Good Jobs and Worthless Boys

I check in with the front desk, the showroom buzzing from beyond a swinging white door, people talking in foreign languages, flicking through unending racks of clothing, taking pictures of bored models standing 7-feet tall and weighing no more than 110 pounds. 

“Hi, I’m here working for [Blank],” I say.

It feels nice to say it.  I AM WORKING FOR [BLANK BLANK BLANK], I want to scream.  I HAVE BEEN MODELING FOR A DECADE AND I AM FINALLY WORKING FOR [BLANK].

“Just a minute,” the woman says, seeming confused, which actually makes me a nervous.  Maybe I’ve had this wrong all along.  Maybe, just as I suspected, I am not special enough to do e-commerce for an expensive department store.  This is a similar kind of logic to one a pretty girl develops who has been dumped often enough that she has scaled back her perception of self-worth, left scraping the proverbial barrel, freaking out about that the 19-year-old barista who doesn’t speak English WHO WON’T FALL IN LOVE WITH HER EITHER!

Not that I’ve been there before.

She comes back, followed by a sales rep.  “Oh!  It’s you,” she says.  “I was so confused.”  The front desk assistant assumed I was one of the buyers, not a model.  I probably look ten years older than 14, which makes me ten years too old.

We walk through the doors and I am assaulted with that all-too-familiar frenzy, thankful to not be a part of it.  Someone tells me to have a seat, grab something to eat, have a coffee.  I sit on the sidelines, espresso in hand, surveying the scene like an All Star Player on the injury bench. 

This is how it always works in modeling: the easiest, most pleasant jobs pay the most.  Fuck off, supermodels.  You and your fruit plates you won’t touch and your business class seats to the Dominican Republic can all go to hell.

The showroom girls drag their pointed heels across the cement floor, lamely turning for buyers requesting photographs.  I recognize the look in their face – that deadened, I-fucking-hate-life face.

“They’re making 1,200 Euros a day,” Becky says, “I don’t know what they’re complaining about.”

I know what they’re complaining about: Paris agencies take 70-percent of everything they make, they’re spending a couple grand to live in a shitty models’ apartment with bunk beds crammed into small rooms like prison cells, their feet are flared and pink and likely undergoing permanent damage that will show up some fifty years from now.

But no one cares about that.  No one cares unless you know, unless you’ve sat at the edge of a bathtub with your face against the tiled wall, soaking your feet in Epsom salts and praying for a swift and sudden death.  “Psh,” Becky says.  “Come on.”

Becky is the leggy and long-limbed assistant to someone but I don’t know whom.  She runs around with strides too long for her frantic pace.  There is something cartoonish about her, a character of a girl living in New York, working in the fashion industry, getting drunk at parties and running late to work.  I have come to love Becky for what she is.

I am lead to the model’s area, a stuffy, subtropical holding cell where everyone sits around naked or changes into clothes, bitching in foreign accents when they don’t have anything else to do.  Most of the models are Russian.  Most of the dressers are from Italy.

It’s late in the afternoon and most of the appointments are already done.  The girls are splayed out half-naked on the beige sofas with an end-of-day listlessness.  My outfits are there for me, hung one at a time, twenty-five in all.  Becky is steaming shirts with some shitty handheld European thing that only serves to soften the hard-edged wrinkles, not rid the fabric of them completely.  All night, I put on cold, damp garments, thankful that they are numerable, that there is already an end in sight even though we are just beginning.  For the first time, I am the one with the better job, unlike the showroom girls who have to look forward to seven more days of a never-ending deluge of pants and shirts and jumpsuits with skintight sleeves and broken zippers.

They glare at me with an understandable jealousy.

Becky asks me about the guy from LA.  “Are you still dating him?” she asks, and I have to think back to who she is talking about because even calling what we were doing “dating” seems generous.  There should be a word that exists somewhere between dating and not dating, a word that accurately encompasses semi-meaningless sex and a few free meals.

L.A…

L.A….

Oh, Trevor.

It comes to me from the depths of some buried place, having selectively blacked out the memory of him.

“Oh, that one?  That ship sailed a loooonnggg time ago…like in a blazing, horrible inferno.”

