12pm
“Iann
I need to get on that horse.”
“Girl…
Let’s look at your wardrobe first.”
“Please,
Iann, just tell the guy I know how to ride bareback.” I touch noses with the immense horse I am petting and
gasp. “Please!”
“Weren’t
you almost in the hospital the last time you rode bareback?” Iann tugs at her
raven curls and laughs at me with huge brown eyes that she has expertly
elongated in black kohl.
“I’d
wear pants this time.”
“Jeans?
“My
onesie.”
“Is
that enough?”
“Get
me on the horse, Iann.”
“I’ll
do my best honeybunny.”
Iann Ivy (her professional moniker) is my buttercup. She is a short, bountifully bosomed, and exotically pretty
girl with a perma-pout and skin the color of lightly-roasted almonds. Hers is an easy-going photographic
style: I jump in with a pose and she tweaks as necessary.
“Chin down, chin down – stop. To the left –” She snaps a few times as I move, laughs
when I make a face. “Can you… maybe
lean your head or Oh! Yeah, actually, do that. I love it when you
just know – but stop touching your nose! It’s fine!”
I
am standing in front of a mock-up of an old cowboy saloon out at Long Branch
Ranch, a faux cowboy town complete with various storefronts, rocking chairs,
cobwebby saloon and barn doors, a bitty chapel and one actual working (when the
caterers are hired) saloon. Iann
wanders back to me in her citygirl short boots. “Let’s go change.
I like this for our first location. The jail and everything is cute but it’s too much.”
We
kick up dust on our way to bathroom.
“Will you-“
Her
laughter tends to peel out from her in waves, and does so now. “I’ll ask about
the horse.”
Suddenly,
we hear a strange snorting sound.
“It’s-“
“A
PIG.”
There is a foot-and-a-half long snuffly little pink-and-black spottled creature with short legs and a belly so protruding that it scrapes the ground when she walks. She squeals impetuously at us, and the sight of her cute little pudgy snout and the short little legs she
toddles on causes me to squeal, and so
pig and girl stand squealing at each other in a tone fit to deafen dogs and men
of a certain age, until the bitty thing snorts away under the porch.
“Iann!”
“Go
change!”
I
do mean to, too. I walk towards
the bathroom with full intention of donning the vest Iann brought me and the belt from my great-grandmother and a new shade of
lipstick, but the little ears that stand at attention on the sweetly snuffling head of that
adorable piglet cause me to lose all reason. I follow her, making idiotic clucking and clicking and
kissing noises. I hike up my skirt
and get down on hands and knees towards a little yellow house that is one of
only three “real” structures (not facades) on the property. The sweet creature has disappeared
beneath the front porch and I am determined to follow.
“Kitten?
Where are you? Sarah Rooose.”
“Right
here!” I call out.
“Are
you under the porch?!”
“…
yes?”
“Kitten! Get out of there.”
A
man whom I guess has just stepped outside of the house begins to laugh at the sight of
Iann bent over to peer under the porch.
“Looks like you found Honey, huh?”
“The
pig? Is that her name?”
“Yep,
that’s Honey. She’s a mini
potbelly.”
I
gently whisper her name, “Hoooney, here Honey,” in addition to the meowling and
clicking noises I’ve been thus far employing, and am awarded the feel of her
muddy little snout in my palm.
“Kitten!" Laughter peels out of Iann at my obvious delight. "Kitten, get out of there. Oh my god.”
“Well
the pig’ll come on out if you give her
some cat food,” the man tells Iann.
I don’t think he hears me.
“That’s
cool! But how do I get my model
out?”
“Is
that a girl under there? I thought
you called for ‘kitten.’”
He
starts walking over to the edge of the porch, and I am able to cover myself
again with the skirt I had hiked up to my waist just in time for his
arrival. I hear the floor creak as
he leans way over to take a look at the under-porch happenings. I smile at the surprised, upside-down
face of a kindly blonde man in his forties.
“Hello!” He doesn’t move.
I smile wider. “She calls
me kitten sometimes.”
“Spiders
under that porch,” he says dubiously.
I obediently shuffle out back into the sunshine, while he uses a bit of
cat food to coax out Honey the adorable mini potbelly pig.
3pm
After lunch, we shoot a few normal things and finally change into the sweet moss-green skirt and beaded collar that had belonged to a woman known in life as “Beauty,” by he who loved her most. I wanted to create something elegant but earthy, primal, feminine-spirited, utterly lovely that would call to mind a pagan wonderland and afterlife I hoped she was now enjoying. I imagined a peaceful scene in which the sequins of her collar glittered in the sunlight while a sweet horse beside me represented all that was wild and free.
