Star Struck Style

September 20 is Joanie Dodds’ birthday.

Joanie was a contestant on Cycle 6 of “America’s Next Top Model.” That cycle will go down in history as one of the best seasons of reality television, period. I know a lot of fans of the show cite Cycle 3 as an all-time favorite, but as a lover of self-aware camp, I have to give it up for Cycle 6 because it was obvious to me that the producers of the show knew how ridiculous it was. So many of the tropes that make “RuPaul’s Drag Race” such a delightful parody of ANTM were born during Cycle 6.

Anyway, sometime after the show aired, someone on a now-defunct online forum posted this photo of Joanie modeling wigs. I saved it to my computer desktop, and I find myself constantly posting it like a GIF on my social media pages. I don’t know why I think it’s so funny, but it seriously cracks me up every time I look at it.

I don’t know what Joanie Dodds thinks of it, but she probably doesn’t care because she’s got nothing to prove. She’s one of the only contestants from the show who parlayed a spot in the finals into a genuine TV career. As Joanie Sprague (her married name) , she has become a fixture on home improvement shows.

Her natal chart is interesting. She has a Gemini moon that doubles-up her Mercurial nature. But what really stands out in her horoscopes is a preponderance of planets in Libra. She has Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn and Pluto in the sign.

Almost anyone born in the second half of 1981 is going to have major Libra influences in their chart, but not everyone is going to have Mercury almost exactly conjunct Pluto. For a Virgo with a Gemini moon, Mercury is personalized. To see it conjoined with the planet that rules over transformation in the chart of someone who has become a fixture of the “renovation” genre of television is amazing!

I’d love to know exactly where this conjunction is located in her chart, but without a time of birth I can’t place it in the houses. So, instead of worrying about that, I think I’m going to visit one of those framing websites to order myself a framed version of the photo above to sit on my actual desktop. When people ask me who it is, I’ll tell them it’s my mom.

Thanks, Joanie!