“Yeah,” Becky says, “I’m not dating the French guy anymore, either.”  She squats on the sofa, holding the steamer against a poplin button-up.  “Ugh!  Fuck this thing.”  And throws it on the sofa, leading me out the door to stand against a white wall and pose like a person without problems, a girl without baggage.  A pretty little thing that looks nice in clothes.

 

Photo courtesy of Fashion Lover

Sharing Crotch Space with Strangers

There are girls sitting against the walls in dusty corners.  The few chairs that inhabit the lobby (if you can call it a lobby) are already occupied by tiny asses (if you can call them asses) or Celine bags.  I scan the room for a sign-in sheet, which there surely is one judging from the lacking undercurrent of anxiety that generally accompanies a potential for rule breaking and lawlessness.  Take my unmarked, unnumbered place, bitch, and I will cut you!  No, there is definitely order in this room.  An order of the very bored kind.

I sign in.

Number 91.

I push an aforementioned Celine bag to the center of a bench so I can sit down and rest my weary bones.  Everyone in here looks like they’re starting hour five of driving school so I imagine I’ll be here for the rest of the afternoon if that serves as any accurate indication.  May as well get comfortable.

“Number 72, 73, and 74.”

Some bland, porridge-looking girl calls out the numbers we have since traded our given names for upon entering the room.  “You can change now,” she instructs.

The “change” in question is the removal of our winter/spring 2012 garments and into something, you know, a little more comfortable…i.e. their lingerie.  It wouldn’t have been enough to have simply asked all the models to show up in their own adorable, purchased-for-boys-but-now-have-to-wear-in-public bra and panty sets, not an unreasonable request given the girl they hire will likely not be required to have lumps in any places but the right ones.  No, they want to see us in their undies, their bras, of which there are only three sets in total.

As I stare at the backside of Number 74, noting the way in which the stretchy white fabric has begun to wrench its way into the crevice of her (surprisingly ample) ass, I calculate some figures.

91/3 = 30.3

Okay, so 30.3 vaginas will have been pressed against whatever pair of underwear I am so lucky to be handed some three hours from now.  Granted, everyone (dear god, please, everyone) is keeping their little g-strings on underneath, but there’s a reason Victoria Secret doesn’t let you try on underwear, little protective plastic crotch patch be damned.

30.3 x .25 = 7.57

That’s the number of girls standing in this room – statistically speaking – who are likely infected with some sexually transmitted disease.

20

How many minutes I will need to pretend I haven’t done these various calculations in my head while I wait, standing half-naked in front of a room full of pretty girls while some aging photographer dude with an ambiguously foreign accent turns pages of another model’s portfolio with an E    X   C    R   U   T   I   A   T   I    N   G  slowness until it’s my turn for him to do the same.  Oh, joy.  Lucky me.

35

The number of minutes I’ve been here by the time they get to the next three girls.

“Number 75, 76, 77.”

I’ve already contemplated an exit, but I have recently discovered the British gentleman with the salt-and-pepper hair manning a laptop in the corner.  “Hey, Thomas?” someone asks him.  He’s British and his name is Thomas and I like his hair.  I decide to give this thing a few more minutes.

A girl I know from Los Angeles comes in and sits down next to me, the owner of the Celine handbag having already left and taken her $3,000 leather tote with her.

“How long have you been here?” she asks.

“Who the fuck knows…my whole life?”

We talk about her haircut.  We talk about my old haircut.  We talk about apartments in Roosevelt City vs. apartments in the West Village.  When we run out of things to talk about, we both tend to our respective cell phones.

Another girl I know from LA comes in.

“How long have you been here?”

“Ages.”

“Have you been back to LA recently?”

“No, I wish.”

Like most casting conversations, this one extinguishes quickly as well, a flash-fire of feeling generally human for a moment or two until you begin to more wholly devote your attention to the anticipation of the ultimate moment of dehumanization, a reality that is clearly presented itself as I make judgments in my head about the new crop of girls standing half-naked in front of me.  Bow-legged, she looked better with clothes on.  Big arms, are models allowed to have big arms?  Wonderful ass, I wonder what she does!

