Description

With her naturally curly dirty blonde hair cropped haphazardly about her jaw and cut short at the front, with her penchant for cropped trousers and men's shirts, Jacqui is hardly the epitome of feminine fifties elegance. Instead she carries herself with a hard gamine beauty all of her own that is only enhanced by the slight upturn of her nose or her high narrow arch of her eyebrows. She looks a little older than her twenty-three years, perhaps in part due to the guarded look she holds about her features, as if a sneer is forever about to appear on her lips. She is a petite woman, though she often appears taller than she is through sheer force of character, and of slight build with narrow hips and an small bust. She can often be found with a slim-cut cigarette perched between her full lips and a patterned silk scarf tied about her head.

Personality

Ferociously opinionated, occasionally obnoxious and with a tendency towards self-destruction, Jacqui is no wallflower. Inspired by the emerging Beat Generation and their rebellion against the inhibition of expression and restriction of experience present in the social norms of the time, she lives her life in much the same manner, saying what she thinks and daring to indulge in experiences considered obscene, risky or unconventional by most.

Equipment

A packet of cigarettes, her benzedrine inhaler and a sketch book.

History

Born to middle class parents in a reasonably wealthy district of Brooklyn, from the outside Jacqui's upbringing was unremarkable. She attended a private school and initially did well, though never really reached her potential, gradually developing into a troublemaker who kept her peers at a distance. She left school at eighteen and, against her parent's wishes, moved into the city with no means of support, no friends and certainly no family who would admit her existence. In fact, her father- a Madison Avenue advertising executive- was a serial adulterer and brutal alcoholic. Her mother- a housewife and mother to five children- would stay indoors for days on end during each of her near-psychotic breakdowns. Her siblings, a sister and three brothers, were all several years older than her and escaped the brunt of their parent's dysfunction by slipping straight into jobs or marriage safely enveloped in American suburbia. Only Jacqui went against the mould.

Five years on, she is working as a waitress in an attempt to make ends meet though she finds it difficult to hold down a job for very long. When ends don't meet, she had no qualms about turning to petty crime to fill in the gap. Her real passion is art and illustration and she occasionally sells sketches to the major publishing companies in the city though she had yet to gain a long-term contract. She surrounds herself with intellectuals (some showing glimmers of the true genius, most just hanging onto the coattails of a new and exciting movement)-writers and poets- but has not found anyone she ever truly feels completely at one with. Like many of her peers, she occasionally indulges in recreational drug use and seems to be using her benzedrine inhaler more and more often. Most of her working colleagues and neighbours consider her dangerous and to be a corrupting influence.