Sheila Takes

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Sheila (30-B-2) FPE

The story really starts before I was born, because my family had been calling me "Elizabeth" for quite a while. Not that they were terribly disappointed when I arrived a son apparently 100% male. The date was the same day World War One started. If you want to be nosey, look it up! As a clinical sidelight, I didn't start breathing for quite a while; the doctor, having exhausted all conventional methods, gave me a hypo of household ammonia and that did it,. (I've been suspicious of doctors ever since). He blamed the Somnoform (twilight sleep) anesthetic he had given my mother.

There were no playful sisters to launch me into TV, My only half-sister is 15 years older than I and about half my weight, so all I learned from her was that teen- age girls have all the advantages over pre-school boys! Nor were there any other TV influences in that little South-western town! TV was strictly my own idea. The first memories of dressing up are vague probably deli- berately forgotten out of guilt feelings. Just old clothes

in the attic I could fit into my mother's dresses.

My father died in 1928, the next year I got the mumps, which stopped the development of my left test- icle. This probably set what had only been wayward impluses before into real motion; from that day. As a girl I am definitely left-handed. About this time my "brother" named me Anna pun, and sort of a mean one, as that is the second half of his name. Truly, I've lived the part of a second class citizen, a permanent minority ever since I suppose we all have.

Our outside life went on smoothly enough dates, dances, etc., during high school; very interested in girls,

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