I’ve been here almost an hour.  Thomas still hasn’t looked my direction.  Girls begin to lose patience and walk quietly out a glass door.  And as I watch Number 82 sit down, cross her legs, and get otherwise nice and cozy with her new pair of underwear (which, I may as well presume will be my pair of underwear) while she chit chats on her iPhone like this lobby were her living room, I realize that I’m too old for this shit – this assumption that I’m too dim to acknowledge the shared-crotch space and extremely unwanted intimacy, the wasted time vs. potential income earned, the generalized inconsiderate nature of what we are being asked to do – and, like a big girl, I gather my things, put on my coat, and walk right out the door.

Score 1: Team Dignity.

Field Trip

Check out my piece on the Flip today.  Click through on the image below.

The room smells like chicken chow mein.  “Do you mind sitting over there while we finish lunch?” he asks, a little fairy with glasses sitting in front of a plate of greasy Chinese food, a plastic fork in his hand.

Countless girls sit in cream plastic folding chairs, none of them a day over 21.  I need to ramp up my eye cream regimen, or perhaps start falling asleep in bathtubs filled with Botox.  Someone passes around a chart filled with names and agencies and ages.  Eighteen, nineteen, eighteen, twenty-one, eighteen, twenty, nineteen.  Some poor sucker has actually cited herself as twenty-six.  A model dinosaur…

Nowhere, USA

Our hotel is a perfectly square box in the middle of nowhere.  Bloomfield, Minnesota.  Population: Who Fucking Cares.  I stare out of the window of my room at another airport hotel – the same building with a different neon sign – and a gray parking lot filled with sad-colored cars.  In the distance, just off the highway, a sign advertises the state Lotto.  “What is Your Dream?” it asks, touting the opportunity to win 48 million dollars.  If winning that money meant I had to stay here another day, I’d still go home.  I look down at the windowsill, a fallen army of dead bugs resting on the air conditioning unit.  Everywhere here is dying to escape.  It’s only been thirty minutes and I am clawing at the walls.

I share an elevator down to the lobby with two doughy businessmen who I will later listen to tout the benefits of Big Box centers like Wal Mart as their female coworker discusses the New Yorker’s seemingly confounding attachment to their local bodegas, stores, restaurants.  “They’re very protective of their little communities over there,” she says, sounding confused, as though we New Yorkers are a bizarre species of humans meant to be studied and not the other way around.  These are the people destroying our country, filling every nook and cranny with the same configuration of shops.  A Best Buy, a Macaroni Grill, a Crate and Barrel, and a Starbucks.  Everything always packaged and always the same, routinely pleasing and similarly disappointing.

The clouds are coming in as I walk the black asphalt road through Minnesota fields, passing more airport hotels and a Hertz rental parking lot.  “Auntie M!  Auntie M!” I hear Dorothy calling out before the tornado comes.  In fact, it would sort of be nice if a tornado came, as it would give me something to do for the next three days, something to talk about with my bored coworkers instead of what they’ve recently learned in the latest issue of Shape Magazine.

I look back from where I came, the Mall of America distancing itself from me with each step forward.  I spent two hours there this morning, waiting for a fitting to start and then having the fitting and then waiting for a shuttle to come and take me back to the hotel, a distance I could have easily walked.  I sat there in front of the giant looming behemoth, the words MALL OF AMERICA plastered on the side in patriotic shades.  Hotel shuttles came in and out, dropping off the eager and out of shape for a day spent consuming food and other things they don’t need in 80,000 feet of recirculating air.  They sell shirts here with the mall’s logo on the front.  And hats.  People buy them.  This is what’s wrong with America.

Get me the fuck out of here.

I take Hiawatha Line 55 down American Boulevard, sitting across from a little boy with a Mohawk afro, an early rebel, dying to get out.  I’d want out, too, if I were him.  His feet can barely touch the floor from his seat on the train and he’s already contemplating how to run away.

We move through suburbs: green neighborhoods with houses featuring Victorian gingerbread porches.  The suburbs give way to industry, brick replaces wood, trees turn into telephone poles.  The periphery of downtown Minneapolis is quite beautiful, though it has been obviously abandoned for bigger, better, newer things.  Weird triangular buildings made of brick stand empty, no longer servicing the railroads so inefficiently snaking around them.

Finally, something redeeming about this place.  And, of course, no one seems to care.