“Just
don’t let that girl on the horse,” the kindly blonde man tells Iann as I scowl
into the distance. “He’s a show
horse. You see that wide
back? He has to be so big because
the girls do flips on that back.
You jump on there and he’ll just start in on his routine. Isn’t made for a trail. But he did just get a haircut!”
This
majestic, newly-coiffed horse wants little to do with me or my idealized vision
of nature. Not only have I been
forbidden to ride him, I have also seemingly lost my ability to interact with
him at all, now that we finally have the camera out. He tolerates a pat here and there but his interest is all in
Honey. She toddles nearby to smell
a flower and off runs Toby to chase her out of his corral.
“What
do we doooo?” Iann whines. Her
listless gaze follows Toby the horse, who has gallivanted away to the edge of
his corral where Honey obliviously noses at flowers just beyond his reach.
“The
only way to get him in frame is if Honey is in the shot, too. I think we need some bread.”
Iann
leaves me standing awkwardly in Toby’s corral while she explains to John that
we need some of the sandwich bread in order to wrangle the animals.
In
the meantime Toby has taken a liking to my hair, chewing it and rubbing his
soft muzzle into the back of my neck.
“Please let him stay until Iann gets here…”
I
close my eyes and lean into Toby’s enormous neck just in time to hear the snap
of Iann’s camera shutter. “Look at
me?”
I
do. Click, click, click. I suddenly feel Toby beginning to
shift. Sure enough, Honey is near
and he is already making moves towards her. “The bread!” Iann pokes a piece into my hand. “Honey! Come here, Honey Honey Honey.”
Toby
now seems as equally irritated by our attentions to Honey as he was by her
freedom earlier. The pig snorts
happily and trots faster than I’ve seen her move all day, even including when
she’s been chased by Toby. I try
to extend the hand with the piece of bread in it as gracefully as possible,
tilt my head back to the horse whose jealous bristling I can already sense, and
glance down to the piglet who noses my ankle in an impatient desire for the
bread. “Take off your shoes,”
calls Iann from about ten feet away.
I take them off carefully, one by one, while still holding my precious
bread, and in my haste to toss the shoes out of frame, step in a morsel of
horse dung. I breathe into a
relaxed, serene expression, and make the silent, executive decision not to tell
her about the crap on my big toe but instead daintily wipe it onto some nearby
flowers, making the entire procedure look like part of a ballet-stance-esque
pose.
This is the best day of my
life. Even the tiny piggy
footprints that will appear all over my belly from allowing Honey to topple
over me as I lie next to her in the hay; and the scratches on my legs from the
hay; and the horse snot that Paul will find mashed into the back of my hair
will count merely as visceral reminders of a lovely day.
May 4th, 2013 Escalator
in Bloomingdale’s
5:30pm
[Descending]
“You’ll
meet my boyfriend; he’s very nice.
Don’t mind him.”
“Sure.”
“I
mean that he gets a little sarcastic.
If we fight, don’t get upset.
We love each other. We’re
just perfectionists.”
“Alright.”
“I
can’t believe you said yes, just like that.”
We seem to be actually
accelerating towards the cacophonous dining hall of the Westfield Mall. Dozens of malcontent mothers and
aunties sit at cafeteria tables munching on “wraps” or slurping soup from
cardboard bowls, lit up by the green-tinged light coming from backlit posters
of glamorous women in red silk dresses whose delicate jewel-bedecked wrists are
a testament to all that we will never live up to. We’ve been slinging sunglasses to these poor people for the
last four hours.
“Let me look at you again!” My raven-haired, elegant companion
delicately lays a long, pale finger where my hair forms a
not-quite-widow’s-peak. “We might
braid your hair. You don’t mind?”
“I don’t mind. As long as you don’t mind the grey,
here, on my temple.” I flip my
hair to one side and then the other to show her. “You see?”
“Oh! No, it’s fine.
Your eyes are perfect! I
can’t wait. And you already know
how to pose. You were so funny
having people try on sunglasses today– you’ll have to laugh again, like that,
for camera I mean.”
“Sure – before we go any further, I
have to ask you –”
“Yes?”
“Was the other girl working with us
born male?”
“Oh definitely!” She says
brightly. “But she was so
pretty! Don’t you think?”
“She was great! I just… was curious if anyone else noticed, I guess.”
