Well, all this has been sort of training, too, for what was to follow, right?
Yeah, and then when I was very young, I think I was fifteen or so, I went to some, one of
those local dances and I won a contest.
I was Miss Teen Queen.
And then I went to another dance, and I was like Nisei Queen.
But they just, I happened to be at the dance and then they chose me, and I remember I had
a black/red eye, because I threw a baton up in the air, a lady walked in front of me,
it was going to hit her, and I tried to move her, and it bounced on her shoulder and then
it went into my eye.
And so I was surprised when it happened.
But it got me a scholarship at a modeling company.
And so then I did modeling after that.
I took the course, I got a number of jobs modeling, I worked some of the trade fairs.
That must have been unusual for an Asian.
Probably.
I remember some, I remember some man from one of those Middle East countries who wanted
me to be part of his harem.
No thank you.
I remember meeting the owner of the Ajinomoto company from Japan.
And I brought him home to meet my mother and father.
He wanted to have me live with his family in Japan as one of his children.
Didn't do that.
So modeling got me a lot of interesting little jobs and I met a lot of very interesting people.
I met, at that time, when some of the first sumo wrestlers came over I got to meet them.
So all of this is probably, is your head getting bigger and bigger as all of this is happening?
No, not really.
Oh, I remember when I won the Nisei contest, they had a photographer take pictures, and
we did some with a bathing suit that had holes on the side and another one that was like
a make believe bikini.
I got such hate mail.
It was in the newspaper, and terrible letters, terrible.
That I was an absolute disgrace to the Japanese community and I should be so ashamed of myself...
And this is from other Japanese.
This is from other Japanese.
I got a lot of hate mail.
And all this time your mother and father are fine with it, or being a little careful?
No, I was still contributing to the household.
I'm still coming home at a pretty reasonable hour.
I don't think I gave them any cause for alarm, but I think I was probably, you know, if they
were, had control to know what I was doing, they would say, well, they don't want me going
to some of these places.
But on the whole, most of the time I wasn't, it's just I loved to go listen to the music.
I didn't see anything wrong with it because I was very naive about sex.
I wasn't having sex, I was just doing things I enjoyed doing.
But it sounds like you attracted a lot of attention, so that must have been, how did
that feel when people gravitated to you?
I didn't think of it as anything different, or didn't seem like a whole lot of attention
to me.
It didn't happen all at once or wasn't...