A Little Lonely

Upon my return to London, since health care was “free” in England, I decided to look into seeing if I could get the strabismus in my eye fixed. I had heard of healthcare rationing and the nightmare waits for services but I thought I’d just give it a shot. It turned out that eye surgeries were not one of the services most in demand and I got a surgery date very quickly.

I was told that what they had to do was shorten the muscle that was weak so that it wouldn’t let the eye wander. It wasn’t until after the surgery that I found out that they actually pulled the whole eyeball out to take care of it. If I had known that beforehand, I may not have done it. Although the surgery greatly improved the issue, the eye still has a slight wander.

I was still working at Safeway but I wasn’t getting any modeling jobs. I realized that I was probably not going to get very far with the modeling “agency” I was with. I knew that I should just try to sign with an established one. But I was scared. 

Hope was important to me. I was trying to model to get the money to go to film school to get back to my dream. If I couldn’t get in at a big modeling agency then my hopes and dreams might come to an end. I decided possibility at a small agency was better than possible rejection at a big one.

My brother had done a little modeling in Hong Kong which had a pretty thriving industry. My sister still lived there so I began to talk to her about possibly moving there. I thought I might have a better chance, as there may be a smaller pool of Western models. 

In the meantime, a couple of my friends from the Anastasis came to visit. Don Stephens came to England for some kind of meetings and he brought two of his kids, Heidi and Luke and another friend of Heidi’s who was living on the ship. Lynn Green of Live in Loving Relationships fame was also their uncle so one of his sons also joined us to tour London. 

Heidi and her friend were graduating on the ship in a couple of months and she invited me to the graduation when the ship was going to be in Jamaica. At the same time, a friend from Florida was anticipating her senior prom and invited me to go with her if I could come. A senior prom is such a big deal to Americans and movies have turned it into legend. I thought it would be intriguing to see if the reality matched the myth.

I still wasn’t going to church and still had no friends in London and as the days went by after my dad’s passing, I did begin to feel a little lonely. So I thought about taking the girls up on their offers to attend their milestones. I prayed about it and felt like I should go and that something good was going to come of it. I thought that probably meant that I was going to have a great time with my friends. Little did I know.

Visiting friends



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