How I Got My Dream Job At Elle Magazine In The ‘90s

A creepy ad for Love’s Baby Soft, JFK Jr. and the Peter Pan Bus

I remember the day I fell in love with magazines. It was 1983, and I was in sixth grade. My family was stationed in Spain because my dad was in the Navy, and my best friend Belle and I were hanging out on her bed in her room. I was flipping through her older sister’s Seventeen magazine, which I had just rescued from the trashcan; American magazines were hard to come by. I took it home with me and spent hours reading it, poring over the pages, marveling at the attention to detail the girl in the back-to-school fashion story exhibited with her buttery yellow headband that perfectly matched her yellow and black plaid skirt and her Trapper Keeper. That girl was going places.

I was enthralled with an ad for Love’s Baby Soft. It told the story of a girl who had the life of my dreams in four panels. In one, my dream girl nuzzled a horse; in another she sat on a sofa watching TV with her cute boyfriend; in the next, she hugged her dad who was dressed in a Santa Claus suit; and in another, she slow-danced at prom with her boyfriend. The final panel was for the perfume itself, which I had never smelled, but I was promised it smelled like innocence, which according to the ad was “sexier than you think.” I was obsessed with that girl. She had everything. I wanted to be her, and…