We reach the bottom of the
escalator. I’ve been standing on
the step in front of Jennifer, and I turn back to her now in confusion.
“Where
are we—”
“Do
you know where we are we going?”
“I’m
following you—”
“Of
course!” She laughs. “I meant, ‘Where is Bart?’”
I
steer her towards the bus terminals.
As we march through the sterile, echo-filled hall in our matching white
pants and Polaroid t-shirts, carrying our Polaroid satchels that contain the
Polaroid water-bottles we’ve been giving out all day, we half-run past the
other promotional models who are peddling other wares to the lifeless forms who
have huddled into this well-decorated basement in their need to consume. It begins to make sense to me that so
many people to whom we were offering free things were afraid even to look at
us. Patrons of Westfield are under
siege as soon as they exit MUNI, from everything to men with possibly-faux
Italian accents trying to give on-the-go-manicures to a woman with a painfully
high-pitched voice asking them to “Just try these headphones for one minute!
Everybody loves ‘em! Everybody LOVES THEM.”
“Soooo, Jennifer, where are we going?”
“Oh!
I’m sorry. Of course! The studio is in Oakland. We’ll get a ride once we get there.”
“Which
stop, though?” I ask while
reaching for my wallet as we approach the BART ticket dispensers.
“Oh! No, don’t worry, I’ll get your BART
ticket.” In the time I take to dig
through to the bottom of my bag for my wallet, she has already purchased her
own ticket and has punched in the information necessary to get mine, too. The machine spits it out and she holds
out it to me, “And—”
“Yes?”
“Just
one more thing—” she holds my BART ticket hostage as she says this, her exotic
eyes narrowing. “I go by Jennifer
for this kind of stuff,” she waves the
BART ticket to indicate our Polaroid shwag, “but my real name,” she hands me my
ticket, “is Taelin.”
It
occurs to me as we step onto the BART train that this girl’s place on the
gender-identity spectrum, her perfect alabaster-pale skin, and her seeming
acuity make her someone obviously quite likable but not necessarily trustworthy.
Her poise actually gives her a mildly dangerous quality – like a
tigress.
Four
hours and countless photos later, I find myself lying on the floor of Ryuuzaki Julio and Taelin's studio, wearing Minnie Mouse ears and a sweet turquoise dress,
with 4ft-diameter helium balloons tied to my wrists and ankles.
“Does
it look kind of like they are lifting me?”
The
photographer snaps the shutter twice. “No.”
“Ok, what if I turn to the right, a
little, maybe?”
“You need to lift only the parts
that have balloons, right? They
are pulling you up…”
“And
now?”
“No,
it still just looks like you’ve fallen.
Not gracefully.” He is
laughing now, “Oh my god, you have to see yourself. You are not going to be very pleased, Madame actress.”
“Be
nice!” Taelin says sharply from
the stairs. She walks up and wraps
her arms around his waist in the same languid, elegant manner that she earlier
caressed my forehead with forefinger.
Smiling, she glances into the camera viewfinder and starts
laughing. “Ok, she’s done. Time for dinner!”
West Oakland
BART
12am
[Phone held to head]
[ringing…]
“Hellllo!”
“Hello,
love.”
[in
an awful approximation of a French accent] “Hello, my buttercream pie, my petite bonbon, my egg
sunnyside up with Freeench toast, how are you tonight, my—”
“Stop—”
“My
sexy Gollum, I cannot wait for your leetle claws, let me hear your growl, my
leettle –”
“Are
you aware that I am taller than average for a woman?”
[In
a perfectly normal, if adorably boyish American accent] “What’s up?”
“No
no no, I need for you to acknowledge first that all those ‘little thises,
little thats’ are ridiculous. I—”
“You
are gigantic! How I fear your
stomp! How are you?”
“I
just got done with work.”
“At
the mall?”
“In
Oakland."
“For
a promotional gig?”
“For a photo shoot. I ran off with one of the models from the promotional gig."
“Ah…
And who are these people?”
“I’m
not entirely sure. We just had a
nice dinner though!”
“…But
you’re coming back.”
“Right. Via BART.”
“And
will you be wanting a glass of wine, my sweet monster?”
