Elisabeth "Lizzie" Lebowski

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Name: Elisabeth ‘Lizzie’ Lebowski
Gender: Female
Age: 18
Grade: Senior
School: George Hunter High School
Hobbies and Interests: Comedy; accordion; volunteering, mentoring.

Appearance: Lizzie has an average build, standing at 5’7” and weighing 142 lbs. She is Caucasian.

Lizzie has dark brown hair that she keeps tied back in a high pony tail. She has a pointed face, with high cheekbones and a thin jawline. She has brown eyes, medium in size, underneath relatively pronounced eyebrows, and a button nose. She also has a mild astigmatism in her right eye, which she owns a pair of wide-framed square red glasses for, but more often than not she just goes without them.

Lizzie’s favourite colour is yellow, and she usually wears button shirts in that tone. She likes to accessorise with buttons with varying designs, often emojis, and wears a pair of red suspenders with a range of light tan trousers, along with brown footwear appropriate to the climate, usually sandals when the weather permits.

Biography: Michaella Berger met her future husband Kyle Lebowski, a human resources department worker, whilst out clubbing with friends; Michaella had moved to Washington, D.C. from her native Germany to work as an international correspondent. The two connected over a period of fourteen months before marrying in the Fall. Their only child, Elisabeth, was born just under two years later. Michaella and Kyle agreed to just have one child to minimise costs and keep the family small and close.

Lizzie’s childhood was reasonably typical. The family moved to Chattanooga when she was six years old, after her mother had been let go as a correspondent a few years before and her father was paid to transfer to another branch of his employer to make up for a shortage in staff. Michaela went on to freelance for a number of publications before settling down into a permanent role when Lizzie was eight.

Lizzie was exposed to a number of hobbies from an early age, as her father wanted her to find areas she was talented in early in life so that she could properly develop the skills, which her mother supported as long as Lizzie wasn’t pushed too hard. Whilst for the most part she didn’t find any particular niches, she did get socialised with a large number of children early on, which led to a quick development of her social skills. As a bright, friendly girl, she made friends easily.

One extracurricular that did stick with Lizzie was music lessons. Specifically, she became very interested in the accordion after seeing a street performer one day when she was four and asking him about it, as she found the music played to be very fun. Telling her parents that it was what she wanted to try, which was a first as before her parents had just chosen for her, she started taking lessons and went on to continue them all throughout elementary school, only stopping for a few weeks after the family moved whilst they adjusted to the new city.

In school, Lizzie was a typical student. Her outgoing personality and good social skills meant she got on well with her classmates, but other than that her academic and athletic performance was unremarkable. She would often be reprimanded for spending more time talking to her classmates than concentrating on her work, but otherwise maintained average grades and avoided getting into any serious trouble.

One of her talents that made her popular with her classmates was her gift for humour. Lizzie had a knack for making her friends laugh, at the time through impressions and reciting from jokebooks, and she enjoyed doing so. She focused on improving this talent over the years, deploying it in school talent shows and on the playground, which led to her becoming the class clown.

This served Lizzie fine in elementary school, and apart from some lectures from her father on the importance of education and not to get distracted or be a distraction, her parents were content enough with it as it meant a healthy social life for their daughter. However, this started to change in middle school.

Lizzie’s humour had failed to grow with her, and her childish jokes stopped being funny. To make matters worse, her clownish personality that had won her friends before started making her the target of insults and ridicule instead. Other girls started calling her Loony Lizzie, and the boys who were trying to impress those girls followed suit. Lizzie found herself becoming an outcast.

Not wanting to be left out of her former friend’s activities, Lizzie began to suppress parts of herself when she went into her second year of middle school. She laughed off her first year as being embarrassing and pathetic, leveraging her charisma to get the other girls back on her side once she started conforming. She dropped her hobbies, quitting her accordion lessons and keeping her jokes to herself, and even started joining in on the other girls’ bullying. She felt terrible for doing so, but the peer pressure to do so was something she couldn’t overcome.

This continued into her Sophomore year at George Hunter High School. Over the years hiding her true self to keep friends had been eating away at her, and she’d become very stressed and neurotic as a result. She kept this hidden well enough at school, but to do so she found herself lashing out and joining in on bullying even more, just to make herself feel better. The inevitable guilt from this led to a vicious cycle, and eventually she had a public breakdown when a group of targets turned back on her and verbally broke her down into the loser she realised she’d become.

She refused to go back to school after that, locking herself in her bedroom and spending most of the next week crying. Her parents took her to see a counsellor, who convinced her to return to school and helped her decide to stop pretending she was someone she wasn’t.

When she returned, she found herself instantly isolated. Many of her former friends turned on her, not helped by some of the insults Lizzie had thrown at them during her breakdown, and many other students were happy to see such an unpleasant person suffer.

Never the less, with continued support from her counsellor she was able to maintain a resolve not to become the person she hated again. She slowly but surely made friends, mostly among students whom she hadn’t picked on before but also rekindling old ties, and began to let her real personality show again.