Photo courtesy of Time

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Bite Me

“There might be a lot of girls when you get there,” my booker warns me ahead of time.  Sure enough, the elevator opens up into a room of models standing and sitting, lining up behind one another and staring around with looks of irritation disguised as patience.  Great.  Totally fucking awesome.

My initial reaction is to turn around, go back through the closing elevator doors, and continue on with my day, knowing that while my bank account risks the potential to suffer, I will go another few days without gray hairs and/or stomach ulcers.  I used to stick around for casting like this.  In turn, I used to waste a lot of my time.

When a client requests to see this many girls it means a few things.  One: they’re inconsiderate of other people’s time.  This requires the assumption that models are, in fact, people.  While it might be one thing for them to be in this office for two hours seeing girls come in and out with their books, it’s another thing to be one of the seventy-five girls waiting for their turn.  Sure, it might be our job to wait – I mean, in addition to looking decent and showing up on time to jobs, castings are really the only thing left on the list of responsibilities this career entails – but such excessive waits can be avoided.  Two: the client doesn’t know what they want.  When you’re standing next to a short redhead, an anorexic blonde, and a zaftig brunette – and all of you are waiting with fifty other chicks for the same job – the likelihood you’re going to be exactly what the client wants gets exponentially smaller.  This is not because you are a bad model; this is because the client in question operates from a planet called Clusterfuck with no place to land their spaceship.  Picking a girl out of this mess is just like throwing spaghetti on the wall and seeing what sticks.  You can wait around and hope you’re that lucky noodle, or you can just go home, confident in your silent protest.

A friend of mine is standing in line.  “How long have you been here?” I ask, groaning as she responds with an answer of “Forty-five minutes.”  I look back at the elevator like a dog whose owner has just stopped into the grocery store and tied them up to a post outside.  Part of me wants to be a good little mutt and stay.  The other part of me wants to tear at my leash with sharp teeth and liberate myself.  Against my better judgment, I throw my shit down in a chair and prepare to stick it out.

There is no sign-in sheet.  This is also something that makes me mad because it means that for the next hour I am waiting, I will be overwhelmed with the anxiety that some stupid bitch is going to cut me in line.  Usually the girls are pretty good about self-regulating, smiling at one another and asking things like, “I’m in front of you, right?” which is just codeword for  “If you go in before me, I will cut you.”  This underlying tension manages to preserve order.  Still, when a client doesn’t provide a simple sheet of computer paper and a black pen for girls to list their names on, the operation looks amateurish and, well, it just makes me mad.

The girls are a strange combination of models from good agencies and models from bad ones.  The majority of them wear cheap black heels – likely reading “Manmade Upper Leather Sole” on the inside – reminding me of how lucky you are to make consistent money in this business.  There are girls with fat arms and lumpy asses, ones that should be models mixing around with ones that shouldn’t be.  The “better” girls look more expensive than the others; they have no fat on their inner thighs and they carry designer handbags filled with Yves Saint Laurent lipstick and second-generation iPads.

As I look around the room, I think to myself that not nearly enough girls in here have eating disorders.  This thought disturbs even me.

I listen to the girls in front of me talk – something I generally prefer models not do.  An absurdly tall brunette likely around the age of eighteen prattles on about indescribably boring topics of conversation that seem exciting when you first start modeling.  When asked by another girl what she had been up to recently, the brunette responds – with no sense of irony – “My agency’s always wanted me to tone up my stomach…so…that’s what I’ve been up to.”  The girls start talking about another model they knew who apparently wasn’t working in New York or Paris (gasp) and she apparently “got sent to Korea.”  The brunette makes it sound like a war assignment.

After forty-five minutes of sitting in a chair and pretending to read The New Yorker, it is my turn to stand up behind my new favorite brunette who is now making phone call after phone call on her BlackBerry.   Does this chick ever shut the f up? She apparently has an impulsive need to be in constant communication, which confuses me because she never has anything interesting to say.  It’s like a streaming feed of NPR, only if NPR sucked.  There is something about her that makes me want to wretch; I cant decide if it’s her lumpy yellow nail polish or the bizarre scabs on the back of her neck.