May 6th At
Paul’s desk
8am
[Blanket on head, phone inside of
blanket and against head]
[ringing…ringing…ringing]
“Hey
listen, this is Sarah Rose: I think we met – to be honest, I am not sure that we
ever met; we might be friends on facebook simply because we know each other
through the Coo Coo Birds or the kids who live at the convent, or whatever, but
I can’t – heh heh heh– well I can’t help noticing that you look a little like
me, not a lot, I mean, I want to
acknowledge that you aren’t quite as horrifically flat-chested as I am and I
wouldn’t want you to think I thought that, you know what I mean, but you do
have big eyes and that sort of, that kind of girl-next-door thing but also kind
of French – not really French per
se, since I’m not French, but that French-ish thing about you - and so I was hoping you might be able
to replace me on a – godDAMNit Paul, you leave my bellybutton alone or I will
tear your face off with my teeth – hoping you might want to replace me on a
shoot that I have tomorrow, OR I also need to replace this model on a shoot
that I am on and so we’d be modeling together, but that one is a two-day thing
but maybe it could be fun to collaborate, and since you’re friends with hippies
maybe camping would be ok, and I think we’re really quite nearly the same
height and could work well together? I know the last-minute thing is
ridiculous. So anyhow give me a
call if you’re interested; my number is—”
Matt
Barkin’s house i.e. Vibrant Films headquarters, i.e. film set
3pm
“What’s
going on, Butler?”
“Et
tu Brutus? The hell does everyone
get off calling me ‘Butler’ these days?
You know that my parents gave me the singular most feminine name in
possibly all of history? I have a
beautiful goddamned name is what I am communicating to you—”
“Why
don’t we take a deep breath…”
“And
I goddamn cannot find another mermaid ANYWHERE in this idiotic town.”
“And
we are breathing out all of this mermaid whatever drama, aaaaaand settling into
here.”
“Where’s
John?”
“That
is not his real name. You can talk
to your costar after two more deep breaths – Is that a tent?! You just casually carrying around
backpacking gear?”
“I’m
going camping tomorrow, which is why I need MERMAIDS, but they have to be
mermaids who are also willing to hike and get dirty –“
“Ok
great, three more breaths, no more mermaids, his real name is Zach, GO. Go, Butler.”
“I’m
going, I’m going.”
May 8th Glass
Beach/Fort Bragg Campground
7pm
It
has just finished raining, but we’ve found our mermaid: Audra Horridge, whose heterochromatic
eyes and sharp wit entranced me in high school, shall be my fellow model. She’s slept most of the way here, her
long hair spread over the backseat of our photographer’s car, and both her blue
eye and her brown eye have that glassy newly-awakened shimmer as they look out
at the ocean which will serve as our backdrop in the morning.
The
air is cold and the sand beneath my grateful feet is wet from the rain, but
from as far back as I can remember, I have been drawn to water, and have
thought it a crime to get near water without getting in it. I
sit on the wet dune, and untie my shoes.
“What
are you doing?”
“Got
to at least stick my toes in the water.”
I’m Ken Butler’s daughter, after all.
May 9th Warm
dry tent, subzero sleeping bag deployed successfully; cramp in leg but I don’
mind, no sir
6:30am
“Sarah Rose! Wakey wakey!” Our designer Kaytee Papusza's soft voice calls to me from a land
beyond my current nest, from out in yon wild wet-cold-landia.
Quoting
my younger bother, from when he was eight years old, I moan, “I’m not
reeeeady.”
7:00am
“Bacon?”
“No
pig.”
“Eggs?”
“Doesn’t
sound like pig. Yes. Mmm. Fetus.”
“You’re
sick.”
“I
know. Does that mean someone is
still making me eggs?”
“Mimosa?”
“Save
me a sip for after the first set.
My eyes will start to get wonky.”
7:30am
Our make-up artist, Becky, sits on
her hands at the picnic table we’ve allotted for make-up. She is trying to warm them before they
touch my face.
“Do you have on any product?” she
asks sweetly, examining my face.
“Just dewdrops, darlin’”
8:30am
Kaytee
settles the cool pearl-inset, metallic cage corset into place against my warm
skin so that Sass can continue building my hairpiece, so that my morning
sunrise sun-salute crown (hand-built by a stylist nymphette called Sydney) has a firm platform to sit upon. Sass’s sweet girlfriend Sharon, the
teeniest lumberjack ever, presses a small batch of whole coffee beans into a
leftover Hersey’s wrapper and begins swinging at them with the blunt end of a teeny hatchet.
“You
forgot to bring a grinder?”
“Didn’t
realize they were whole when we bought ‘em last night.”
I
nod. I am fairly certain that
Sharon and I are the only ones to have utilized the hatchet at all this
trip. In the land of ultra-femmes,
she and I rise to the mythic level of Tarzan.
