It's no secret that California harbors a wide spectrum of realities--and no two could be more different than those of Long Beach, the Los Angeles suburb where Christine Maddox now lives, and of Tracy, a little town about 20 minutes' drive from Stockton where she was born 23 years ago. According to Christine it has "a high school, one theater and one bowling alley." It also has a number of factories. Her father works in one of them; he's a watchman for a paper company. Christine herself worked for a while in a factory, checking paint jobs on adding machines and TV sets; she also did some knob attaching and hot stamping ("putting little silver things on top of little plastic things"). It wasn't exactly her life's calling. So, in spite of the fact that she loves Northern California ("You're so close to the lakes and mountains, not to mention the snow in winter"), she made her way south to Los Angeles. She considers the city overpopulated, and it was a little "spooky" at first: "Back home, everybody knew everybody else. But here, I'd smile at people and they wouldn't smile back. Eventually, I got used to it." Christine may have been aided in making that adjustment by the fact that she comes from a large family. It didn't hurt, either, that modeling jobs--for furniture-store ads and things like that--began to materialize without much delay. She's also had a number of offers to act; but so far she's turned them all down because she feels acting would be "too time-consuming." Christine still sees her relatives fairly often--her brother lives in nearby Hawthorne--but home is now her Long Beach apartment, and when she's not posing for photographers, she busies herself in classic California style--swimming and water-skiing, riding a motorcycle or cruising around in the '64 Dodge that she keeps threatening to fix up. Last year, she widened her horizons with a nine-day junket to Hong Kong, and she was thoroughly entranced by the unfamiliar sights, sounds and smells of the Orient. Christine also makes frequent excursions to Disneyland, where her visits haven't been without incident: "Once Porky Pig was picking out girls to dance with during a show, and when he picked me, I was so embarrassed I started running through the crowd--with the Big Bad Woif chasing me. Next time I'll know what they're up to in advance and I'll sneak away before they notice me." Which indicates that Miss December is still a modest, small-town girl at heart. We wouldn't have it any other way.