Finally, it’s my turn.  I lean against a window ledge as I watch some sort-of hip guy flip through my book.  Flip.  Flip.  Flip.  I listen to the pages flop onto one another as I stare out the window.  The brunette with the loud mouth and the weird neck scabs and the abs that need toning is standing behind me in an Audrey-Hepburn-Made-in-China-knock-off, waiting for him to see her in it.  He apparently liked her enough to have her try something on.  Me, however, after my sitting and standing and waiting and being generally bored, he is not a big fan of.  “Thank you,” he says, and hands me my book.  Ah, well.  Can’t win them all.

Emotional Wheelhouse

The casting is either for gum or tampons; I can’t remember which.  They both have the word “free” in their name, implying some sort of liberty from various maladies.  I’m hoping it’s for gum.  When I arrive, my fear is confirmed: Tampons it is.

The room is light and airy, housed on the tenth floor across from a building sporting mind-numblingly large words painted in black letters on a white brick wall.  HARRY’S REALTY it screams at me menacingly.  Font size 1.7 billion is meant to be viewed from the street, not at eye level, and its size and intensity makes me inexplicably queasy.

There are other blondes in the room: blonder blondes with the meaty arms of actresses that haven’t made it yet.  Once an actress sees herself on television enough, she inevitably begins to wither away, stripping herself to skin and bone.  Before that, they look like normal girls – farm-fed, warm-blooded American chicks fresh off the bus from Ohio.  After they’ve “made it,” it’s another story entirely.  It might be fair to say one can judge the success of an actress by how anorexic she is.  I’m only half kidding.

I sign in and grab a card to fill with my required information: my agent’s contact info in case the client actually wants to book me, my first and last name to keep track of my face, all of which is followed by boxes for my age and measurements.  The first two are the only things on the little rectangle that are straightforward and true.  The latter is a comical filling in of the same lies I’ve been using for the last five years, the same deflated numbers that everyone uses.  They should just fill out everyone’s card with 32’’ 24’’ 35’’ and call it a day.  I fill out the requisite bullshit using a black and white Bic pen with a fork attached to it to prevent theft.

When I first started modeling I dreaded commercial castings, not realizing that this was where the money was made, especially in Los Angeles.  I was nineteen and wanted to be “editorial” even though I had no idea what the hell that really meant.  To me, “editorial” was associated with traveling the world, living in hotels, being a supermodel.  Paris, New York, Milan.  You later find out that “editorial” is codeword for “broke.”  It took me awhile before I was comfortable pretending to hop around in an imaginary ocean with some Labrador named Pooh Bear while keeping the look of embarrassed horror off of my face.  Still, using my face to sell feminine hygenine products is something I have a hard time with.

The casting director comes out to check the list for another blonde to drag into the room with her.  She is a warm and soft woman with a thick New York accent that reminds me that this city can actually raise people with souls.  She calls the name of a girl in the corner, remembering her with a fondness that seems genuine.  There’s something about the whole scenario that reminds me of going to the OBGYN, greeted by a kind nurse who’s well aware this is going to be the worst thing I do all day, which is, ironically enough, appropriate.

Across from me I listen to the petite girl manning the front desk make phone calls to agents for an upcoming casting for paint.  She reads from a list that has been written to memory.  “They need to wear painter’s pants or white jeans, but they must be CLEAN.  No actual paint on their clothing.  We want them to look like painters but not be painters.  A three-button polo shirt.  We also want to make sure they’re comfortable on a ladder, bending to pick things up, etc.”  I nearly laugh at the last bit but would like to be called in here again to audition for more embarrassing products down the road.  I hear her hang up the phone and within half a minute she is going at it again, repeating the same drivel to the next person, peppering her spiel with new words to save her from her own boredom.

Today, I have come in jeans and a tank top as requested, though I am not a tank top type of girl.  My outfits err on the side of bury-me-in-fabric-and-dress-me-like-a-dude.  The tank I am wearing today is a friend’s that I have not yet returned.  Its somber olive green color in combination with my gray jeans and black boots and studded punk belt would probably be more suitable for enlisting military recruits at a bar, but it’s about all I could manage before I left the house today.  My oversized men’s jacket is an added bonus; its unattractive bulkiness reminiscent of my dad gutting fish at June Lake on foggy mornings.

