Skipping the prom — because the ticket cost too much, as she told Marie Claire — is a detail that reads as either poignant or practical depending on what register you bring to it. In the register she describes it: practical. She didn’t go because it was expensive and she didn’t particularly care about it. This is not a story she tells as a wound. It is a story she tells to illustrate the difference between what her concerns were and what the concerns of her peers were. She was seventeen years old in 2003. The concerns of a typical seventeen-year-old in 2003 did not include evaluating ticket purchases against genuine budgetary constraints.
## The Years Between Law & Order and Blair Waldorf
The span between Leighton Meester’s television debut in 1999, on Law & Order, and her career-defining casting on Gossip Girl in 2007 is eight years of working actress biography. These are years that rarely receive detailed attention in profiles of any working actress — they are the years before the breakthrough, and they are characterized by the unglamorous but essential work of building a career from the audition room up.
She appeared in Tarzan in 2003, the WB drama that attempted to translate the Edgar Rice Burroughs characters into a contemporary New York setting, with Travis Fimmel as the titular character before Fimmel found his way to other notable roles. The show ran for one season and eight episodes, was not renewed, and is remembered primarily as a footnote in the biographies of its cast members rather than as a significant piece of television in its own right.