Sheralee Conners, Miss July, 1961

Before the Blue-Green eyes of a chestnut-tressed, twenty-year-old native New Yorker named Sheralee Conners–as before the unswerving gaze of thousands of female fame-and-fortune-seekers from shore to shore–Gotham shimmers like a modern-day Xanadu of fifty-storied pleasure domes, antenna-spired TV tabernacles and long-green mansions of high fashion and finance. These naive newcomers to the Unforbidden City ordinarily arrive with little more than a pocketful of hope for a well-padded niche in the fashion, publishing, or communications kingdoms. Sheralee, contrarily, pursues her aspirations with a city-hipness that would leave these Janies-come-lately olive with envy. Perspicaciously, she chases after three simultaneous dreams, on the worldly-wise theory that at least one of them is even money to come true. Hankering to fly high as a big-time thrush, she sings willingly for the nonce as an off-screen oriole in sixty-second TV sales-pitches. One of a lithe-limbed modeling elite, Sheralee labors Dior to Dior in Manhattan's well-groomed world of haute couture. A long-time scholar of cakewalk, charleston and gavotte, she also teaches terpsichore, wants to start a summer camp seminar in the Berkshires for serious students of modern dance. Amidst all this job-juggling, she still manages to steal moments for surf-splashing at nearby Jones Beach; for alfresco listening in Lewisohn Stadium; and for Sunday afternoon canters along Central Park's meandering bridle paths, pursued by galloping huntsmen eager to lead her down the bridal–or primrose–path. The end of this long but lively journey into night finds her lampably lamplit and birthday-suited for forty well-earned winks.