My eyes are burning from a night spent crying on the floor of my living room.  I touch the puffiness above my cheekbones and know that this is not a good look for me.  The client won’t care about my reasons for looking rough and raw; these people are not expected to be forgiving in nature.  Later, they’ll be in a screening room flipping through footage of girls like the pages of a vacuous, boring glossy mag.  When they arrive at me, someone will say in between bites of his club sandwich, “Man.  She’s got tiny little eyes.  And they’re so…pink.  Her face must look that miserable all the time.  Miserable Face.  Next!”  There is no creativity in casting.  If they tell you to show up like a nurse, don’t show up like you’re a girl who thinks this casting is fucking stupid and people can think for themselves.  Dress like a fucking nurse.  You better show up wearing a white button up dress with your tits poking out enough (though not too provocatively) and some orthopedic shoes.  Too often I have played the “Fuck You” card, throwing dress code suggestions out the window completely or marring their vision beyond recognition with my own stylistic interpretation.  Case in point: today.  Needless to say, I don’t book commercials too often.

It’s my turn up to bat and the casting director greets me with equal kindness.  I am taller by her than a foot, looming behind her like some kind of skinny-limbed monster as we walk into the room.  The clients sit at a large table in front of lists and production sheets, watching the results of a camera taking pictures of me on a bigger screen.

The casting director stands on her tippy toes behind her Canon, giving me my inspiration for each shot.  Half-way through I feel as though I have successfully relived my life as a baby, being coochie coochie cooed by a total and complete stranger.  God love this woman, she’s just doing her job.

So, you’ve got an idea…

Yeah…

Cute!

And it’s a great idea…

And you’re SURPRISED!

Ah-DOR-able.

Look up at the bubble…

I have forgotten that the copy sheet outside featured the top portion of a blonde’s face accompanied by a thought bubble, both flanked by a box of…uh-hem… “product.”  Confused, I look around the room for a real bubble, thinking that she had perhaps nicknamed the light-box above her.  I remember the sheet and I laugh, mumbling about how I’m an idiot or something vaguely self-deprecating.

Give me a smile.  BIG SMILE!

Now…no teeth.

Just a smirk…

Riiiggghhtttttt…So cute!

Now raise your eyebrow suspiciously…

Until you’re stuck in a casting studio with a camera, a TV featuring your giant makeup-less face, and a table full of people staring at you, you have no idea how difficult it is to raise your eyebrow on cue, or make any other facial expression for that matter.  This is why actors should be paid offensive amounts of money.  Frankly, this shit is hard.

She’s standing in front of me, waiting in her patient and friendly way.  I try to raise my eyebrow and laugh when I realize it’s not cooperating with my brain’s control center.  I laugh again and cover my face, hoping that my shortcomings as a face maker are made up for with my charm.

“Sorry,” I say.  “I don’t know why I’m struggling today.”

Oh yeah, I remember: I spent the previous twelve hours crying in my empty apartment.  Before this moment, being watched by people who could potentially pay my rent for the next few months, the idea of smiling, laughing, or thought-bubble-looking were the furthest things from my emotional wheelhouse.  Had she asked me for tears, total and complete desperation, agony, or the look of “Fear of Dying Alone” I would have been their most promising subject all day.

Life on a Box

The job is in a department store.  When I get the call sheet I know it will involve rich people drinking cocktails and me standing on a wooden box wearing clothes I cannot afford.  Yet.  Clothes I cannot afford, yet.  I tell myself I will one day be able to justify the purchase of YSL and Prada even though I have witness firsthand what a ridiculous thing said pursuit is.  “Pretty clothes.  Empty souls,” a friend once told me.

Still, I would like to think that I am not just an indentured servant in the fashion trade – that I will one day be worthy of the clothes people hire me to look good in, because, after all, I do look good in them.  Admittedly, there is something sick about using beauty and youth to model clothes sold to the older, moneyed set with their elderly bulges and sagging skin.  It’s easier to sell a Chanel tweed suit off a thirteen year old with a tight, twenty-three-inch waist and stick legs – this is about the only thing tweed suits look good hanging off of.  The dream is, of course, to be young and fabulous and outrageously wealthy, purchasing designer goods and traveling to Saint Tropez while you still had a tight ass and looked good in the stuff.  You know, like Kate Moss.

