Welcome to my parlor; With Madonna as a role model, Jennifer Rubell set out in her late teens on a quest to find herself.

Byline: Jennifer Rubell

May 1989. I'm eighteen years old, finishing up a year off between high school and college, getting ready to leave for Harvard in the fall. I should be excited, but the truth is, I'm terrified. I think of Cambridge and envision a sea of scary preppy kids in their Saabs and Volvos, with perfectly aged khakis and decent, conservative parents. I'd love to be one of them, but I know I can't. Instead, I'll arrive at school in September dressed in black, with my mother, also dressed in black. I'll be carrying a single duffel bag (black, of course) that contains, among other things, a plaque by the artist Jenny Holzer that says, protect me from what i want. I'll hang the plaque on the wall over my bed, and I won't have a television. And all this will be my family's fault.

My parents, instead of letting us spend weekends like normal kids, have spent years dragging me and my brother around art galleries on a mission to collect work that the majority of Americans don't consider art at all (though they will). Strange things happen in our house. Jean-Michel Basquiat accidentally leaves his coke straw in my bathroom. Andy Warhol wanders around a party snapping Polaroids, saying, "That's great," in response to anything anyone says to him.

My uncle Steve's helicoptered-in weekends in Southampton and friends like Calvin and Liza and Bianca add some glamour, and a little notoriety, too. By this time, Steve's already created Studio 54, gone to prison for tax evasion, invented the boutique hotel, and been diagnosed with AIDS. His funeral will be one of the last things I attend before leaving for college.

Enter Madonna. I'd already been to her concerts and identified with something in her beyond the boy-toy getup and sexed-up dance moves. Now I find her in the May 1989 issue of Vogue, rubber bracelets and head shmatte gone, decked out in a fuchsia couture dress and Cruella De Vil updo, playing lady of the manor in a perfectly appointed home. She's rich enough to belong now, to have the decorated house and designer frocks, the over-the-top shoot styled by Andre Leon Talley and the kind of body you only get when it's your full-time job to make sure you have it. She looks successful, the way society women with infanta dogs look successful. She's probably the richest woman in America who didn't inherit it or marry it.

The girls I know have evolved, grown, matured, changed their minds. They've tried a new look, a new school, a new boyfriend or attitude or hair color, but they've never done this: Madonna is trying on a new life. I like this idea.

In the beginning, I run with it. I arrive at Harvard committed to making a clean break with my past. I vow not to talk about the strange world my family inhabits: not the artists, not the nightclubs, not the parties at Halston's house. I don't have a clear vision of the new me, but I want to create something for myself just as exciting as what my parents gave me. And even though I don't know what that is, I'm pretty sure the first step to getting there is a blank slate. I need to dispose of the person I was and find the threads of someone new. Then I need to weave those threads into a whole new persona. Easy.