CHELSEA POST-PUBERTY

Three years after President Clinton took office, his daughter Chelsea has reached her sixteenth birthday. We never thought it would happen; with all the media scrutiny surrounding the poor child as she hit puberty, she is lucky to have escaped relatively unscathed.

Judging from how beautiful she looked at her father's State of the Union address, the White House hasn't hurt her too much. She has gone from a gawky 13-year-old to a self-confident 16-year-old (perhaps the ballet lessons helped?), all in front of the television cameras.

We're glad to see that, even after being the leader of the free world, President Clinton admits to feeling sentimental about his only child: "I was sitting there thinking, 'You know, it seems like just yesterday I was changing her diapers, and here she is driving me around in a car,'" he said last year. Sounds like some other parents we know.

We wish the First Daughter a sweet sixteen and hope that she only becomes more assured and more graceful by the time her father leaves office in 2000. Sarah J. Schaffer