We get our hair and makeup done: pink lips and a strong eyebrow, straight hair parted to on the side.  I sit on a chair and watch people on their way home from work, real jobs that require plain wool coats and dress shoes, walking in the shadow of some giant gray church.  Cold radiates through the windows, old and thin and made before the day of double-paned insulation.

I listen to the girls talk about things I don’t care about over the blissful noise of a hairdryer.  The one who just had her wedding talks about what they put in their goody bags.  The one planning her own discusses the outrageous cost of engraved champagne flutes that no one will ever use once they take them home, glasses destined to end up in a Goodwill in the company of similar intentions with different names and dates.  When I am done being made up I go hide in the dressing room with a rack full of designer clothes and color-blocked wedge sandals.

It is difficult to be a non-girl surrounded by “girls.”  I don’t want to talk about your newest copy of US Weekly Magazine.  I don’t care that your negligent boyfriend forgot to pick up your dry cleaning yesterday.  And I really don’t want to hear about your audition tomorrow morning to play some dude’s silent girlfriend on a soap opera.  This attitude inevitably makes me look like a nonparticipatory bitch, judgmental and harsh.  However, I am willing to appear this way if it means saving what few brain cells I have managed to retain over the course of my career doing this.

The sky outside is fully black and its time for us to suit up – the first of four outfits apiece.  An easy, every-twenty-minutes rotation that you could never complain about.  I’m literally being paid to stand, quiet and still, for eighty some-odd minutes.  That’s it.

We are walked to our white boxes in different corners.  I heave myself upwards and prepare for the boredom to set in.  The DJ is the same one they used last time, a hip chick with blonde hair and a matching entourage and the inability to mix music together.  She could listen to a song by The Shins and logically come up with a way to bleed it into LL Cool Jay’s “Doin’ It.”

The room begins to fill with people teetering on their shoes and wielding glasses of free champagne.  It is a not-so-interesting mix, the fashion whores and the fashion bores, people obsessed with how good they think they look.  They crane their necks around, attempting to see if people are watching them or if anyone worthwhile has arrived.

Through the crowd a terrifyingly anorexic woman weaves, parting the seas with a silent horror.  Orange silk track shorts hang off the rattling bones of her protruding hips.  Her boned legs are covered in tights likely made for an infant in order to utilize enough stretch to hug onto the nothing of her limbs.  A black tank top clings to her rib cage.  Her skin is tan and her hair is short; it is unlikely her body is able to produce much more than a few inches before falling out.  She is, quite literally, skin and bone.  Walking death.  The model across from me spots her at the same time and we widen our eyes in unison.

The music screeches along and I change my outfits per the schedule.  Strange women want pictures taken with me.  Drunk women think I’m a mannequin.  Older men wearing wool scarves and gray hair stare over their drinks, thinking they have a chance in hell.  And soon enough, we’re done.  Off to put on our own cheap clothing and our ratty and salt-stained shoes, off to our real lives of Metrocards and dinners eaten at home.

Another Day, Another Closet

It’s market again – that time after fashion week when the real work starts: buyers and their appointments, orders paid for in currencies from around the world, commerce.  I walk towards my normal changing room for the week of showroom I have to look forward to.  It’s not so much a room as it is a 3’ x 6’ storage closet they’ve moved boxes out of on our account.  Three girls normally change here, weaving between each other’s naked bodies and a rolling rack filled with a never-ending barrage of clothing.  The nice blonde is already there, sitting on a folding chair crammed underneath shelves filled with clear Rubbermaid storage boxes.  Her head is down, reading a magazine, waiting for someone to not look at her and say, “Here.  Try this on.”

I’ve been doing this sort of work since I moved to New York a year ago.  I had done it before, some three years back, for a famous designer adored by old ladies who like a nice full skirt and a fur jacket or two.  We paraded the entire collection in front of panel of department stores, sitting on the carpeted floor of a proper dressing room in between the time it took for people to make real decisions outside.  I was working with an obnoxious Brazilian with impossibly thin everything and crooked white teeth.  Her voice was deep and throaty, everything she said accompanied by the word, “Bay-beeeeee.”

