Old and New Are Combined as 13 Make Debuts

“Look at all those people!”

Tenise Harris peeked from the South Lounge in the Disneyland Hotel and got a bad case of nerves.

“I’m so nervous I can’t breathe ,” said Harris, a Chino High School junior and one of 13 debutantes presented in the hotel’s Grand Ballroom on Saturday night.

The party, attended by 565 guests from Orange and Los Angeles counties, was sponsored by the Orange County chapter of Links Inc., a national community service organization involved in educational, cultural and philanthropic activities.

For Harris and her deb buddies, the night was the culmination of six months of preparation--including hours of volunteer work, etiquette training and career counseling.

“We’ve tried to take an old tradition and modernize it,” said Laura Rycraw, event chairwoman.

Tradition prevailed at the fund-raiser, where career and civic concerns were briefly displaced by pressing matters of makeup, hair, curtsy and waltz.

While the black-tie crowd sipped cocktails outside the ballroom, the white-gowned girls, their families and escorts posed for formal portraits behind the South Lounge’s closed doors.

“Look at my beautiful baby!” cooed Earlene Owens as she combed Kamela Bell’s hair. Bell, a junior at Cerritos High School, is Owens’ godchild.

Debutante Robynne Royster, a junior at the Los Angeles High School of the Arts, said she’d wanted to be a debutante since she was a toddler.

“My mother was a debutante,” said Royster, an aspiring actress who kept a cool head while those around her tensed. “Starting when I was about 3, I used to dress up and play around in her gown.”

The presentation of the girls--which included the requisite curtsies, bouquets and tours of the ballroom dance floor--began at 7 p.m., after brief speeches by Rycraw, Links Inc. chapter President Iva Green and Jennie Spencer Green, who presented scholarship awards.

Emcee Horace Mitchell, vice chancellor of student affairs at UC Irvine, described the accomplishments of the “13 young, gifted and talented African-American women . . . (whose) beauty (is) sweeter than the sound of a musical instrument.”

Also making a formal debut were Shelbi Titus, a junior at Cerritos High School; Sharmarra Turner, a senior at Dorsey High School in Los Angeles; Gwendolyn Williams, a senior at Saddleback High School in Santa Ana; Joi Williams, a junior at Gahr High School in Cerritos; Sabrina Barry, a junior at San Pedro High School; Russetta Bourda, a junior at St. Anthony High School in Long Beach; Yolaunda Collier, a junior at University High School in Irvine; Heather Davis, a junior at Whitney High School in Cerritos; Denise Johnson, a junior at Corona High School; and Kristie Moore, a senior at Cerritos High School.