5:00pm
I
am down to my last “look,” the love-child of Sass (our hair wizard) and environmentalism: after a day’s worth of wearing sweet,
glamorous, ethereal mermaid dresses, I will don sleek black hairpieces (full
wings smothered in a black tar-like substance) and black hairspray to portray
the “Oil Spill Mermaid.”
“What’s
the outfit that goes with it?”
Kaytee
laughs. “Well, girls, I made a
collar.”
“And—”
“No,
no, it’s just the collar.”
“We’ll
do beauty shots,” says Regina, “Close-ups only. You can even wear your pajamas; just cheat the top down a
little to expose your shoulders.”
I
put on the collar, some chains over my shoulders, and we take some photos in
front of a jutted out rock. I
frown at the seaweed-strewn edge of the sea, where inky black rocks tumble back
and forth with the tide.
“So
clearly… and I don’t mind, I
really don’t, but clearly what needs to happen is that I need to get in that
water in my nude underwear with my head towards shore and be the washed-up
oil-spill mermaid.”
“You
want to get in the water?”
“It’s
not about want; I’m just saying it would be beautiful. So clearly it’s what I have to do.”
Regina,
our photographer, glances over my hair, and the ocean. She says simply, “I
mean, if you’re willing.”
Audra
cheers me on. “Definitely you have
to! I’ll hold your pants.”
Accordingly, I remove these non-mermaid articles of clothing and dip myself into the cold water. In my "real" life, I hate being cold more than anything else in the world, but the fog that swirls around me and the water that splashes my goose-pimpled skin feels like a most welcome baptism. I have tried thus far, perhaps a little too heavy-handedly, to strip away the "magic" or the glamour that too often is associated with "the industry," leaving you instead with the simple, often awkward, rarely magical realities of the world of fashion photography. However, as part of this wild, all-girl team of supportive designers, stylists, photographer, and models, I feel like a participant in art, rather than in fashion. There was an unabashed joy I took in carefully spreading out this fleetingly youthful body of mine along the sand, flexing my toes to give an illusion of calf muscles that I have not actually earned. Audra joined me, too, flinging aside modesty to hold the form of grecian marble in the sunset light and assume a pained expression as the mermaid mama to my drown'd self. We slipped into shapes that mimick Michaelangelo's Pietà, and holding each other, embody in two women the work of our nine-woman team.
10:00pm
Audra
and I doze on and off in the backseat of Regina’s car, waking each other with exclamations.
“I
can’t believe we did it!”
“I
can’t believe you were down.”
“I
can’t believe you were down.”
My
phone rings.
“Hello?”
“Hey,
Sarose.”
“Yasu-san?”
“Can
you work tomorrow?”
“What
time?”
“Call
time 9am.”
“Where?”
“Oh,
you don’t drive, do you?”
“…no”
“Ok,
ok, can you call Nao? We’re not
even sure yet whether you have the role.”
I
search my phone for “duocreative” numbers and the one I want comes up right
away. It only rings twice.
“Salah
Loze!”
“Naomichi-san!
Audra
laughs as I cover the speaker and tell her, “Of course I know that my emphasis
is on all the wrong syllables. We
butcher each other’s names, and it’s like a bonding thing, ok?”
Meanwhile
Naomichi explains that they are replacing me in a role that has already been cast.
“You
didn’t audition for this one.”
“I
know! I haven’t auditioned since I’ve been back.”
“Yeah,
but the director likes you. We
have one more option: someone who actually auditioned, but we’ll call you
back.”
“Ok.”
I
force myself to sleep until the next call comes in at 11:00pm.
A
few of the grips, production assistants, and schedulers who also work for
Japanese TV have told me that “moshi moshi” is an acceptable way to answer the
phone but I prefer shouting their names.
“Naomichi-San!”
“Salah
Loze! We have you set. Bring lots of clothes. Not too nice, but casual and cute. Ok? Meet us at 7:45am at the downtown Travelodge. We drive to Fairfax. Don’t be late!”
I
snuggle back into my coat and sleep again.
3:00am
I
arrived home about a half-hour ago, packed my suitcase and organized my
make-up, and am ready to catch my last few glimpses of the inside of my
eyelids, but I cannot sleep. I lie
awake wondering how it is that after losing their actress for the role of
“woman who has been physically abusing her husband,” mine was the first name they thought of to replace
her. I try to lull myself to sleep
with the notion that it’s my anime-esque over-wide eyes that make me great
potential candidate, but the logical side of me won’t allow me to discount the
very real possibility that the producers at Duocreative just really do think
that I am crazy.
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