I’m hanging up my coat when I am pulled aside by one of the head sales reps and told, “You’re actually supposed to be in here,” and walked down the hallway into an office.  “We’re doing something different this season,” she tells me and I know that I have been demoted to doing denim and jersey, not the runway collection shown the day before.  I sit down on a plastic chair and note the familiar name written on a sticker placed on the inside of my pair of size 41 shoes.  Aline: blonde supermodel.  Me:  blonde not-so-super-model.

Last week I had to come in and try on thirty-five pairs of jeans that squeezed my hips and pushed whatever fat I had northward into an all-too-desirable muffin top.  They do this every season, throwing you in the tiniest pieces they have, just to make sure you haven’t put on five pounds so they can hire you again – a model’s litmus test.

“What size are you?” they asked, scrunching their faces while they asked me to turn around.  I felt myself sweating the sweat of someone who believed they were about to be fired for eating too many almonds that week.  “Let’s try these in on another size…” one said, handing me a larger pair.  I went home feeling like a fat chick, wanting to slit my wrists and call it a day.  Now, I’d be wearing these for days on end.

Often, modeling is like going over to your skinny, boneless, fourteen-year-old’s house and being forced to wear her clothing for a week because the airline you’ve just flown on for the holidays has lost your bags.  You fit, but not really.  Things pull over and around your body but don’t zip up.  Pants stretch offensively in places that they would not if they were just a smidge bigger.  You feel uncomfortable, guilty, and horrifically ugly, not remembering that you’re a decade older than this person who hasn’t gone through puberty yet.  Except I get paid to do this, and if you don’t fit, you don’t get paid.

After trying on skinny jeans made out of raw denim, I went home and had a mini-nervous breakdown in my mirror, looking around my apartment and hating that it and that everything I owned depended on the static size of my hip measurements.  It brought on a crushing wave of anxiety, thinking how long I could keep it all up.  I watched my face twist in the mirror, feeling spoiled and stupid, wishing that I could just pack up my bags and move back to LA, get a real job that commanded real respect and responsibilities, eat meatballs and live in some shitty apartment in Korea Town.

 

Diamonds and Duck Confit

The room begins to fill up with the evening’s guests.  Slowly they trickle in, dressed and manicured, grabbing glasses of champagne with hands wearing expensive wedding rings.  I recognize some of the dresses they are wearing – designer dresses that get paraded down catwalks.  I never could figure out why people would spend five grand on a dress or where they would every wear it. Apparently, this is where.  On a Wednesday night on 5^th Avenue, in the store of a famous designer, surrounded by things to purchase and free booze.  This is the destination for such fabulousness.  Again, reality does not live up to my expectations.

Women separate themselves into their Upper East Side cliques, followed by their Louboutin shadows; the telltale red soles of shoes forever in their wake.  The blondes are all the same blonde, bleached and unhealthy looking, what was once hair now rendered into high-maintenance straw.  Sagging elbows and lifted faces.  Women in dresses too short or too low, their age-defying outfits not defying anything, especially gravity.

Necks and ears and hands sparkle with jewelry, making the room’s pallor seem even duller by comparison.  They laugh, reservedly.  They kiss each other on the cheeks, carefully.  They watch one another, jealously.

This is not a world to live in.  This land of diamonds and duck confit, mansions and makeup, Central Park views.

The terminally bored and totally fabulous eat their canapés served by thin and handsome young men, stuffing their mouths with gourmet grilled cheese and steak carpaccio.  Wives are followed closely by husbands in navy suits and beautiful dress shoes, Ivy League haircuts and handsome wrinkles.

There is a woman with eyebrows laid forever in heavy concern.  She looks like a reporter – out of place and too intelligent.  She doesn’t have a date and she doesn’t belong and she interests me the most.  She talks to the servers, which most of the people don’t.  Their conversations are always limited to a terse “Thank you” or a headshake.

I watch from above, standing on a platform and biding me time as the blood from my whole body begins to pool cruelly into my feet wearing a pair of six-inch heels in the wrong size, dying to leave a place that so many people want to be.  This place like a beautiful building, waiting for its paint to peel.