Army base. Mom got a job in the daycare center there, so we got to live in one of those cute little base houses. Between her widow’s pension, her daycare salary, and the little extra she brought in with those “smiling mom” modeling jobs, Mom made sure that me and Danni grew up never knowing how tough things really were, money-wise I mean.

Danni was always bugging Mom to let her go on one of her modeling shoots, but Mom didn’t think it was a good place for a kid to be hanging out. Finally, when Danni was ten, Mom caved in and took her to her next modeling gig. The photographer took one look at Danni, with her big blue eyes and long blond hair, and demanded that she be in the pictures too. Mom protested, but Danni made it clear that she wanted to do it and the photos were really amazing!

Danni began to get her own modeling jobs and made enough money to enter a small beauty pageant. Mom was none to pleased with this, but figured that one good loss would end Danni’s fascination with the whole pageant thing. Besides, Mom had always told us that “you don’t know if you don’t try”, so she wasn’t in a position to tell Danni not to try.

And wouldn’t you know, but Danni wins that pageant! Along with a trophy and a tiara, Danni received a check for five hundred dollars! Danni begged Mom to let her enter another pageant, then another, and pretty soon Danni was the reigning beauty queen in her age range. Even better, Danni was bringing in enough money to allow Mom to quit her job at the daycare center and focus on helping Danni continue in the pageant world.

I never gave a hoot for any of that beauty stuff. One time Danni dragged me along to a class at a beauty salon (Up Do’s and Up Don’ts) where I managed to irritate the instructor so much that he whipped a handful of curlers at me and kicked me out of the class and the salon – forever.

Here’s the part of my life where I have to talk about Robert (blech).

Robert Ruebens is a music agent. He has made a lot of money helping other people make their musical dreams come true. Robert is okay looking, but he spends so much time and money on his hair, teeth, and fancy clothes that he seems a lot more handsome than he really is. I think Robert is a rat, but Mom says that Robert is not a bad guy; it’s just that he’s so focused on his job that if you aren’t directly related to what he’s doing (making money) then he doesn’t see you, hear you, or acknowledge your existence. In other words, he’s rotten to me.

Mom likes to tell people that it was fate that brought Robert into our lives; truth is it was a junker car with a lame transmission and bad brakes.

Me, Mom, and Danni were in Los Angeles, California, because Danni was in a beauty pageant there. Mom was driving up a steep hill when the transmission slipped and our car began to roll backwards. Mom tried to brake, but the car kept going. It was scary; we all screamed, but the junker didn’t go very far. It only rolled a couple of feet, what stopped it was the car behind us. We rushed out of the junker and found Robert sitting behind the wheel of his now smooshed 1962 Mercedes Gull-wing convertible (it was a really cool car…was). Robert was in shock. Mom apologized over and over again. She was babbling about how sorry she was when reporters and television cameras began to descend on the scene. Suddenly a reporter for Television Tonight shoved a microphone in Mom’s face and asked her how it felt to have almost flattened one of the most powerful men in the music industry. Robert was pale and just kept repeating, “my baby, just out of the shop”, in a trembling voice.

Not to brag, but it was me who saved the day. I walked over to Robert and told him that he should be grateful that he wasn’t hurt. When he began wail about how much it was going to cost to fix his car, I calmly explained that we had no money yet; however, Danni was going to be a superstar singer someday and if Robert were to represent her, then he’d get his car money and a lot more. Robert was so shocked by a little kid talking business that he stopped whining. He looked at Danni. She was pretty enough to be a pop star, but how did he know that she could sing? I convinced him to attend the pageant that night. Robert did, and the minute he heard Danni sing, he knew he’d found his next big star. Mom signed a big fat contract that night.

Danni has been working with the best producers to record the perfect CD. She just turned sixteen and Robert is about to release her music and send her on the road for a major tour of every big mall in the United States! He keeps saying that Danni will be an immediate smash! Radio stations around the world will play her music. Her videos will be shown day and night. Her CD will fly off music store shelves. If everything works out the way Robert has planned, by the time she turns seventeen, Danni Devine will be a worldwide sensation and the number one superstar pop princess on the planet!

I don’t know about all this. It sounds way too good to be true and I don’t like the idea of Danni being gone for so long. If it all does happen, will it make our lives perfect? I mean, everyone dreams of being rich and famous, right? But what I wonder is, will it really work out that way in real life? Guess I’ll just have to wait and see.