Lianna immediately understood that her type of girl needed stoking after they walked miles home. They needed reassurance. They needed a firm but sweet voice telling them that it was more than OK to be a girl who liked to dress in lace.

Lianna demystified life for them. Just because a girl, usually called woman then, worked at a good job didn’t mean she had to sacrifice her identity. Lianna, nicely, designed a collection of go anywhere suits. If girls kept the jacket buttoned during the day, the rayon or silk suits made them look like a CEO. They came with skinny fitted blouses, tees and lace camisoles. She even persuaded Nike to come out with lace sneakers color coordinated to the suits.

Girls could go everywhere as long as they remembered that girls didn’t have to hide their femininity to make it to the top. Lianna idolized Diane Van Furstenberg who made dresses that enhanced attributes. She couldn’t understand why girls had suddenly become adverse to looking like girls.

Lianna had bustier and Marilyn dresses she wore proudly with lace socks, and Candie cork sandals. She didn’t want other girls to dress like her. She wanted them all to revel in their femininity. She wanted girls to feel good about themselves. She wanted girls to become CEO’s, wives, mothers, and princesses. She worked with the zeal of a convert or revolutionary.
**
Good Girls Go Everywhere â„¢ became a mantra. There was only one rule; good girls never forget they make the world go round. Later, sex is wonderful as long as it’s safe was added.

Lianna wrote a book on the lost art of dating. She had learned the secret from her sister, Hollis, who had only three dateless, or not in relationship, nights since she was twelve in 1966.

Lianna was an expert on marriage as she had first been married at 19, and divorced three years later in a quickie divorce in the Dominican Republic so she could marry her second husband Charles. He was killed in a car accident seven years later.

She edited the baby book and had mothers talk about their experiences. Lianna had miscarried after Charles’s accident. But that’s when the transit strike began and she realized how pitiful girls then called women appeared.

They looked as if they had no faith in themselves. Older men laughed at them. Until Lianna told them they didn’t know that they were hiding their true self behind a shield of false professionalism. Oh did they listen to Lianna’s voice.

Lianna’s clothing business expanded to all types of clothes as long as they had some sort of funk appeal. The perfect sheets she had never seen but dreamed of were designed. A make up, skin care and perfume line were inevitable.

When girls began nesting or just couch potatoing Lianna worked with a furniture company to make interesting furniture in great colors.

One of her big missions was to make single girls live in apartments that looked like homes and not half way stops to marriage, or a place to sleep in between work, the gym, other activities and dates. Personally she found it pathetic when a 40 year old slept in a single bed in a one bedroom apartment, or slept in the sofa in a studio when so many great alternatives were available, thanks to Lianna. Lianna’s Good Girl paints for walls were a smash. She made sconces and other pretty accent items.

Since girls were spending more time at home she thought they should know how to cook simple food that looked like it took hours and experimented with recipes that she put in her cook book. It was easy to start a line of prepared foods only sold in select stores.

Lianna and Hollis’s father had brought them up to be financially independent. She couldn’t understand why girls would waste a thousand dollars on many small items but be afraid to spend a thousand on something tangible. She wrote books on finance.

Lianna didn’t understand girls were so scared to travel alone. She made girls proud solo travelers.

There wasn’t one aspect of a girls life not covered by Lianna. Now she was writing and lecturing on enjoying middle age even though so many middle aged people were living non-traditional lives. The children might be young, the husband out of the picture, the girl’s mother elderly and dependent, the money not great, but the not so young girl was still going to feel empowered.

She began a line of diet foods, nutritional supplements and other things important to growing older.

One day Lianna felt as if she had been left holding a bag that weighed two tons, had 20 dead bodies and an ocean of regrets.

She had spent almost 30 years making two and a half generations of girls/women feeling financially and otherwise empowered in beautiful clothes with beautiful furniture in a beautiful house.

Who was she to have been so brazen? What gave her the right to decide other women’s lifestyles? Yes, she had spoke in her firm yet soft voice and they had come.

Yes, nobody made them come. Why had she felt so entitled?