Lizzie still continued to harbour a lot of guilt over her past though, and joined a number of clubs as a self-inflicted penance. She joined the anti-bullying society, both because she wanted to work to stop people doing what she’d done, and also because she wanted to convince people that she really had changed. She also joined the volunteering club, as she believed helping people would be another way to make herself feel better. Although she joined these clubs largely out of guilt, she has over time found herself to truly enjoy taking part in them, as she gets to feel like she’s making a positive impact whilst also enjoying the company of the club members.

She also picked the accordion back up as a Junior. Although she was rusty from not practicing for so long, she still enjoyed playing upbeat jaunty melodies with it and felt it went a good way to softening her image. She also found people to be a lot more accepting of it in her Junior year than in middle school, which meant she could finally relax about liking to play it again. She currently plays a 48 bass piano accordion. While she enjoys playing lively music, she also has a soft spot for jazz and enjoys listening to it when relaxing and wanting to create a more mellow mood.

She was also able to bring her comedy back into her social life, without using it come up with cruel barbs against other students. Even when trying to maintain a fake image, she had still kept up with comedy shows at home in private and worked on routines in journals she kept to herself, so unlike her music, her skills had never really rusted. This became a useful tool in winning people back over to her side, and she was able to relive the joy she got from making people laugh.

Lizzie also changed her wardrobe around this time, deliberately dressing herself in an outlandish fashion to distance herself from the girl who pretended to obsess over styles and trends whilst lashing out at her classmates. At first it felt awkward to wear something so different to what she was used to, but after styling herself like it for so long she’s come to like it as her own unique look.

These days, Lizzie enjoys family friendly styles of humour, as she doesn’t want to alienate anyone from being able to enjoy it and also doesn’t feel that profanity is necessary to make people laugh. She relies on observational comedy for the most part, and she considers Ellen DeGeneres her role model in the area.

She has performed in public on a few occasions, at school talent shows and open mic nights at local establishments, with reasonably successful results. Whilst Lizzie has tried a few different mediums for her comedy, such as writing comedy scripts and doing videos online, she very much prefers performing in front of a live audience so that she can experience their laughs first-hand.

When not working on her hobbies or taking part in club activities, Lizzie tends to enjoy hanging out with her friends in a typical teenage fashion, going out on the town to window shop, grab a bite or see a movie. She has never dated anyone, though she identifies as straight. Whilst she thinks she’d be open to dating given the chance, the right guy has yet to appear.

Being half German, Lizzie has been to Europe to visit her mother’s family most summers in her life, with members of the family visiting her in America in return a few times. As her mother never made much of an effort to teach her, Lizzie’s ability to speak German is reasonable but not fluent, largely picked up from her time spent over there over the years. She did take a class in the language for two years in high school, but opted not to continue with it as she had other subjects she wanted to take instead and felt that she was proficient enough already.

Lizzie’s relationship with her parents is healthy, though they have their issues. Her father wishes she was more focused academically, so that she could have a better career than he believes he had, whilst her mother, being a journalist, wishes Lizzie had more of an interest in world events and the bigger issues than just whether or not people were laughing. Though this causes some tension from time to time, the two are happy that she is better off than she was a few years ago, and support her expressing herself. They have been to a number of her comedy shows, and are proud of her talent.

Lizzie maintains a B average in school. She puts in a reasonable amount of effort into studying, but just as a way to make sure she graduates at a decent level. She enjoys creative writing classes, as it’s another way for her to express her comedy, and her least favourite subject is math due to its lack of any creativity as far as she cares. Although she doesn't play any sports and didn't take phys ed beyond the mandatory two years, she stays active enough through her hobbies to be at a decent but unremarkable level of fitness.

In her final year of high school, Lizzie has managed to become comfortable enough with herself again. She has a healthy social circle and is able to enjoy her hobbies. However, she still harbours guilt over her past actions, and goes to great lengths to avoid lashing out at people. This has meant she has been reluctant to stand up for herself at times or take controversial positions, though she doesn’t deliberately let people walk all over her either. If she realises she's in such a situation, she does her best to walk away without getting into a fight.

Lizzie has started volunteering to mentor younger students, as she hopes to help them avoid making the same mistakes she did. She takes part in peer counselling, and has become known amongst some of the Freshman year for being approachable and entertaining. She enjoys being able to relate to the younger students over problems, and is glad she can lend a hand.

After graduation, Lizzie is undecided on what she’d want to do as a career. She would like to find a job which lets her help people and make them smile, but has yet to find a career that will let her do this to her satisfaction. She would love to attend college in New York so that she can experience the show business elements of the city and try out her material there while deciding what to do with her life, but is sceptical that her family could afford it. She has applied to a number of schools there along with some local colleges as an undecided major, just in case.

Advantages: Lizzie is naturally charismatic and experienced at keeping people in good spirits, which will help her make allies and help them maintain a level head. Her deliberate efforts to appear friendly and non-threatening could also make it easier for other students to trust her.
Disadvantages: Lizzie is very conscious about her image, and still harbours guilt over her past. This may make her more hesitant to take actions that could jeopardise people’s opinion on her, even at her own expense. She's had trouble coping with peer pressure in the past, and is more likely to follow than lead. Some students may still hold a grudge towards her from when she was a bully.

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With the start of V7 Final Applications, this profile has been moved to the abandoned section. It is eligible for immediate resubmission for final applications.